CAMS major Lily Eisenthal ’16 will present her comps paper at the fourth annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Conference at the University of Colorado-Boulder, April 14-17, 2016. Lily’s paper is a study of two films directed by Vera Chytilova – Daisies (Sedmikrasky, 1966), a monument of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and Fruit of Paradise (Ovoce stromu rajskych jime, 1970), an understudied but equally bewitching work. She grounds her argument in the contexts of the New Wave and the lives of the creative trio of Chytilova, Ester Krumbachova, and Jaroslav Kucera, and draws on theories from outside of cinema studies that other film scholars such as Jonathan L. Owen, Iveta Jusova, and Dan Reyes have engaged with in their works. Lily details a theory of excess based on George Bataille’s 1933 essay, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” combining it with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray’s foundational works of the 1970s on feminine writing and difference to assert that excess is an essential component in a feminine cinematic writing. In her analysis of color, editing, sets, spaces, camerawork, performance and behavior of characters, she finds that the films’ excesses visualize active feminine desire and push cinematic and social boundaries, liberating women on screen and in the audience. The revolutionary feminine aesthetic of both Daisies and Fruit of Paradise offers a model for radical filmmaking and living that still resonates almost fifty years later.