Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - East Central Europe

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 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'

***********************************

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

***********************************

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