Dušan Makavejev's most famous avant-garde film was inspired by a book called Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis. If that doesn't sound like a fun night out, you've never seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Criterion scored a hit with their release last year of Makaveyev's two best and most notorious films, WR and Sweet Movie. Now they've done us all a service by releasing his first three films in Eclipse Series 18:Dušan Makavejev, Free Radical.
Fellow iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard similarly pushed the celluloid envelope, but while Godard's narrative-busting seemed like so much calculated exercise, Makaveyev's approach was genuinely omnivorous, hungry for ideas and excited about the possibilities of going beyond narrative. "But don't you see how this is connected too?" you can imagine him waving his arms and throwing his shot glass down, drunk on filmmaking.
Dr. Zivojin Aleksic as Criminologist in LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.
Makaveyev's films came out of and celebrated the sexual revolution with an equal accent on both words of the phrase. Within the first five minutes of Man is Not a Bird (1965) Makaveyev has set up his two major themes: Marxism and sex. After a credit sequence typeset in stark Gill Sans, "Opening remarks on negative aspects of love" offers a Marxist hypnotist itemizing and railing against the local superstitions. This leads into a sequence with a burlesque singer entertaining a rowdy bunch of factory workers. The film is one of his more straightforward but is peppered with striking imagery, as in a car wash that sounds like a roaring tiger.
Love Affair or: the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) is based on a true story, though again Makaveyev's technique is leagues beyond that of Unsolved Mysteries. Part procedural, part collage, this is one of Makaveyev's more conventional works, though where this director is concerned that's a relative statement.
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