Memories of Taboo-Buster Dušan Makavejev

Our first meeting occurred in a smoke-filled editing room in the bowels of one of those gloomy government buildings on Belgrade’s Knez Mihailova. It was March of 1967, and Dušan was editing what would become the first of his international art-house successes. The Serbian title was “Ljubavni slučaj,” and Dušan explained that this meant “Love Case” in English. I suggested he should call it Love Dossier, and he accepted this with alacrity. However, better brains than his and mine decided in their wisdom to entitle the film Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator. This enigmatic, amusing, and faintly sinister film opened at the Yugoslav national festival in Pula in July 1967, and was bought by Brandon Films for the U.S. following its New York Festival premiere two months later. It inaugurated the golden years of Dušan Makavejev.

Much influenced by Godard, Makavejev pushed to still further boundaries a dialectic that in each of his films opposed interludes of documentary to scenes of fantasy. At the same time he pioneered a forensic approach to cinema. In Switchboard Operator, an erstwhile revolutionary and civil servant who has been relegated to the status of rat-catcher, seduces and then inexplicably murders a young woman in contemporary Belgrade. The sex scenes in Switchboard Operator are stitched together with interviews with a sexologist, images of the autopsy on the victim’s corpse, clips from Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, and laconic comments on the life of rats that roam the city sewers.

His next work, Innocence Unprotected, was selected for Berlin in June 1968, and WR: Mysteries of the Organism featured in the first edition of the International Forum for Young Cinema in 1971. Innocence Unprotected portrayed the Serbian athlete Dragoljub Aleksić, who in 1942 had made a film about his own gymnastic feats, interspersed with stretches of wide-eyed melodrama. Makavejev virtually “re-made” this exercise in vanity, tinting some sequences, and bulking it out with a collage of wartime newsreel clips and interviews with Aleksić himself and his original cameraman.

At the Berlin Festival of 1970, Makavejev was a member of the jury and showed his mettle off-screen when Michael Verhoeven’s West German entry, O.K., dealing with the rape of a young Vietnamese girl by four U.S. soldiers, aroused the wrath of jury president George Stevens. Makavejev argued forcefully that any filmmaker has the right to speak freely about world issues, and, accused by Stevens of being an agent for the East German government, he finally resigned. Rumors circulated that West German Chancellor Willy Brandt then personally intervened in the crisis, and Stevens agreed to reconcile with Makavejev and his fellow jurors.

The initials WR stand for Wilhelm Reich, the Austro-American psychoanalyst who claimed to have discovered “orgone” energy, which enhanced one’s sexual energy. Reich’s written work was still banned in the U.S. when Makavejev began his research for WR: Mysteries of the Organism—and as late as 1960 his books had been literally burned at the request of the Food and Drug Agency of the time. Looking back from the perspective of 2001, Dušan said, “My cinema is one of essays—but the essays are not always evident, they are often hidden.” To some degree WR serves as a disquisition on the life and experiments of Reich; but to an even larger degree it’s a call to arms against censorship and intolerance. Makavejev offers a clear dialectic between the frustrations and stupidity of rigid ideology (read: Communism) and the freedom of a Reichian world. He then proceeds, like Magritte or Braque, to fill his canvas with a cluster of sundry clips from the 1946 Soviet film, The Vow, about Stalin, one of which follows a close-up shot of a plaster-cast phallus. The fictional thread of WR describes a doomed affair between Milena Draviċ and a Russian skater, contrasted with the zestful copulation of Jagoda Kaloper and “Comrade Ljuba.” Theory and practice, the irrational and the rational, thus meet in head-on collision, and the result is a film that mauls the sacred iconography of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, affirming that “Politics is for those whose orgasm is incomplete.” It’s a classic utopian parable, in the mood of Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Animal Farm. Jagoda Kaloper traveled with WR to campuses across America, and I introduced her and the film at the University of Rochester. The undergraduate audience of the early seventies revelled in Jagoda’s nude scenes, even if the political references often seemed out of reach. In Yugoslavia, however, WR was banned without ceremony—for sixteen years—and in many other territories the film enraged the censors.