A Whole Account of a Great Soul
Lorraine Mortimer,
Terror and Joy. The Films of Dusan Makavejev.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4887-0
US$25.00 (pb)
336pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

It is not a small appreciation to say about a book that it fortunately managed to bring the character of its versatile ”hero”, the unclassifiable classic maverick: Dusan Makavejev, to life. Precisely for the exceptional originality of the acclaimed director, and for his anomalous career during the last decades, this enterprise has not been simple. The Serbian-born citizen-of-the-world, who has lived through many turbulences of our age, both in “terror and joy” (as the title names it) proves to deserve great attention. How many ups and downs, how many wild surprises and new ideas have kept his work in motion!

Let’s just quote a few well named chapters of the book: ”The Fire in Us”, “With Eggs, Flour, Sugar and Berries”, “Our Carnal Nature and Cosmic Flow”, “Delicious Soup” or “Garlands of Garlic”, in order to taste the specific approach to both the discussed subject matter and the author’s fine sensibility to seize them. It is an excellent monograph, analyzing in subtle details the celebrated films but, on the other hand, it would never neglect to delineate the context of their making, as well. Lorraine Mortimer has the facility to go along with the ”hypnotic states” and “principled paganism” of the indestructibly young Dusan Makavejev. Starting with the first feature: Man is Not a Bird (Yugoslavia 1966) following with Love Affair (Yugoslavia 1967) and arriving at one of the pinnacles, the world famous WR The Mysteries of the Organism (Yugoslavia/West Germany 1971) she doesn’t miss the smallest nuance in the changes and innovations in his filmmaking ambitions, inspiration and style.

All of Makavejev’s films were controversial, provoking passionate reactions, pro and con. Lorraine Mortimer is not only able to present them, but she has an acute insight into the critics’ interpretation as well. While Makavejev was fully aware of the social-political circumstances and pressures ruling in his country, his desire and vision went much further. “I wanted to talk of the love of Balkan people for horses, trees, water, fruits, flowers, girls’ hair, the wind, the grape, doves, wolves, bears, thunder…” he dares to claim. What a wonderfully enthusiastic ambition, and how terrible that it could be considered subversive and blasphemous! In the actual historical moments, political passions overrun everything, and the “warriors” were people unable to “respect neither bees nor gees” (in his wording). As the late, outstanding British critic, Ray Durgnat remarked: “His films are structured by the subtle contrast between “official” rhetoric and the intimate reality of human experience.” And for the authorities to be out of the mainstream was not excusable, since Makavejev’s people were neither angels, nor beasts – merely intriguing characters.

This “simple” point of view led Makevejev to break with academic storytelling patterns, too, applying in full freedom much more layered, rich structures in which plain linearity was changed to a multidimensional unfolding. Love Affair became the first breakthrough, a film which immediately placed him next to Godard’s innovations. However, the sensible differences have soon been noticed. Makavejev didn’t go for distanciation, “on the contrary, he carries the quest for naturalism as far as any neo-realist ” as Robin Wood remarked. And I dare to add that in its very moment, I myself, too, abundantly praised the originality of the audacious merge of genres and styles, along with Amos Vogel, who rightly summed up, the great strength of Makavejev…“his wise, knowing, sophisticated “acceptance” of foibles, illusions, fortitude”.

The author reminds the reader that it was WR that put Makavejev on the international map, with the ‘71 Cannes standing ovation. Her analysis of this really complex film is exhaustive. Thorough research, personal collection of the intricate historical and practical film-production circumstances help her in the endeavor. She would not omit any aspect, political, sociological, or merely genre-like issues, illuminating its timeliness and the director’s personal affinity to the theme. WR became an explosive bomb, and Makavejev explained in full conscience: ”I felt that it was very important to bring back Reich with all his force – his incredible power and energy. To keep all his contradictory statements and attitude”…yet, of course, it was not a political manifesto, but a huge, absurd tale, juggling with documents, commentaries, inserts, interviews, scenes of fiction or cinematic borrowings… with “humor, love, joy and play”, an unparalleled patchwork, as if walking on a philosophical tightrope, as some attentive critics put it.

Indeed, WR cheerfully, passionately transgressed all decent boundaries, even in savagery and kitschy sentimentalism, conquering not only a large number of enthusiastic disenchanted people of our generation but no less respectable philosophers like Stanley Cavell. Deservedly.

And then came Sweet Movie (Canada/France/West Germany 1974) interpreted by the same luminary as “the most concentrated work…that follows out the idea that the way we assess the state of the world is to find out how it tastes… showing the genuine disgust we may feel (up) to the cleansing revulsion…” Shocking, distasteful, embarrassing, its acceptance was not so fast like that of WR. Makavejev spoke of the danger of embracing the ideal of eternal pleasure. He believed that our nude, hungry and mad pursuit of pleasure brings about the painful truth that wholeness cannot exist without this ambiguity.

Lorraine Mortimer doesn’t deny that sometimes she had a hard time to fully enjoy the film but finally couldn’t but accept it in its eccentricity and exaggerations, even if too much could seem sometimes too much. This is a very honest statement and doesn’t take away anything of the film’s importance.

Almost seven years had to pass by before Makavejev could realize his next film Montenegro (Sweden/UK 1981). Evoking the two first lines of the movie: ”A little girl questioned a monkey in a zoo: Why do you live here? Isn’t it nicer where you come from?” both the film and the critic introduce the reader to the deeper, more hidden trouble of the drama, the heart of the film. However, immigration, with all its pain, absurdity and terrible banality in our days is obviously treated in a Makavejevian way: with humor, excessive situations, and Rabelaisian accumulation of improbable actions. Zanzibar as the main location, the stage of the adventures, is of course the apex of the unlikely environment of the wild events, but precisely this level of the extreme (deliberately raw, “vulgar”) playfulness helps him to go much beyond the merely dark, political common place. We have to admire the truly Bunuelian ending: the closing twist about the poisoned fruit which sums up, with the smartest simplicity, the substance of his movie: no one can remain indifferent, including the spoiled beauty of the haute society, once one has to face the physical reality of the “apatriates”, the displaced immigrants and the real TASTE of the texture of their condition.

Knowing, ever since Aristotle, that the “ending is the chief thing”, Makavejev constantly proves it with his wit, emotional ampleness and elegiac wry wisdom. All his films charm us with their far-reaching, illuminating closure. The finale of his last feature Gorilla bathes at noon (Germany/Yugoslavia 1993) will be memorable for a long, long time, much beyond the given film, itself.

After the demolition of maybe the most gigantic statue of Lenin in the “after the wall” Berlin, our ex-soviet, rootless soldier cannot help but collect his huge head, placing it on a miserable cart to accompany him – where? To an unknown cemetery? To a junk-heap? To a fabled forest? We just go forward, passing further without ever arriving at a specific place. New and new details, rich and at once impertinent, humorous episodes unfold, an “Eisensteinian montage of attractions” as Michel Ciment remarked, though a highly ironic one, “but it is also mourning of what was the utopia of a generation, (the filmmaker’s postwar generation) in which the unrestrainable Makavejev is speaking to us” with all the melancholy of the complex sense of loss.

The music is perfectly fitting to this ambivalent, painful and grotesque event: it is the funeral march, so often used in the long history of party rituals: resounding, pompous, yet full of the weight of a long living tradition, whenever a defunct hero had to be accompanied to his final resting place. It is a glorious ending, which maybe didn’t affect the writer of the book that much.

Mortimer is right to connect this film so closely to Makavejev’s self-portrait documentary in which the title A Hole in the Soul (UK 1994) once again cannot help but hint at the “double entendre” of the used words (alluding to the literal meaning of the similarly sounding “sole”). Here the melancholy overcomes, and this time the lyricism is less acerbic than many times before.

Thus, here we have a very accomplished account of one of our time’s incomparable, “fantastic” directors. It is erudite, well understood, and written with full empathy and enthusiasm. The manifold approach deepens the analysis of this exceptional oeuvre. On the other hand, I still would question, whether so many quotations, from all the more or less important contemporary critics, journalists, sociologists are truly needed. Since Mortimer writes so well and with such a dynamic, emotion filled sensibility, the terribly loquacious reviews are sometimes heavy and really less necessary. I’d truly question the 781(!) quotations and so many “Big Names” in order to underpin her pertinent analyses.

I do understand that by formation she is an anthropologist, and would want to include these respective authors as well. However, I believe that, though the book becomes more “scholarly” with these historical, theoretical explanations, the extent of the quotations may be overdoing it.

Yet, among all of these citations, remarks and full quotations, it seems surprising to see that the existing, surrounding cinematic context, the achievements and problems of the late sixties, seventies, eighties – besides the once mentioned name of Godard – are not there in order to testify to the novelty of Makavejev’s oeuvre. Similarly, the few important inspirational models, examples and affinities that Makavejev clearly could be, and was, influenced by, are not represented, though they would better emphasize his originality. Sometimes we get the feeling that the director stood completely alone, like an immovable icon, in the whole battlefield of three decades of international filmmaking, with all its trends, “irregular” personal insights, and quests to express the surrounding world. There were still Pasolini, Glauber Rocha, Fassbinder, Jakubisko, or Jancso and Alain Tanner who were breaking away from linear storytelling, blending documentary and fiction. Even if Makavejev was rather alone, he was never fully in an isolated, private “hole”.

Lorraine Mortimer admits that this book is a labor of love. Excellent. This is an unusual, touching openness. Love can be very profound, just and reach the real depth of another human being, an artist, who has produced so many irresistible, memorable works. Fortunately, beyond this love, a lot of prestigious labor enriched her book, regardless of some “holes in the whole” which makes it infinitely useful. The book fills a long-felt gap, offering pleasure and a great amount of knowledge.

Yvette Biro,
New York University, USA.

Created on: Friday, 24 July 2009