Dušan Makavejev was one of the great countercultural sui generis voices to emerge from the convulsive antiestablishment bedrock of the 1960s, w/ its various new waves and locally global movements for the emancipation of desiring-machines and their assemblages from the clutches of social-machines in the East and the West. (Social-machines as manifested by the military-industrial complex, malevolent forces of Capital and State, sociocultural estrangement, and what New Left post-Marxist critical theorist Herbert Marcuse called Technological Rationalism (the destructive drive inherent to the state apparatus of the Soviet Union just as much as those of Western Imperialism)). His films bring to mind May ’68 French student slogans such as: “take your desires for reality,” “it is forbidden to forbid,” and “under the paving stones, the beach.” While many of the radical cultural and social movements in the West maintained ideological allegiances to Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, and Marxist-Leninist discourse in general, radical artists and dissidents in the East who lived under the tyrannical sets of controls erected around European communism throughout the nations aligned beneath the aegis of the Warsaw Pact, saw the failings of Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat became nothing more than a base plutocracy supported by military power, a fact that became visible to the whole world in 1968 when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Czechoslovakia to put an end to the popular Spring Movement for socialism w/ a human face under Alexander Dubček. Radical writers, artists, and filmmakers (as well as politically active dissidents) throughout the Eastern Bloc had long before come to know how difficult it was to freely communicate, or especially to enact, ideas in this repressive climate. Yugoslavia’s Novi Film movement, made-up of outspokenly critical artists – besides Makavejev, the movement included Aleksandar Petrović and the seriously fucking bitter Živojin Pavlović – was one of many, many movements that skirted censorship by embossing their critiques in films that were superficially made to resemble the standard socialist-realist fare promulgated by the Serbian Communist Party’s Ideological Commission in their case. Makavejev, who started out working in the fifties after having gorged himself on disparate cinemas, high and low, at the Yugoslav Cinémathèque, quickly developed a unique style, combining bricolage, intertextuality, frank sexuality, documentary style, and sly commentary. Makavejev’s cheeky films push ideology to the foreground to lambaste and undermine it, showing how people get tangled up in it, overwhelmed by it, and ultimately trip up, all in tizzy. He mocks the image of a functioning, idyllic collectivity foisted on the masses by the existing institutions, making a mockery of popular forms and idioms, along w/ their underpinning ideological scaffolding. What his films celebrate is unbridled personal liberation of a sexual or performative nature that breaks through any constricting bonds the outside world may seek to impose upon libinal drive. The form of his films likewise takes on a freewheeling, open-ended, asymptotic wildness, turning on a dime, heading off on new lines-of-flight, employing multiple narrative forms and voices, crashing through barriers, and enacting new schema, landscaping new root-systems, wherever they may burrow. He was able to practice his termite art under the radar for well over a decade before being exiled in 1973 after the release of his greatest masterpiece, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (’71), a free-form cinematic essay celebrating Wilhelm Reich and his theories of the primordial cosmic energy he called “orgone,” which essentially amounts to the orgasmic energy that connects all things to the Universal force of Life and which pulses out of the earth, down from the heavens, and through organisms. Reich is the ultimate subject for Makavejev, whose entire body of work, leading from his early experiments in Yugoslavia, to his twin masterpieces of performative libidinal desublimation, the already Criterionized WR and Sweet Movie (’74), and culminating in a series of sneakily subversive international co-productions, has continually broken down the decrepit structures of any-given-position-whatever, to allow energy to flow and explode new possibilities out of the formulaic gridwork of narratological and ideological precedent, replacing meaning or discursive reiteration w/ sped-up ecstatic and anarchic joie de vivre, an endless making passionately active of reactive forces, fixed to blast through any institutional moorings in its path. Criterion’s bare-bones new Eclipse series box, Free Radicals, presents his first three Yugoslavian features, showcasing the early, putative emergence of Makavejev’s absolutely singular vision.
Covek nije tica / Man is Not a Bird
Man is Not a Bird (’65) opens w/ a crazed-looking oddly-coiffed mesmerist, the “youngest hypnotist in the Balkans,” delivering a soliloquy on his chosen trade, talking about “the negative aspects of love,” explaining how he has used hypnosis to free a young girl of the “delusion” that she was in love w/ a particular boy, because of some occult spell she had been put under, who it was deemed was no good for her. He talks directly to the camera, as in a documentary, riffing on the various kinds of magical thinking, old wives tales, silly superstitions, and absurd beliefs that play a major role in everyday life. “The moral,” he says, is that “magic is absolute nonsense.” How then, the ensuing film seems to ask, should we understand love? What of its magic? What of its madness? What do we do w/ desire? What follows is a fractured narrative, interrupted by various documentary asides, about two copper factory employees in the remote region of Bor. One, Jan, is relatively high up the factory ladder, an assembly expert who is in the throws of a messy affair w/ his landlord’s daughter, a tempestuous hairdresser named Rajka (the sexy and diffident and oh-so-flexible Milena Dravić). The other is Barbulović, a hulking, fiendish member of the lumpenproletariat, who loafs around, gets wasted, and fucks whomsoever he can lay his dirty hands upon (a depiction of the communist laborer that is almost ridiculously subversive in a culture used to seeing such figures hoisted up as selfless, heroic, defenders of the little people – and funny, because there is never really any reason for him to be constantly interrupting the love story that we are nominally watching). The story (or the stories-that-are-the-story), which in its way details the endless frustrations of its characters bound up as they are in demoralizing work and the vagaries of relationships that are frustrating, untenable, and impossible to cleanly extricate oneself from, is constantly being interrupted by scenes of hypnosis (the title coming from one such scene wherein a stage full of hypnotized audience members are made to flap about the stage fully believing that they are, in fact, birds), odd carnivalesque performances, digressions on Beethoven, and a mordant tour of the factory where a guide pontificates on the wonders of this worker’s paradise before a group of rapt school children while we witness Barbulović trapped in filthy, exhausting labor, an emasculated object of the collective gaze. The film depicts a taxonomy of humiliations and desperations within a set of conditions not conducive to life. Even love becomes a baleful purgatory fraught w/ dangers and conditions as poor as the barracks that house the workers. The film suggests that love and ideology are two kinds of hypnosis that can entrap entire populations of people in a mnemonic thrall from which they are unable to awaken themselves, and in which their individual strivings, desire having been hijacked by external forces, amount to little more than a mad zonked-out Serbian dude flapping his arms in an impotent, vainglorious attempt at taking flight.
Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. / Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator
Almost a streamlined variation on the not-a-love-story between Jan and Rajka that made up a good part of Man is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (’67) tells the temporally disjointed story of Hungarian telephone operator Izabela (Eva Ras, often naked and lazed-out in odd positions like Milena Dravić before her) and her older Serbian Muslim rat exterminator boyfriend Ahmed (the adorable and diminutive Slobodan Aligrudić, almost overwhelmed by his clothes), a story that the temporal disjointedness lets us know early on is not going to end well when one of Makavejev’s trademark documentary digressions flashforwards to the recovery of Izabela’s body accompanied by a dry dissertation by a doctor concerning the handling of the corpse. As the arc of the relationship between our two lovers goes from the heights of blissful cohabitation to bedeviled tragedy after a dalliance w/ the horny local mailman causes a guilty and sullen Izabela to collapse the love affair from within, sending mild-mannered Ahmed back to the bottle and culminating in her unfortunately unwitnessed accidental death at his blotto hands. Again, the film is routinely bisected, interrupted, and rerouted back and forth by Makavejev’s patchwork exploration of the subject from every possible angle and vantage, as a sexologist and criminologist take turns lecturing to us, elucidations on the history of phallus worship are presented along w/ erotic sketches from antiquity, fragments from Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (’31) appear on the TV, a shot of Izabel’s bare ass is graphically matched w/ a pair of eggs, then with two mounds of flower into which the egg yolks are dropped and kneaded as part of a subsequent lesson in strudel making. The film throws all of its disparate elements together in freewheeling collage, turning what is essentially a neorealist-style staged documentary into and artfully arranged hardscrabble poetic tapestry of fragments that reflexively align w/ one another, mimicking the autopsy performed by the coroner of the film as by all of its experts and talking heads who, in one way or another, for all their pompous elocution, scientific deduction, and myriad of truth-claims (like those propogated and upheld by the socialist state in its reification of the fixed tenants upon which it is all-knowingly erected), are unable to grasp the generally messy, inextricably complicated, and never semantically reducible complexities of lives as they are actually lived, carried out, and brought to thorny and difficult ends, often not morally coherent or easily assimilated by easy encapsulations as these are. Love Affair is mussed and diffuse, never equivocating one way or the other, hard to fix judgment upon, just as is life. Here we are seeing Makavajev begin to structure very directly his evolving tendency to show how ideologies, systems for endogenously producing hard-and-fast truths-in-themselves, employing bureaucracies of voices that refuse, or deploy energy to repress, the anarchic life-forces that dispel the illusion of their claims, how powers that have the tendency to narrate histories, no matter how marginalized or entrenched, in their own voice, using their own systems of signs, actively destabilizing any opportunity for critical thought, doubt, or disharmony within the apparatus of a limited and limiting expressivity, ultimately fail to uphold the frames that they impose upon the world when exposed to even the slightest countervailing exposure.
Nevinost bez zastite / Innocence Unprotected
With Innocence Unprotected, the most conceptually rich and formally busy film from his early Yugoslav period, Makavejev further encroaches upon the mashup terrain of his subsequent masterpieces of intertextual collage, WR and Sweet Movie, that directly follow it, w/ a “new production of a good old film,” as the opening title card half-truthfully informs us. The title is taken from a 1942 film of the same name as Makavejev’s, the first talkie made in Yugoslavia, though the communist powers that be tried to suppress the fact since it was made under Nazi occupation, thus making it incompatible w/ the self-mythologization of the state (this being a film whose production had to be kept secret from the Nazis for similar reasons!). The bulk of Makavejev’s film is actually given over to an arch and extremely funny repositioning of the actual 1942 film, often tinted or hand-stenciled so that Makavejev can impose his own jokester antics on the crapace of the original film itself as though he were tagging it like a Brooklyn subway car. Made by the absurd and extremely popular dangerous-to-himself-and-others muscle man, acrobat, daredevil, escape artist, and workaday locksmith Dragoljub Aleksić, the original film is a boisterously over-the-top vamp-fest featuring incomprehensibly bad acting and a shopworn plot – intercut, in a way that perhaps foresaw Makavejev, w/ documentary footage of Aleksić’s various fucked-up what-the-hell-is-he-doing? feats of highwire derring-do – about an everyman hero who saves his true love from being raped by an evil industrialist scumbag in the upstairs bedroom of the home where she is kept by a heartless old slag who has sold her out to the letch for favors already performed (or soon to be returned) in gratis. The film had one public showing during the war, but was subsequently squashed from the records, its director-star accused of collaboration and nearly sold down the river. Makavejev comes onto the scenes twenty-six years later and rounds up Aleksić and his collaborators on the classic-that-wasn’t-to-be, interviewing them, letting them do oddball shit in front of his camera, and filming nearly-septuagenarian Aleksić flexing on a rotating pedestal w/ some seriously gorgeous bitches dangling off of him. These are some self-effacingly goofy people whom age has in no way softened. Not only does Makavejev intercut the modern versions of the players in this forgotten blip on the radar of cinematographic history, he also mines moments of surprising poignancy by offsetting moments in Aleksić’s ridiculous melodrama, such as when the love interest in a moment of longing and lamentation poses crestfallen at a window to peer out on the outside world, w/ newsreel footage of the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, reminding the viewer of the real world context of the film’s impossible-seeming production and the extraordinary tragedy that befell Yugoslavia not only as one of many countries to be raped like an innocent young romantic in an upstairs loft by the Nazis, but as the only country to be bombed by both sides during the war. Suddenly the original movie’s corny plot and cardboard heroics take on a moving subtext, as a celebration of individuality and shared values in a world in which values were thrown out the window to make way for imperialistic plunder and catastrophic violence. Innocence Unprotected becomes a wild and wooly gaff w/ serious underlying resonances that milks a historical text for easy laughs only to turn the gambit around on us revealing a genuine and complicated pathos. It is both a celebration, a mockery, and a solemn and powerful reconfiguration of its own berserk and heavily mediated contents, a batshit collage that Makavejev would soon outdo once again, with WR and Sweet Movie, his two subsequent jaunts into outer-fucking-space.
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