On 25 January, precisely on the fifth anniversary of the death of the great Serbian, Yugoslav and European director Dušan Makavejev (1932-2019), a retrospective of his films will begin in the Yugoslav Film Archive, in its main movie theater that was named “Makavejev” in February 2019.
Five short and nine feature films of this respected, but also disputed author in former Yugoslavia, will be shown. His oeuvre is characterized by lavish creative imagination and free spirit.
On the first evening, documentaries and experimental shorts are on the program, followed by one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts Man Is Not a Bird (1965) – a love story in the setting of coal mining town Bor, with scenes of the fair hypnosis as a metaphor for the ideological slogans of the time.
The retrospective resumes chronologically – from Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and American production Manifesto (1988), to the Yugoslav and German co-production Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993).
During Black Wave period, the works of Makavejev were criticized as subversive. His films dealt with the experiences of post-was reconstruction and construction in an engaged and witty manner, boldly treating political and sexual taboos, challenging censors. Professional critics highlighted his avantgarde and imaginative collages in which documents and excerpts from other authors’ films had been interwoven.
When he was prevented from working in the country, Makavejev filmed in Europe and gave lectures on film at Harvard University, made friends and admirers all over the world. On the occasion of his death, many people from Belgrade, the entire region, and the European Film Academy paid tribute to him, as well as his former students from America and well-known directors Wim Wenders and Francis Ford Coppola.
In addition to numerous awards in the country and abroad, Makavejev also received the Golden Seal Award of the Yugoslav Film Archive in 2012.
