Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical (3-DVD)

There's never been another filmmaker quite like Dusan Makavejev. Even in the 1960s, when all of cinema's steadfast rules seemed to be breaking down and artists such as Godard, Cassavetes, and Marker were dissolving the boundries between fiction and documentary, Yugoslavia's Makavejev stood alone. His films are about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, racous, 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 Comunist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen. Man Is Not a Bird: (Covek Nije Tica) MAN IS NOT A BIRD is an antic portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor inside a copper factory, yet Makavejev make room for plentiful free-form riffing on the almost comically bleak environs. For his first feature, following years of making documentaries and experimental shorts, the mountains near Yugoslavia's border with Bulgaria, and got to know the workers in the region, interviewing them about their lives and experiences, 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 MAN IS NOT A BIRD is one of cimena's most assured and daring debuts. Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator: (Ljubavni Sluca Ili Tragedija Sluzbenice PTT) In outline, this is the story of a tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist (Slobodan Algrudic) in Belgrade. Yet in Makavejev's manic hands, this second feature becomes an endlessly suprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom. Featuring interludes of interviews with a medical 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, furthur demonstrated Makavejev's adeptness at mixing and matching genres, and his odd, sophisticated humanism. Innocence Unprotected: (Nevinost Bez Zastite) This free-associative, utterly unclassifiable film--assembled from the "lost" footage of the first Serbian talkie, a silly melodrama titled INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED, made during the Nazi occupation; comtemporary interviews with the megamen who made it and other crew members; and images of the World War II destruction, and subsequent rebuilding, of Belgrade--is one of Makavejev's most freewheeling farces. And at its center is a (real-life) character you won't soon forget: Dragoljub Aleksic, and acrobat, locksmith, and Houdini-style escape artist whom Makavejev uses as the absurd and wonderous basis for a look back at his country's tumultous recent history.