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Dušan Makavejev - Five Films (The Criterion Collection) [2 DVD9s & 3 DVD5s]

Posted By: mook45

Date: 10 Jun 2011 22:35:20

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There’s never been another filmmaker quite like Dušan Makavejev. Even in the 1960s, when all of cinema’s rules seemed to be breaking down and artists such as Godard, Cassavetes, and Marker were dissolving the boundary between fiction and documentary, Yugoslavia’s Makavejev stood alone. His films about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, raucous, and ribald. Across these, his wild, collagelike first three films, Makavejev investigates—with a tonic mix of earnestness and whimsy—love, death, and work; the legacy of war and the absurdity of daily life in a Communist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen.

Man is Not a Bird (1965, 78 mins)

Man Is Not a Bird is an antic, free-form portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor in a copper factory. For this first feature, following years of making documentaries and experimental shorts, Dusan Makavejev and his crew set up shop in Bor, a mining town in the mountains near Yugoslavia’s border with Bulgaria, interviewing the workers in the region and even shooting footage inside the local ore factories. Yet the result is hardly a staid tribute to the working class. Also featuring seductive Milena Dravic, who would go on to star in Makavejev’s groundbreaking WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Man Is Not a Bird is one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967, 68 mins)

In outline, this is the story of the tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist (Slobodan Aligrudic) in Belgrade. Yet in Dusan Makavejev’s manic hands, this second feature becomes an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom. Featuring interludes of interviews with a sexologist and a criminologist, as well as some of the most elegant dramatic filmmaking of the director’s career, Love Affair, based on a true incident, further demonstrated Makavejev’s adeptness at mixing and matching genres, and his odd, sophisticated humanism.

Innocence Unprotected (1968, 79 mins)

This utterly unclassifiable film is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces, assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, a silly melodrama titled Innocence Unprotected, made during the Nazi occupation; contemporary interviews with the megaman who made it and other crew members; and images of the World War II destruction, and subsequent rebuilding, of Belgrade. And at its center is a (real-life) character you won’t soon forget: Dragoljub Aleksic, an acrobat, locksmith, and Houdini-style escape artist whom Makavejev uses as the absurd and wondrous basis for a look back at his country’s tumultuous recent history.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971, 85 mins)

What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation. Banned upon its release in the director’s homeland, the art-house smash WR is both whimsical and bold in its blending of politics and sexuality.

Disc Features:
* New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dušan Makavejev
* Audio commentary assembled from Raymond Durgnat’s 1999 book on the film
* Hole in the Soul, Makavejev’s 1994 tragicomic autobiographical short film, originally made for the BBC
* New and archival video interviews with Makavejev
* New and improved English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sweet Movie (1974, 98 mins)

Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dušan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.

Disc Features:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dušan Makavejev
New video interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova
Actress Anna Prucnal sings a song from the film
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic David Sterritt and Harvard professor and philosopher Stanley Cavell

DVDs:
DVD RELEASE: 2007-9
STUDIO: Criterion
CATALOG: Eclipse 18 / 389 / 390
SYSTEM: NTSC
SCREEN: OCR
COLOUR: Colour (Man… & Love.. B&W)
AUDIO: Dolby Digital mono:

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Subtitles (from opensubtitles.org)

DVD 2000 Art-house