CINEMA REBORN - Seven newly-restored Australian films in the 2025 program.

 AUSTRALIAN FILM-MAKERS AT CINEMA REBORN 2025

Cinema Reborn 2025 will present seven films by Australian film-makers. All will be presented in the presence of the directors or in the case of the films of the late Anna Kannava, the producer. All have been restored by the film-makers themselves working in conjunction with renowned Australian director and director of photography Ray Argall and his company Piccolo Films. For information about session times, bookings and credits CLICK HERE

WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN (John Hughes, (1996) Cast: Martin Jacobs,Gillian Jones, Jacek Koman, Angie Milliken “In the hands of director John Hughes this material is transformed into a fragmented, cool film that utilises many techniques, associated with art cinema….an impressive film that provides many entry points for the viewer by supplying just enough character development and narrative motivation to engage on an emotional level.” Geoff Mayer, The Oxford Companion to Australian Film There are very few Australian films which draw their style and inspiration from European art cinema and the work of such masters as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. What I Have Written, based on a novel by John Scott, is however such a film. It draws on those sources to present a twisting and complex narrative, intertwining two love stories – the first an erotic drama set in Australian academia, the second a story which draws on, using black and white photography and the Parisian setting, from Marker’s legendary La Jetée. John Hughes, otherwise a master documentary maker for close to fifty years, took a detour into fictional drama that resembles the literary work of Marguerite Duras and  Alain Robbe-Grillet. As such it stands almost alone in the Australian cinema. The world premiere of this 4K restoration will be both a unique experience and a reminder that the Australian cinema has occasionally been more than echoes of BBC drama, broad comedy and American genre re-treads. John Hughes will introduce his film at its Sydney and Melbourne screenings and take part in a post-film conversation HOW THE WEST WAS LOST (David Noakes, 1987) "will always be the best, most honest and most entertaining record of the 1946 Strike... It is an exhilarating, inspirational documentary that shows what people can achieve when they have vision, courage and solidarity." - Jerry Roberts, Pearls and Irritations On 1 May 1946, 800 Aboriginal station workers walked off sheep stations in the north-west of Western Australia, marking the beginning of a carefully organised strike that was to last for at least three years, but never officially ended. The strike was more than a demand for better wages and conditions. It was, in the words of Keith Connolly in the Melbourne Herald, 'a well-considered statement by a grievously exploited people, standing up for their rights and dignity'. How The West Was Lost tells the story of a shameful yet still largely unknown piece of Australia’s tangled history… David Noakes and Rose Murray will introduce this film at its Sydney and Melbourne screenings and take part in a post-film conversation. Rose Murray is a Nyangumarta woman whose family were part of the 1946 Pilbara Strike.  THE MINISKIRTED DYNAMO (Rivka Hartman, 1996) “Dora emerges as afascinating character… a very personal piece of film-making” – David Stratton “The Miniskirted Dynamo  is a lively, often hilarious, film as well asa moving personal document…This is not a film for those who believe in the mythof happy families – or perhaps it is the perfect film.” - Barbara Creed, The Age Rivka Hartman’s The Miniskirted Dynamo focuses on her mother, Dr Dora Bialestock, an extraordinary figure inMelbourne’s medical community. Dora studied Medicine at the University of Melbourne and published widely on her specialist research subjects . She became a figure of some controversy when she attacked the state government’s management of children in care. She was a public thorn in many sides of government. Hartman’s film is a remarkable autobiographical and biographical documentary about the intense and tangled relationship between the film-maker and her mother, both of whom had ambitions and goals that did not mix well. Rivka Hartman will introduce her film at its Sydney and Melbournescreenings THE BUTLER (Anna Kannava, 1997) + TEN YEARS AFTER…TEN YEARS OLDER (Anna Kannava, 1986) “I was very moved by The Butler, a portrait of Anna's brother, Nino. This film has one of those unexpected moments of grace that totally won me over – it brought tears to my eyes (not of sadness, but of happiness and liberation).” – Cristina Álvarez López “I was struck by the absolute coherence of her relatively small but impressive and enduring output.” – Adrian Martin Celebrating the filmmaking of Anna Kannava (1959-2011) with two remarkable autobiographical documentaries, recently restored in 4K. Born in Cyprus, Kannava migrated to Melbourne with her family in 1974. In the meditative Ten Years After…Ten Years Older, the director tenderly reflects on returning to her homeland after a decade away. In the deftly comedic and deeply affecting The Butler, Kannava impressionistically portrays the life she shared with her devoted younger brother Nino. These two key works reveal a gifted filmmaker deserving of widespread recognition. Anna Kannava’s films were produced by John Cruthers who has supervised their restoration. The films will be introduced by John Cruthers in Sydney.  BREAD AND DRIPPING (Vic Smith, Margot Nash, Elizabeth Schaffer,Wendy Brady and Donna Foster, 1981) Four women recount their lives during the bleak years ofthe Depression of the 1930s. Tibby Whalan, Eileen Pittman, Beryl Armstrong andMary Wright describe their struggles to survive and maintain families whenfaced with widespread unemployment, evictions and hardship. Bread and Dripping screens with How the West was Lost in Sydney and Melbourne. It will be introduced by Vic Smith and Elizabeth Schaffer in Sydney ON A FULL MOON (Lee Whitmore, 1997) This "poem to my mother", features memories of childhood and family lovingly animated frame by frame by pencil and pastel on paper.  On a Full Moon screens with The Miniskirted Dynamo  and will be introduced by Lee Whitmore in Sydney.

Streaming on Disney+ - Rod Bishop finds much to admire in the film-making of Alice Rohrwacher, including the recent LE PUPILLE (2022, Italy/USA)

  

Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón

After the magic realism and rural working-class exploitation of her third feature Happy as Lazzaro (2018), Alice Rohrwacher returned to the children and female adolescents of her first two features.

Le Pupille (2022), a 38-minute short produced by Alfonso Cuarón, set in a Catholic orphanage during World War Two was nominated for an Oscar in 2023.

The orphan girls in Le Pupille just wanna have fun, but are subjected to a religiously inspired disciplinary regime led by a particularly nasty nun (Alba Rohrwacher). She labels one girl as “wicked” and the softly spoken student responds by inspiring her classmates to rebel. 

Le Pupille

Children’s stories are, by and large, disguised lessons in morality. But here, there’s a deliberate avoidance of any moral teaching and if the audience is missing this intention, the girls are happy to burst into song, singing straight to camera to tell us the film has no moral perspective. 

It takes only a couple of minutes with Rohrwacher’s first feature Heavenly Bodies (2011) to realize her filmmaking talents were fully-formed from the very start of her career. 

As was her view of Italian Catholicism, and she follows the 13-year-old Marta, living in rural poverty and suffering through her training for Communion – both as a supplicant raising her head for a blessing and as a prisoner transitioning from the wonders and innocence of her childhood to the expectations of her gender role in adult life.

Heavenly Bodies

In The Wonders (2014), the 14-year-old Gelsomina resolutely struggles with the love and responsibilities she feels for her rural working-class bee-keeper family, yet experiences a desire to outgrow this narrow world and experience ‘the beyond’. She transgresses by secretly joining her family up as contestants in a reality TV show based around peasants who still live like Etruscans, those mysterious peoples whose civilization and language disappeared into the formation of the Roman Empire. 

The Etruscans are even more central to Rohrwacher’s fourth feature La Chimera, based around the tombaroli, contemporary Italian graverobbers who fall into conflict with the capitalistic, international art market. In both films, Etruscan art is presented as wondrous, spell-binding, enriching - indicating a world of marvel beyond the confines of rural poverty.

The girls and female adolescents are replaced by the man-child Lazzaro in Happy as Lazzaro (2018). Perhaps ‘somewhere on the spectrum’, Lazzaro lives in an impoverished rural community of indentured labourers growing tobacco for down-at-heel, titled nobility. They are out of time and place, but discovered by an astonished carabinieri. 

Josh O'Connor, La Chimera

Used as a compliant slave by his community, Lazzaro’s childlike innocence and sense of pragmatic wonder at the natural world belies his true age. Accidently dying, but woken by a wolf, Lazzaro resurrects decades later and searches for what’s left of his community, some of whom kneel down and venerate him like a saint.

It’s the same religious divinity, magical realism and ancient worlds that her girls and female adolescents reach out for in Heavenly Bodies, The Wonders and Le Pupille.

It’s Rohrwacher’s distinctive world where she focuses on her main characters as they transition from their wondrous childhoods into the rigors and disappointments of adult life.

My viewing partner describes Rohrwacher as “a visionary with a courageous sense of conviction, her films all delivered with a light-handed exultation”. 

On DVD - David Hare catches up with Clint Eastwwod - JUROR#2 (USA, 2024)

Not yet seen by me, this seemingly final work from a master hardly had any theatrical release last year at all, certainly none in this corner of the planet. Ditto no streaming. 

Warner/Discovery under Zaslav has seen fit to give it minimal release on a Blu-ray in the States, and here in Aus/NZ in a PAL DVD, avec the usual semitone audio and video speedup.

It’s better than nothing. Eastwood, as only he can, curated a cast for this - Nicholas Hoult who still looks barely more than a baby, like his startled deer in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. Toni Collette who just gets better with everything she does now. Kiefer Sutherland, his character an emorional mess (again).

It’s another reflection by Eastwood on “justice”, a concept that seems terribly unsafe in a world now dominated by liars, con artists and psychopathic billionaires. Eastwood may be the last of the great classical American directors. At least, after he goes, a formidable filmography.

CINEMA REBORN - 2025 PROGRAMME LAUNCHED + ANDREI TARKOVSKY, CHARITABLE DONATIONS

THE CINEMA REBORN 2025 PROGRAM LAUNCHED Our biggest ever selection of restored classic cinema is now revealed on the Cinema Reborn website. All sessions for our Sydney and Melbourne seasons are set out with short notes on all of the films. The selection ranges from the 1920s with the newly-restored silent masterpiece STELLA DALLAS to the 1990s. We have four programs of films by Australian directors and another superb selection of Hollywood classics, European award-winners and some remarkable works from the Philippines, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Lebanon. To explore the whole program head for our website at cinemareborn.com.au There are links on each page enabling you to book at the Ritz and the Lido. BOOKINGS NOW OPEN If you were one of those who ordered an advance copy our 24 page program booklet you may already know just what you want to see and when. If so you can head straight to the Ritz and Lido websites and start booking now. Members of the Ritz and Lido Movie Clubs receive concessions at all sessions. Cinema Reborn offers student concession tickets of $15 for all sessions except for THE SACRIFICE. For the Ritz https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/cinemareborn-2025   For the Lido https://www.lidocinemas.com.au/events/cinema-reborn-2025 If you would like a digital Pdf copy of the program booklet emailed to you just send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com SCULPTING IN TIME: THE FILMS OF ANDREI TARKOVSKY Leading up to Cinema Reborn 2025 we are  delighted to announce a collaboration with Ritz, Lido and Classic Cinemas in presenting a complete retrospective of the feature films of master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. These will be the first ever screenings in Australia to be devoted to a full career review of this master filmmaker. Tarkovsky’s work was previously at Cinema Reborn in 2022 when his masterpiece Mirror was presented in a superb 4K restoration. The retrospective will begin at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney on March 20 and Lido and Classic Cinemas in Melbourne on March 27, where Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood will be screened at 7pm on those dates. In Sydney there will be an introduction to the season at the Ivan’s Childhood screening by Sydney University film studies scholar Matilda Mroz and the main screening of The Sacrifice during the Cinema Reborn 2025 season will be preceded by an introduction by actor, educator and film-maker Richard James Allen. In Melbourne, critics Grace Boschetti (Ivan’s Childhood) and David Heslin (The Sacrifice) will introduce those sessions at the Hawthorn Lido. The Sacrifice will be a part of the 2025 Cinema Reborn season at the Ritz on Thursday 1 May and at Lido on Thursday 8 May, and will  also screen at Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick on Thursday 8 May. Full details of the Tarkovsky retrospective, with links to bookings at each of the cinemas, may be found here0. The Hawthorn Lido https://www.lidocinemas.com.au/events/sculpting-in-time-the-films-of-andrei-tarkovsky The Randwick Ritz https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/sculpting-in-time-andrei-tarkovsky The Elsternwick Classic https://www.classiccinemas.com.au/events/sculpting-in-time-the-films-of-andrei-tarkovsky CHARITABLE DONATIONS Cinema Reborn has established a page to enable our supporters to make tax-deductible donations to support our work. Our organisation is run by a group of film industry professionals, working critics, curators and film conservation specialists. All work in an entirely voluntary capacity. Nevertheless there are significant costs, most notably our screening fees, which have to be met each year and we are always grateful for the financial support we receive that defrays these costs and charges. If you would like to make a donation you may do so via via the attached link established by the Australian Cultural Fund which enables small unincorporated organisations like ours to use a service which would otherwise not be easily accessible. To make a donation any time between now and the end of Cinema Reborn 2025 click on this link https://artists.australianculturalfund.org.au/s/project/a2EMn00000FDsl8MAD/cinema-reborn-2025 CINEMA REBORN MAILING LIST Please forward this email to any friends who may be interested in our presentations of restored cinema classics. Invite them to join our mailing list by sending an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com

The Current Cinema - David Hare's nostalgia bells get rung by QUEER (Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2024)

I revisited last night these tattered remnants of my youth (bought way back in my palmy days of hustling, acid trips and “moral” abandon in 1968.) Back then William Burroughs felt like an endorsement, the smart older brother we never had to simply scorn the establishment, all the while shouting from the barricades “eat shit motherfuckers.” Being queer then was another proud crime and adjunctive slap in the face to bourgeois society.

Now, nearly sixty years later the western world seems to be strangling itself again in large part thanks to cannibilistic capitalism, egocentricity and transactionalism. All sugar coated with the cancer of PC and university minted degrees on things like film and gender studies, in the process draining those noble realities into garbage salaries for deeply unworthy New Economy Tertiary “learning” with their bloodless, intellectually zombified “curricula” ” and their completely worthless “degrees”

Which is all a roundabout way of getting to the point. After dodging every Guadagnino film since Call Me By Your Name which turned me avidly against this auteur of swoondom, I finally succumbed to. his new film, Queer.

I am in shock at its ability to completely capture me and take me back to places I hadn’t revisited since I was very, very young.

Let me just get this out there. The players in this literally gorgeous movie are all so wonderful they seem to have been waiting a lifetime to get their parts. Even my beloved Lesley Manville, here unrecognizable as the Jungle Botanist-Witch who feeds the boys Telepathy enabling Yage. 

David Hare's copy

Every step up the scale of stylization that Guadagnino lays onto the visual fabric just multiplies the pleasure - the 50s linen suits, the unbelievable goofy but beautiful miniature bi-plane flying wobbly on wires against a painted cartoon sky. From the entirely Cinecittã soundstage where they rebuilt a 1951 Mexico City and a Guatamalan jungle in lurid sea green and rattlesnake copper. To the final staggering trip sequence in which, unlike Burroughs’ novel, Lee and Eugene do in fact find Yage and imbibe its powers. The epilogue which sublimely and achingly recreates the endgame of Kubrick’s 2001, set to Reznor and Ross’ Vaster than Empires it may be the greatest “death scene” I’ve seen in movies.

I’m old now and I hate what the world’s become. This movie and its incredible passion made me young again, it brought me back real joy, real pleasure, real excitement. It’s so alive with outrageous taste and feeling you seem to apprehend the excitement of all the players, whose sheer immersion in their parts has turned them on too.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison unearths NE ZHA 2 (Yu Yang, China, 2025)

Yu Yang’s new  Ne Zha 2 -  the0 Nezha Mo tong nao hai follow up - is, they are telling us, the most successful animated film of all time. I have to wonder about this as the one of the eight-a-day sessions I attended drew only a single figure attendance by lights down, despite all the sold seats indicated on the plan. There was also female giggling issuing from a stall in the blokes’ loo before the session, which I felt it better not to investigate.

The film might be more approachable if you see part one but what we end up with is a brain frying succession of wide screen set piece displays with a few anime characters wandering through them. The plot finally settles into a Kirikou rip off.

It  has the rebellious kid Ne Zha (Yanting Lü) who is half of the Chaos Pearl with Ao Bing (Mo Han), a more sedate character. After some gross-out bodily fluids comedy, suited to his tot aspect, we get down to what passes for a plot with the immortals battling monsters as represented by the Dragon King rulers of the Four Seas, setting their sea creatures against  the Chan Sect’s  bearded baby Wuliang from the Yu Zu Palace on a cloud, with the valiant human defenders of the Chentang Pass as victims of The Dragon Rulers of the Four Seas. The master pan is to convert opponents into immortality pearls in the mighty heavenly cauldron. Devices like the sky splitting severed hand are employed by faltering frozen parents and a chubby stone matron who ends up as rocks imprisoned in a metal cage, while hostile Badger Armies and  (impressive) underwater dragons, which are normally found only in the Eastern region, get into the combat. Will our hero be able to withstand the ice thorns which have immobilised him as the true author of the celestial  infamy is revealed?

Admirers of King Hu (Touch of Zen’s immortals on wavering bamboo stalks) and Li Han-hsiang (Love Etern’s derisive white outfit idlers) will recognise their influence. The panoramas of grotesque monsters from Asian traditional art and kiddie literature are impressive but constant barrages of them tend to have a numbing effect. The film just keeps on going long after the big screen impact of its great design and laboratory work has been absorbed. We end with a joke anachronistic routine  embedded in the end titles  Toon freaks and curious tinies are likely to enjoy it.

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - East Central Europe - 6 (40) Yugoslavia

                                                                                                                                                 

Graphic for a Dusan Makavejev retrospective in Moscow, January 2024

Vatroslav Mimica b.23 (Croatia)   Aleksander Petrović b.29 (Serbia)   Dusân Makavejev  (An IFG Director of the Year, 1973) b.32 (Serbia)    Živojin/Zika Pavloviƈ (Serbia) b.33    Purikša Djordjeviƈ (Serbia), Matjaž Klopčić (Slovenia)

Multiculturalism, autonomy and the counteroffensive

In 1961 in contrast to the other Eastern European countries, in multinational Yugoslavia “liberalising of cultural policy and a weakening of control over the film companies resulted in a surge in film production as well as a decrease in the number of “ideologically safe” films. “The basic prerequisites for the birth of autonomous film art and of socially critical films was created.” (M & A Liehm 412) This brought the first of a new generation of filmmakers into the studios. It also resulted in politically motivated critical attacks and prohibitions directed at films with social content and aesthetic ambition breaking new ground. These conflicts were part of the struggle over the political future termed the “second Yugoslav revolution,” the first being the uprising in Serbia against German occupation in 1941 led by the Communist party.

The ultimate result for film, as the Liehms point out, “was the strengthening of creative autonomy, and, contrary to the other Eastern European countries, the gradual legalisation of new forms of film production.” This enabled “independent groups of film-makers to obtain means to make films outside the framework of existing film enterprises.” Not only did this increase the scope for new talent but also increased the opportunity for those pursuing profit in mainstream production.”

Political liberalisation of the arts in the early sixties also resulted in a clearer determination of the character of the national film industries . Serbia had the largest film industry with the greatest number of film artists including directors attracting international attention. Croatian film showed the influence of animated (the Zagreb studio) and amateur experimental film based on the high visual level of Croatian culture as opposed to the Belgrade school. Slovenian film was founded primarily by France Stiglic in the forties and fifties. The sixties opened the door to a new sensitivity - exemplified by Matjaz Klopčić and Bostjan Hladnik “that changed Slovenian film lyricism into a tool of pure film thought and a romantic approach to life.” Bosnian film was a smaller industry establishing a unique position, producing such original film artists as Boro Drašković and Bata Čengić. The documentary studio at Sarajevo established a reputation as being the most daring and committed (ibid 413-4). This was the background for “Novi (new) Film,”a period of personal films, films that claimed the right to subjective interpretations of the lives of individuals and society, the right to “open metaphors,” leaving room for viewers to think and feel for themselves” ( 417).  

Vatroslav Mimica (1923-2020, above), the leading Croatian writer-director, one of the founders of the Zagreb school of animation who made many notable animated shorts in the 50s-early 60s including Venice Festival Grand Prix winner in 1958, The Loner (Samac), turning to feature films with Prometej sa took Vilsevice / Prometheus for Vishevica Island (1964). A successful company manager returns to his native island to attend a ceremony commemorating the heroics of the partisans, of which he was one, in the mountains during the war. The narrative assumes the form of his memories infused with bitterness and melancholy. Mimica successfully continued this innovative storytelling in Yugoslav cinema in Pondeljak ili utorak/Monday or Tuesday (1966), visual stylisation of the narrative growing out of the premises set up by the plot involving the daydreaming of an ordinary journalist breaking the monotony of his days. Mimica continued this fusion of plot and form in Kaja unit cu te/I’ll Kill You (1967) in which the terror plot grows out of the atmosphere created by the visualisation of a Dalmatian town. “It is as if tragedy in all Mimica’s films was simply the derailment of an aesthetic structure created by the camera” (Liehm 419). In Hranjenik/Nourishee (1971) the narrative is a metaphor in which a concentration camp , created by various shades of colour, becomes a world in which helpless people, left to their own devices, try over and over again to achieve a glimpse of freedom (ibid).

Purisa Djordjević (1924-2022, above) takes a retrospectively poetic view of the partisan war and the postwar period in a tetrology : Devojka / Girl  (1965) a tragic wartime tale; San / Dream (1966), a poetic meditation about partisan warfare ; Jutro / Morning(1967) a sombre study of a peacetime dawn;  Podne / Noon (1968) is a poetic meditation about partisan warfare, a sombre dawn of peace and a reflection in full midday light, on the break with Moscow. Djordjevic captures the tragic reality of partisan warfare by unifying in a single style the most direct almost documentary approach and the most dreamlike metaphors, as if to frame the same question to Yugoslavs: “are free people able to sing about freedom the same way they did when they were dreaming about it during the war?” (Liehm 420).

Aleksandar Petrović (1929-94, above) was “a central figure of New Film” in multiple roles including journalist, head of the Belgrade film studio, professor of the Film School and film director. His debut film Djove / Two (1961) broke new ground in portraying a romantic relationship in a form synonymous with modern film both thematically and in the exploration of new film language, as Bostan Hladnik attempted with the visualisation of stream of consciousness in Ples v dezju / Dancing in the Rain (1961).  Djorjievic’s Three (1965) is a multi-episode film based on short stories about three encounters with death that leaves an open question: to kill or to forgive? Skupljaci perja / I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) was an international success in portraying the tragic lot of the Vojvodina gypsies living on the borderline between reality and grotesque projection in a world of imagination, Petrović drawing metaphors for contemporary life and the world.

Zivojin Pavolović (1933-98, above) was “the instigator of conflicts that accompanied the birth and the successful advance of “New Film,” the Liehms inform that, “his style is a poetic naturalism; his goal is to debunk all myths about reality; and his 'heroes' are generally people from Dostoyevsky's Yugoslavia” ( 421), the inspiration for his second feature Sovraznik /The Double(1965). Zaseda/The Ambush (1969) is a bitter view of the period immediately following the war “when  Stalin was God,” the hero killing in the name of the revolution is then himself killed.

Matjaz Klopcić (1934-2007, above) “followed Slovenian cinema’s founder France Stiglic’s lyricism and Bostian Hladnik’s sense of stylistic experimentation with his own narrative style which emerged from his sense of form and his love for his native city of Ljubljana, “the true hero” of his films”. The poetically perceived city in the present is the setting for his first two features, Zgodba ki je ni /A Nonexistent Story (1966), and particularly, Na papirnatih avionih /On the Wings of  Paper (1967) - and in the past - his film about wartime youth, Sedmina/Funeral Feast (1968) a.k.a as Pozdravi Mariju/Greetings to Maria. “Klopcicfinally turned away from Ljubljana in his abstract anti-ideological metaphor about the contemporary world, Oxygen (1971)” (Liehm 427).

Dusan Makavejev (1932-2019, above), New Film's most original and infamous international figure, is linked by Kovács to Godard, Buñuel, and Straub-Huillet, as the most politicised and provocative artists of Europe's late modern cinema (32). The anti-psychological structure of Makavejev’s first feature, Covek nije tica/Man is not a Bird (1965), very similar in structure to Switchboard Operator, is a freewheeling collage of social commentary, labour and sexual politics and other seemingly unrelated topics. Bird culminates in the synchronising of a sexual climax with the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony being performed in a cavernous foundry, to the ironic juxtaposition of Nazi newsreels with Yugoslavia's first film the subject of Makavejev’s third, Innocence Unprotected (1968), itself a kind of primitive prefiguring of the the collage mix of fact and fiction taken up by Makavejev with the surrealistic collage of WR Mysteries of the Organism (1971), his first three films forming a kind of continuum.

In Makavejev’s standout second feature, Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice PTT/ Love Dossier or The Tragedy of the Switchboard Operator (1967) is a tragi-comic love affair between a switchboard operator and a corporation rat-catcher which turns sour after an idyllic beginning and in the course of which Makavejev takes the opportunity to make some ironic comments on Yugoslav society and its taboos. The loose narrative is “tied to social reality only by a thin thread.” Time is fragmented by flashes forward and other ‘extraneous’ factual and archival material but fused perfectly with the couple’s story “to create a picture of human activity in all its contradictions’’ ( Armes 202).  “The disjunctions and contradictions yield a lot of ideas about personal freedom and oppression (especially within a socialist state) and the profusion of images, is well enough organised to make the movie continuously provocative and suggestive.” (Tony Rayns Time Out). Their erotic relationship... ends up “consuming the man and the woman in the middle of a cool, indifferent world.” Makavejev “did not accuse or condemn, he simply made a statement” (Liehm 424).

Robin Wood identifies Makavejev’s first three features as ‘poem-films’, of which Switchboard Operator is the most developed, revealing him as “an artistic personality of great originality and consistence.” The poem-film is distinguished by Wood from the much more commonly deployed ‘novel-film’, a narrative form in which characters and themes are developed through a linear progression of events. A poem seems rather to exist in space, like a statue, “its meaning can be grasped only when the interaction of the parts can be experienced as a whole.” In Switchboard Operator the narrative of plot-and-characters is only one-if dominant-element  in a poetically organised whole of juxtaposed images and ideas broken down by Wood into 40 sequences of which 14 have no or only a tenuous connection with the central couple, the rest “forming a highly complex network of cross-references calling into question or modifying the others” (7).

Rejecting any pretence at anything approaching a conventional unifying structure peaking in extremity with his Sweet Movie (1974). In WR, Mysteries of the Organism (1971) a play upon Wilhelm Reich’s mission to reconcile Marx and Freud, Makavejev goes further than any other Eastern European filmmaker in denigrating the October Revolution while foregrounding Reich’s belief in the global need for better orgasms.

“Novi (New) Film”, the Liehms’ claim as “the art of democratic socialism, an art that has no duties and obligations, but rather the freedom to be a conscience - often an unavoidably sombre one - of the land, the nation, the society, and the individuals that comprise it” (430). Conflicts inevitably arose as a result of the process of radical democratisation of a system that had previously been a more closed and centralised one. The disputes between the advanced and more backward sections of such a diverse spread of nationalities [across Yugoslavia] provided the opportunity for “centrist” attack to be targeted in nationalistic terms. At first it was against so-called Croatian nationalists which turned into a broad campaign in 1972 “with purges, arrests, and even trials aimed against the liberal wing of the Yugoslav CP, intellectuals, representatives of the radical students,etc” (ibid).

Film was probably hit hardest by this counteroffensive. The attack had actually been foreshadowed at the national film festival at Pula in 1969 when the Yugoslav Communist Party published an article entitled “The Black Wave in our Films.” As the Liehms relate, in 1972 “Makavejev and Pavlović were expelled from the Party and Petrović had to leave his position as head of the film academy. Mica Popović, a well known Belgrade painter whose debut feature was twice banned then reedited, was vociferously attacked; work was stopped on a number of films in 1973, and heroic partisan themes came to the forefront again.”   

The demise of ‘novi film’ brought to an end a glorious period in the history of cinema in Eastern Europe, in which most countries took part. Makavejev joined Forman and Janscó in seeking at least temporary refuge in the west. But it was not the end of everything. Slovakia, which had played a very minor role in the nominally Czechoslovak New Wave, escaped the worst of the repression and produced interesting films in the 1970s. Polish cinema revived. Some at least of the émigrés returned to their homelands. But the sense of the cinema as a vanguard in the struggle to enable the peoples of Eastern Europe to ‘live in truth’ in Václav Havel’s phrase, disappeared and did not return.                                                                            

                                                                     -Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ‘Making Waves'

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Mira and Antonin J. Liehm  The Most Important Art: East European Film Art After 1945  1977                

Roy Armes  The Ambiguous Image  1976   

Andràs Bàlint Kovàcs  Screening Modernism : European Art Cinema 1950-80  2007   

Robin Wood   “Dusan Makavejev  in Second Wave  ed. Ian Cameron 

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso