Man Is Not a Bird

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

"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.

In Dusan Makavejev's somewhat brilliant debut feature, he does not go full on crazy like he does in some of his later works; however, sprinkles of such insanity can be found all throughout this charming, tragic, funny, and wild romance. Combining various elements that range from the comic to the dramatic and the gritty to the surreal, "Man Is Not a Bird" functions primarily as a tribute to the common, everyday working man, as well as an unconventional love story focusing on an unlikely couple's stunningly sensual transgenerational relationship. These two portraits of society merge into a single small scale epic tragicomedy, one that sparkles with emotion and delight. Although a bit slow at first, by the second half of this movie I was mostly hooked. The Beethoven concert scene is moving, both in its camera-work and emotional intensity, and within the last ten or so minutes Makavejev really seems to go bonkers. Playing with and crossing the boundaries of everyday occurrences and fantastical, almost Felliniesque moments of mild fantasy, Makavejev begins to really blur the line between tragedy and comedy; the film's final moments work as both masterworks painted with both tears and laughter.

Dusan Makavejev made himself known in the world of international cinema with his first film, Man in Not a Bird, and it's a film that juggles stories and a political atmosphere (mostly) in the guise of a documentary on a copper mill. It deals with romance and work, two themes that Makavejev would toy with and dissect with his anarchic and absurdist style throughout his whole career. It's about a construction foreman, Jan Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec), who is in town to oversee the copper mill, and a hairdresser named Rajka (Milena Dravić) who falls in love with him. How this happens is never made exactly clear, even as Makavejev indulges in a moodily-lit lovemaking scene that tells us all we need to know about their passion, nor is it clear how he is really attracted to her. That is, until their relationship becomes compromised by a man closer to her age, a guy who always comes in to the barbershop to get shaved even when he doesn't need it, just to hit on her.

It's this, plus an undercooked story of a drunken man and his troublesome own affair that brings out a huge girl-fight between his wife and his lover in the middle of a street, that marks the dramatic side of the picture. Mixing in and out of these stories is footage of the mill, the workers working diligently, leading up to a big celebratory concert where Beethoven's 9th fills the air (also in cutaways to Rajka having her fling with the man in the truck as her actual lover sits in his awarding ceremony).

It's not filled with Makavejev's rampant humor, and it's more of a real "film" instead of one of his hybrid comedy-documentaries. Man is Not a Bird is a fresh burst of original film-making, and if it's not always engaging during its 79 minutes (I found myself tuning out in a couple of scenes) it's still reveals an artist with something to say. There's something urgent about his film, particularly towards the end and during those hypnotist scenes where the audience is enraptures by the hypnotists skills directing people on a stage. Makavejev is after an essential truth in human nature: work and love can't always go together, or sometimes one takes over the other, and a (Communist) nation like the one this is set in needs to find a balance of both.

The guy behind this is clearly a talented man, this is the first of his stuff I see but it's an acquaintance I'm happy to make. It's a Yugoslav Breathless of sorts, or better yet the Czech film Loves of a Blonde which came out the same year, except instead of scenic Paris this unfolds in dour Belgrade, it has actual blood running in its veins instead of just poise, and instead of a boyhood fantasy about movies and movie icons, it locks the story in all sorts of other self-referential illusion.

The hypnotist who explains to an audience about the power of superstition and illusory belief, a great viewing template that sets up everything else as objectively unreal yet present in the willing viewer. The pompous ceremony where a superintendent is awarded by the communist powers that be before an audience of bored factory workers, some of whom may have even turned up to watch the film. The closing scene with the circus of very real absurdities.

So this is the journey here, from cinematic hypnotizing to slightly less (or more) real situations through what palpable desires these may unlock.

It's all centered in a relationship between a blonde hairdresser and a middle-aged superintendent of an energy project. The desires being to trust a lover, to complete a work even as you wonder why, to have dreams survive. I like that it is primarily visual and freeform, while being vital instead of just an artifact of technique; the less you think you have to say, the less of your own self obscures the possibilities of what is before you.

It isn't great, but it is among the most accomplished debuts of New Wave. Now I set my eyes on later works by this guy.