Man Is Not a Bird

Covek nije tica AKA Man Is Not A Bird is one of the three first full-length films by director Dusan Makavejev. Makavejev is the most well known and also the most bizarre Yugoslavian director. In his films erotic and political catalog face each other, he combines old propaganda material with early pornographic images (The Switchboard Operator is actually a better example of this). He was one of the most important filmmakers in Novi-film, which means the Eastern bloc new wave during the Cold War.

The class division to miners and educated experts shocked Makavejev, who wanted to show the true workers. Man Is Not A Bird is about a dull ordinary miner-town, where a hypnotist Roko delivers enjoyment and relief to the workers. He can make them believe that they are free, socialist heroes or even birds. The film has two different stories from the same town. A town which has no way out, which is in domination of its government.

As we know in the 1960's New Wave ran through Europe. We probably remember best the French new wave (Truffaut, Godard). But the new artistic movement did also arrive to the other side of Europe, to the Eastern bloc. Novi-film doesn't narratively differ much from French new wave, but its collage-style is something you don't see in France. They are as cheer as other new wave films, but also the satire of them is as strong. In Czechoslovakia for instance the government banned many films by Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel. I don't know much about the destiny of these Yugoslavian films, but they must've shocked people.

Why a man can't be a bird? He can, only with the help of a hypnotist, but a deeper meaning hides in the title. I thought that it meant; A man is not a bird because it cannot fly free. We can't fly free as birds, because we are held down by society, relationships, work and the pressure of our community. But should we be free like birds? This is a big theme in this fine film by Makavejev and it discusses about it. A Man Is Not A Bird also deals up with class division and other social issues of Yugoslavia. I found it very interesting and well made. If you enjoyed this be sure to check out Dusan Makavejev's other early film: Love Affair: Or The Case of The Missing Switchboard Operator.

This is one of Makavejev's early movies. An elder man, an engineer, Jan Rudinski, is invited to a little town on the east of Serbia to put together the machinery for copper production. There he meets young and pretty Rajka and they fall in in love with each other. She is charmed with his virility and his intelligence. At the end she is about have an one-night adventure with young truck driver. On the other side flows the story in a factory. Factory is the metonymy for communism. Makavejev depicts opportunities in Serbia during post-war time in a very distinctive manner. It seems to me that these two issues are very present in his later works - love (~sex) and Serbian communist period. But he always talks about it with a such humor, almost mocking. It is like he wants to say that life is almost nothing but a game - love, hate, death, working.

Yes, it is true that it's plot is pretty simple. But it seems that the director wasn't much occupied with it either. The word 'game' is not just the question of the plot, but also the question of the style. Makavejev experiments with movie form. He mixes some documentary (or quasi-documentary) material with the played material. The effect is achieving a kind of essay-like sense. This meta-text, meta-story, an extra course, if you want, is about hypnosis. Thus, this element stays in some strange relationship with the basic plot. This is very important, because he develops this method in his further masterpieces: "W.R. - Misterije organizma" (W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism), "Nevinost bez zastite" (Innocence unprotected), "Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T."(Love Affair; or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator). I do not recommend this movie to, I may say, lower-level customers, accustomed to the conventional forms, but to those who are seeking for some new once, to those who are almost never satisified

Dušan Makavejev's directorial debut looks at the lives of some people in a mining town. I interpreted "Čovek nije tica" ("Man Is Not a Bird" in English) as a satire on Yugoslavian society. Yugoslavia was initially part of the Eastern Bloc, but Tito's disagreements with Stalin led to its expulsion from the alliance. Nevertheless, Eastern Bloc-style policies remained in place. The wealth stayed concentrated among the party, while most people worked dangerous jobs. It may have been easier for people in the US and Western Europe to go to Yugoslavia than to the rest of Eastern Europe, but to its citizens it was little different from the Soviet bloc. And the hypnosis scenes? It might evoke abstract hypnosis, or convincing people of something that isn't true: both the Eastern and Western blocs tried to pass themselves off as defenders of freedom, even as both did unethical things. To be certain, the open-pit mine looks like the sort of thing that one would find in West Virginia.

I found it to be a good movie. I now hope to see Makavejev's other movies.

The debut feature film of Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, best known for his films WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. These are the three films of his I've so far seen (and, along with Man Is Not a Bird, I also own two more in a recently released Eclipse box set). He's very clearly a unique director. Man Is Not a Bird is kind of a mixture of avant garde, semi-documentary film-making mixed with wry comedy, social realism of the sort you often see from countries behind the Iron Curtain and French New Wave stylistic touches. It's a real mishmash, but it works pretty well. If the stories of the film had been a tad more interesting, I could see this film having a greater impact. As it is, it follows a couple of stories in the mining town of Bor, one involving a middle-aged man who has arrived in the town to work as an engineer. He begins an affair with a much younger hairdresser (Milena Dravic, who is also featured in WR). The other major plot line involves a worker at the smelting plant who treats his homely wife cruelly. Much like Sweet Movie, which is by far my favorite Makavejev film so far, the true value of the film is in its gorgeous imagery, here in black and white. Makavejev especially finds wonderful ways of shooting Milena Dravic, with whose form he seems obsessed at times. I would say this doesn't feel like a fully-formed film, but it's definitely of interest.

"The word itself comes from the Greek hypnos, meaning sleep. But hypnosis is not ordinary sleep but an induced, artificial sleep. For a man asleep can do nothing, but under hypnosis he can carry out the most complex commands, including murder."

In depicting the grimy reality for workers in a mining community instead of conditions which were usually idealized as cheerful and patriotic in propaganda films, Dusan Makavejev inserted himself into the Yugoslav Black Wave movement with his debut effort. It's rough around the edges but its cinematography is fantastic, and its thinly veiled criticism of State communism is deeply meaningful. Aside from the earthy, realistic, and certainly non-idealized workers in the toxic environment of the Bor Mining Basin (in what is now eastern Serbia), there are many pokes at the Yugoslav state:

• The class field trip of a group of children to see workers, where we hear their teacher comment on how they've seized control from the capitalists, but also that the gold mining could have netted every citizen in Yugoslavia a set of gold teeth, which is wealth the manual laborers are definitely not receiving. A couple of them feel a need to steal cable by winding it around their bodies instead.

• The pushing of the workers in order to complete the project ahead of schedule to enable a business deal with South America, which looked a lot like capitalism and made it apparent there wasn't much of a difference between working for the State and working for oligarchs running a "free market." Even the expert supervisor brought in from Slovenia is at risk for receiving only a token medal and a banquet for his efforts instead of getting the cash bonus he had been promised.

• The two large photographs of the workers' hands that are meant for the awards ceremony, but summarily removed, a symbol for how the workers are often praised but not really "seen" in this society, meant to be centered on the proletarian. In this same ceremony, we hear the soaring humanism of Beethoven's Ode to Joy set against the audience of workers who stare rather blankly at the performance, completely disconnected from the message of hope and joy.

• Perhaps most telling is the group hypnosis scene, which Makavejev references again at the end. In it the subjects go from being frightened by imaginary tigers, to floating like cosmonauts, to flying like birds, all to the delight of the audience. There is the obvious symbolism that the people in this town are not capable of soaring like birds, they are trapped in brutal conditions, and can't even escape cheap lives filled with sexual jealousy instead of the rapture of love. But there is also hidden commentary here in the collective hypnosis taking place under State communism, one that has people controllable by the State and deluded into thinking their reality is different than what is. Man is not a bird, indeed, and he needs to be awakened from this condition.

The only bright spot in what is a rather pessimistic film comes from the subplot of the wife (Eva Ras) of the terrible husband (Stojan Arandjelovic) who not only cheats on her, but gives his mistress almost all of her dresses. After getting into a brawl and being thrown in jail, he comes home glowering at her, telling her to shut up and serve him, then eats the dinner she's made with his hands straight out of the frying pan. What a guy, and we're also told he beats her. When she sees the other woman in the market, she chases her down and fights her on top of a pile of cabbages. But her epiphany comes when she tells her friend that her husband has been like a hypnotist and in control of her. In the concert scene we see her sitting with another man, an indication that she has "woken up" from her hypnosis and will be moving on to a better situation, escaping him.

Filling in the rest of the story is the love triangle between the visiting supervisor (Janez Vrhovec), a young woman who seduces him as a means of possibly escaping the town (Milena Dravic), and the local truck driver who's constantly hitting on her and fondling her butt when she gives him a shave (Boris Dvornik). The tender lovemaking scenes with the supervisor are quite a contrast to the tawdry sex she has in the truck, but it's notable that despite promises of taking her with him when he leaves, the supervisor is silent when she asks if he's married or if he owns a house. He expects to remain opaque but demands an accounting of her, displaying some of the same unpleasant characteristics as Arandjelovic's character. I thought that in a minor key, the film also had a nice little critique of another controlling force, the patriarchy.

I liked the other little bits of entertainment for the workers here, including the singer Fatima early on ("I'm my ma's Friday child / I'm no doll, but I'm wild"), and the hypnotist explaining local superstitions like when a clock's hands come together, girls imagining a boy is thinking of them and trying to guess his name. Makavejev rounds it off with a traveling circus show ala Fellini, featuring lurid acts like a contortionist, people who put snakes in their mouths, and a scantily clad woman shaking what she's got - things the workers respond to much more than Beethoven. It seemed like a perfect ending to a brilliant debut film, one that deserves more appreciation.