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

Defending Cinephilia (2) - From Paris John Baxter tells tales of plague, lockdown and Christmas cheer... and remembers Dusan Makavejev

 

Dusan Makavajev

DUSAN MAKAVAJEV R.I.P.

            Dusan Makavajev’s death in January 2019 went largely unremarked. Not surprising, as many years had passed since Sweet Movie, W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro and The Coca Cola Kid induced waves of amusement or protest (more oftenboth.)  His last screen credit was in 1996 for Danske piger viser alt , aka Danish Girls Show Everything. Belying its title, this is a discreet film à sketches from various hands, sociologically illuminating but with little or no sex; a surprise, given Dusan’s lifelong ambition to épater les bourgeois. 

            For a while we were neighbours in Paris. His apartment was in the same building as our local supermarket -Anna Karina was another regular –  and we’d bump into one another as he inched down the aisles, hunched over a chariot filled mostly with beer.  He was in no hurry to leave, since the market was warm, and the trolley as supportive as any Zimmer frame.

            Inspired by the ambiance, he described a trip he and his wife made back to Serbia for the fall of the Milosevic regime.  The hysteria had mellowed into confusion, marked by frequent marches, which the Makavajevs dutifully watched from their apartment window. Since the electricity worked only intermittently, Dusan decided to join one, mainly to keep warm. He had no idea what issue it was supporting. Curious, he worked his way to the head of the parade, where two men carried a large cloth banner.  It said, simply, Sauerkraut.  

            Dusan marching for sauerkraut makes more sense than him supporting a political or social issue, about most of which he was indifferent. His appetites for food and sex, on the other hand, were voracious. On deplaning in Sydney to make The Coca Cola Kid,his first demand was to visit a Reichian therapist. He was duly delivered to an innocuous bungalow somewhere along the northern beaches and didn’t emerge for four or five hours, when, refreshed by his spell in the orgone box, he directed his minder to the nearest MacDonalds.  After six Big Macs, he pronounced himself match-fit  

            We met a few times during the making of The Coca Cola Kid; meetingsilluminated by tales of cinematic duplicity and Yugoslavian chicanery. About our country, he was ambivalent. So much potential, so little achievement.  “Australia is Switzerland,” he decreed, “but it wants to be Texas.” 

                                                         *

Keira Knightley, Colette

MAKING MISCHIEF WITH KEIRA.

            I have what the French call a beguin for Keira Knightley. It dates back to her radiant appearance in Love Actually but my impression that the screen lights up when she appears was reinforced by Pride and Prejudice and that Chanel commercial in which she roars  through Paris on a white motorcycle.  Hoping to exorcise this ensorcellement my daughter took me to see A Dangerous Method but watching Miss K. being spanked by Michael Fassbender just fanned the flames.  

            Wash Westmoreland’s Colette dates from 2018but escaped me until this year, since when I’ve watched it repeatedly.

            The quality of mischief is rare in modern cinema; in cinema of any period, come to that. Clara Bow had it, and Irene Dunne – remember her in History Is Made At Night, teasing Charles Boyer about the tell-all telegram from his girlfriend? “Do you think it will ever replace baseball?”  

         Today’s actresses can guffaw, sneer or smirk, but few have a giggle in them. 

            Knightley’s Colette is mischievous passim.  She sets the tone as a teenager, demurely greeting Willy (Dominic West), her father’s old companion-in-arms, when he visits their home, then sneaking off for a quick shag in the hayloft.  Where any run-of-the mill actress would glower as Willy accepts the plaudits of the crowd for the book she’s written, Knightley’s mocking smile is as full of contentment as of malice.  Most cross-dressing actresses  put on drag like a uniform, where, for her, the starched white shirt and black tie, like Marlene Dietrich’s smoking, is the signal of an inner transformation, and the garments just the outer manifestation. Her sideways grin invites us into the deception. Look how we fool them!  More mischief, please.

                                                                        *

Gold Class, Event Cinemas, Sydney

A SNACK WITH A FLICK.

            As cinemas remained dark during the Covid 19 lockdowns, optimistic forecasts suggested that a night at the movies might be given new vitality if wine, beer and even food were served at one’s seat. 

            Responses were decidedly salt-and-vinegar. That popcorn and Coke are how movie-houses make their money is common knowledge, but on those with bars attached, where you can drink and snack at your seat, the jury is still out. (Do they still exist in Australia? I await an encyclopedic account of their popularity, probably with photographic evidence, if not menus and greasy napkins for proof.) 

            In England, they were touted for a while as the wave of the future. Cup-holders sprouted on the seats in most West End cinemas, and in such civilized venues as the Everyman in Hampstead, small tables were fitted, with a loop to accommodate a bottle.

            Serving tea on trays during theatrical matinees had ceased before I arrived in London but in Tokyo the practice flourished. Without the reviving contents of a bentobox, how could one make it through three hours of kabuki? However, as far as I know, the practice never took root in continental Europe – which is a little surprising, since the first public screening of a movie, by the Lumiérès, was in a cafe.  

            Drinking with a movie did survive, for a while at least, in provincial venues where, since there was no actual cinema, films were screened in the beer garden behind a bar. You sat on stackable chairs watching the image projected on a white painted wall, the sound-track compromised by poor amplification and the conversation from inside. Periodically, and apparently at random, the film stopped for visits to the loo, and replenishments of Stella Artois. 

            We survived smoking in cinemas so perhaps we could become accustomed to food and drink. I’d ask only that noise be kept to a minimum. There are few distractions more galling than the rustle of bonbons being unwrapped and fingers rummaging in tubs of popcorn. An old friend found them intolerable. At the first crackle, he was on his feet, bawling at the offender “What are you doing? Building a nest?”  

                                                                        *

GOD REST YE MERRY.

            Some time every Christmas, I find a pretext to watch the episode In Excelsis Deo from Season 1 of The West Wing.  

            I saw it first in Byron Bay. as a guest of the Writers Festival.  Insomniac with jetlag, I fell into the series, which was new to me. Once the sun came up, I rented the whole first year and binge-watched it over two or three days.   In Excelsis Deo was the sixth episode, and a Christmas show, but though I was seeing it with curtains drawn against the glare of the Australian sun,  its setting in a wintry Washington DC felt more real than what waited outside. I hardly knew Australia any more but had lived for some time in Virginia, not far from DC.  Everything conspired to validate Proust’s insight that places and things exist only insofar as we remember them, “and houses, trees and avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

            The issues of In Excelsis Deo rang particularly true. A family member whom I hadn’t seen since infancy lived near Byron Bay, and a meeting had been arranged with her and various siblings. It was not an encounter to which I was looking forward. 

            Presidential speech-writer Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), the White House’s resident conscience, is called by the police to explain why a homeless man who died of exposure has his card in his pocket. The explanation is innocent, but Toby notices that the man, as a Marine, was entitled to be buried in Arlington. Responding to impulses that he never explains, but which need no explanation, he arranges a military funeral, even though it means forging the president’s signature.  The sole festive element occurs at the conclusion, which cuts between a White House carol service and the burial at Arlington.  The loneliness and dignity of one ritual neutralises the other’s sentimentality. Everyone at the funeral looks believably strained. I liked the nervous start of the mourners at the gunfire of the salute.  

            My family meeting, though not exactly pleasurable, went better than expected. Maybe the film helped.  I was amused to read later that a fight erupted between Sorkin and co-writer Rick Cleveland over credits for the episode (which won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series.) Someone didn’t get the memo about tidings of comfort and joy.

                                                            *          

“I’M MAD AS HELL...”  

                        Shortly after the pandemic started to spread, reports from China, disseminated by social media, described anonymous voices in the night shouting from the roofs of apartment buildings. Many people thought they said "Keep up the fight!"  

                        As communities across the world imposed quarantines and curfews, a custom grew up of people confined to inner city apartments coming to their windows or balconies each evening and applauding. In Italy, some sang operatic arias and popular songs, chanted football mantras, played instruments and waved flags. In Britain, Spain, Turkey and India, they did so at 7pm, but in Spain and France, in recognition of a preference to eat late, the applause took place at 8. 

                        In Paris, quarantine began at noon on March 17, 2020. It would last for 55 days.  Shops, offices, schools, restaurants, cinemas and museums closed. Only food shops remained open. Initially we were allowed out for one hour a day. We had to wear a mask and carry a document indicating where we lived and at what time we left home. Transgressors were fined, even jailed.  Paris became a ghost town – except for those moments each night when, as a few distant church bells ceased pealing, windows opened or people came out onto their balconies, and applauded.  

                        My wife and I, as well as our daughter and anyone else who happened to be in the apartment, automatically stepped out onto the terrace and joined in. We waved and smiled to neighbors across the narrow canyon of rue de l’Odéon – a bonding in adversity that soon became as important as the volume of applause.  

                        Naturally we thought of Network, the 1976 film written by Paddy Chayefsky. It imagined a similar outpouring of solidarity and discontent when, egged on by a television news-reader in the grip of paranoid schizophrenic delusions (Peter Finch, in a performance that earned a posthumous Oscar),  people all over the United States opened their windows and shouted “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”  But who were we applauding? This was as vague as what the protestors of Network  were “not going to take.” Certainly the medical services deserved our appreciation. But essentially, our “hopes and prayers”, to use the ruling cliché, were not only with them. We were also, like those fictional crowds in 1976, encouraging ourselves.