Sex and Politics of the Subversive Kind: Dušan Makavejev’s Yugoslavian Films of the 1960s

Makavejev’s Secret

by

Christopher Zimmerman

Men live their beautiful, wild lives quite close to magnificent ideas and progressive truths. My film is dedicated to those interesting, vague, in-between spaces.

Dušan Makavejev

The film expressed my belief [that] the only acceptable socialism would be one with human faces and bodies. Among [the] gigantic constructs of Production and History, individuals live like sad mice, sometimes stealing a little happiness for themselves, condemned to loneliness and uncertainty.

Dušan Makavejev

In early 2019, world cinema lost one of its truly ‘free radicals’: father of the Yugoslav Black Wave and international provocateur Dušan Makavejev. The films of this raucous revolutionary call for sexual and political liberation from the ideological strictures in both Communist and Capitalist societies. Makavejev’s films, in their provocations of both the mind and the body, are themselves catalysts for unleashing the forces and energies that have been repressed by the political. As a cinema of de-mystification, his work can be seen as a critique of ideology that opens a space in which transformation—personal, sexual, political—can be staged.

Returning the human body to the site of politics, Makavejev’s films are counter-ideological collages, subversively exploring both the politics of sexuality and, more interestingly, the sexuality of politics. Through an intricate network of collisions, his films probe the limits of convention, authority, dogmatism, in search of a point of rupture, a moment of breaking through rigidified, disciplining worldviews. Synthesizing different registers of time, Makavejev weaves fantasy and reality, fiction and documentary, memory and trauma, narrative and history into intricate filmic tapestries that unsettle expectation and point to the ‘secret’ of ideology, to the ‘hole in the soul’.

The Hole in the Soul

The autobiographical Hole in the Soul—Makevejev’s final film made for BBC Scotland in 1994—opens with the director’s voice-over explaining that his childhood coincided with WWII and that he thus saw from an early age how ‘easily people plunge into the dance of hurting and being hurt’. The images underneath Makavejev’s voice-over are taken from the original Innocence Unprotected, in which Aleksic is repeatedly hit over the head with a wooden plank after having swung through the window to save the woman in distress.

 

Dušan Makavejev Man is Not a Bird (1965)

Makavejev then asks: ‘What is this exciting secret of this order?’ The film continues with increasingly outrageous and humorous sound effects synched to Aleksic’s head hitting the plank in slow motion, suggesting, perhaps, the repeated ‘beatings’ that Makavejev himself has taken for his subversive films.

In a film reflecting on his life in film, Makavejev immediately frames the problem in terms of a vicious circle, a sado-masochistic loop into which humans unwittingly fall prey. There is an order structuring human reality and behavior, but it is a secret to which we do not have access. Is this not precisely how ideology functions? At the point when we think that we are farthest from ideology is when we are fully within it: the water to the fish, capitalism to our contemporary global system. Without critical questioning, vigorous public debate, and subversive artistic creation, we fall into this dance. What is striking here is the fact that it is a dance, suggesting that, irrespective of its cycle of violence, we enjoy it; it is somehow pleasurable.

But, Makavejev’s question, after setting up this stark view of human nature as stuck in this rut of pain-pleasure, points to the existence of a secret to this order, a hidden reason why we persist in hurting and being hurt, an invisible underlying structure, a system. If we can only uncover the secret, perhaps the ideological edifice that propagates this Hobbesian view of human nature can be shown to be the insubstantial construction that it is. And yet, echoing Jacques Lacan’s aphorism that ‘there is no Other of the Other’, isn’t the secret of psychoanalysis the fact that there is no Big Other operating behind the scenes? Contrary to what we need to believe, there is no master of ceremonies. In Makavejev’s Hole in the Soul, the uncovering of this secret reveals another secret, which covers the gap, the void out of which ideology is generated and sustained. In other words, the secret of the secret is that there is no secret, or, the secret is simply a container around a void, a hole in the soul.

The Soul of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek, in his The Sublime Object of Ideology, writes: ‘Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself: an “illusion” which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel… The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.’

Dušan Makavejev Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967)

Zizek turns our intuitive sense of ideology on its head. This inversion, from ideology being an escape from reality to reality itself being an ideological escape from the traumatic real, re-frames the this fundamental gap in being, the hole in the soul, as precisely that which is smoothed over by ideology, that which is erased, for example, in the continuity system of Classical film. The first step in shattering the coordinates of ideology is the recognition that reality itself is generated by ideology in order to avoid the trauma of the void in our being. Despite our strivings for wholeness and completeness, life itself is a covering-over of this fundamental emptiness.

Dušan means ‘soul’, and this self-deprecating, self-reflective, and self-reflexive film seeks out the hole in Makavejev. Through a complex constellation of historical, artistic, and political forces, Dušan has lost his soul. The film sets out to find his soul, that is, his name, which has been lost, much like his homeland of Yugoslavia, and yet, through the filmmaking process, he only finds a hole, a gap. Is this not the Lacanian Real, the void around which we circulate? In Lacanian terms, the individual is structured around a gap, a void, of that impossible real kernel that we can only approach obliquely, through fictions. It is not that we are incomplete because of a lack in us, rather the reverse, we lack because of our fundamental incompleteness. It is precisely this hole in Makavejev’s soul that generates these subversive and radically innovative films. It is the gap, the lack in Makavejev (the fact that he was an outcast in Yugoslavia and in Hollywood) from which his creative ‘inspiration’ and energy emanate. And it is this hole in his soul that generates the humanist flame that ignites Makavejev’s life-long fight against the repressive ideologies that shape us into cogs in the machine. Cinema as Deleuzian war machine…

Cinema as a Guerrilla Operation

Makavejev’s uncompromising exploration of the limits of the visual, of what can be stomached, forces us as viewers to question those very limits. His work is a challenge; its subversiveness shakes us out of our lethargy, shoves us off of the well-worn patterns of thought. Openly criticizing the status quo and the dominant structures of power in both the East and the West, openly defying both cinematic conventions and conventional tastes, resulted in Makavejev feeling the weight of the power that he criticized. His films were suppressed in Yugoslavia; he went into exile in the West where he faced censorship and had to struggle to find funding for his projects.

Charges of cruelty and disgust have been leveled against Makavejev’s films (particularly Sweet Movie, and to some extent WR: Mysteries of the Organism). Amos Vogel, however, argues that Makavejev’s is a ‘constructive cruelty’ in which his ‘visual shock and cruelty’ throughout his work are ‘in the service of humanism’. In other words, Makavejev does not shock for the sake of being shocking, rather, his provocations are necessary strategies for breaking out of the networked power structures in which humans are enmeshed, shaped, and formed. Liberation begins with a transformation of the self, and this transformation is connected to the sexual energy and the flow of life coursing through our bodies that is otherwise repressed, suppressed, censored.

Dušan Makavejev Innocence Unprotected (1968)

Makavejev is quoted as saying: ‘I see the cinema as a guerrilla operation. Guerrilla against everything that is fixed, defined, established, dogmatic, eternal. It’s not irrelevant that the cinema should be at war, because eventually everything is connected. Hollywood is Wall Street and the Pentagon… But that doesn’t mean that the cinema must serve the revolution: the revolution has no need of servants. Everyone must create his own revolution.’

Here, Makavejev conceives of cinema as a tool of guerrilla warfare, that is, irregular, independent, asymmetrical transgression against the dominant ideology and the ruling elites. He calls for a cinema that harasses and sabotages the codified and rigidified ways of looking and living in societies structured in top-down hierarchies. Cinema should fight against everything that is established, rigidified into convention, against accepting reality as natural and inevitable. It is this rigidity of ideology that shapes humans into unthinking, unfeeling creatures. It is this ‘frigidity’ of ideology that represses our creative sexuality, our relations to others. Thus, Makavejev’s cinema as guerrilla operation does indeed elicit visceral responses from viewers, shocking us into probing the limits of discourse, sensibility, and taste; making us feel cinema in and with our bodies. At the same time, however, the director’s formal structures and concepts of associational montage are the engines of the radical synthesis of his dialectical filmmaking, which, I argue, both mirrors consciousness and collides with our minds to produce a cinema that thinks. Revolution begins with an inner transformation of the individual’s consciousness.

Mix-Master Makavejev

Makavejev’s first three films made in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s whimsically and subversively critique the ruling ideology, irreverently explore the intersections of sexuality and politics, and dissolve the boundary between fiction and documentary. More than merely seeds that will blossom into his ‘mature’ work, these first three masterpieces are the crucible out of which Makavejev explores and perfects his ability to draw disparate materials into his dialectical filmmaking made possible through his radically innovative associational montage.

Underneath the shocking surface content of Makavejev’s films, which essentially banished him in Yugoslavia and censored him in the West, is an equally ‘shocking’ formal network. Makavejev’s controversial content probing the limits of taste and convention belies the explosive synthesis of film theoretical concepts in play and an approach to filmmaking that suggests the functioning of consciousness itself. On this level, Makavejev’s films themselves think through the complexity of ideology, history, memory, trauma—the hole in the soul…

Even during a period when the European New Waves were jubilantly transgressing cinematic conventions and when filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard in France and Shirley Clarke and John Cassavettes in the US were blurring and dissolving the boundaries between fiction and documentary, between fantasy and reality, Makavejev’s dialectical filmmaking and radical synthesis make his work stand out in an already experimental environment. Although he delves deeply into cinema history, particularly his ‘debt’ to Eisenstein, Vertov, and Rouch, the singularity and uniqueness of Makavejev’s body of unclassifiable work is reflected in the fact that he has no imitators. There is no Makavejev school.

The Collision of Consciousness

In vital respects, Makavejev takes up and provocatively expands Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Diametrically opposed to smooth, seemingly seamless continuity editing, Eisenstein conceived of montage as collision. Editing was not linkage, rather shots were meant to collide, and a third meaning, a synthesis, emerges out of two juxtaposed images. Eisenstein’s goal was to create in the minds of viewers a revolutionary synthesis. And, it is through montage that the viewer is encouraged to derive meaning from these collisions. It is also through montage that viewers are tasked with thinking and seeing in new and radical ways. Just as new meaning is synthesized out of the collision of montage, the film and the viewer ‘collide’ thus producing the film in our minds. For Eisenstein, the initial creative act is undertaken by the filmmaker who assembles the film, but an equally creative act is performed by the viewing audience.

Dušan Makavejev Innocence Unprotected (1968)

Makavejev’s associational montage also unfolds through radical collisions between fiction and documentary footage, between filmed and archival images, between sound and image, between music and lyrics. Like Eisenstein, Makavejev’s montage is meant to shock, to stimulate thought and feeling. But unlike Eisenstein, Makavejev’s montage is double-edged; it questions the binary oppositions with which Eisenstein was operating; it creates doubt and skepticism with respect to myth-making. His films collide with our minds and bodies, opening, if we accept the challenge, to think and feel differently about the world.

But, Makavejev was also deeply influenced by another Soviet filmmaker: Dziga Vertov. Essentially a documentarian, Vertov developed the concept of Kino-Pravda (‘film-truth’) through his extensive work creating newsreels. For Vertov, truth must be the foundation for a truly proletarian cinema, and his filmmaking practice consisted of using the mechanical eye of the camera to register and capture fleeting fragments of reality and assembling them through the editing process into documents of socialist reality that reveal what cannot be perceived by the un-aided eye.

From its very beginnings, the cinematic lens represents a mechanical extension of human vision. The camera-eye is a disembodied prosthetic eye, an unfettered mobile eye that can travel and discover the world. The mechanical eye doubles the reality that passes in front of it. For Vertov, ‘film-truth’ is not a matter of uncovering absolute, universal truth, but is the truth of an encounter—an encounter between the Cinema-Eye, reality, and our minds as viewers. With the revolutionary potential of this encounter, Vertov transforms cinema into a reflexive exploration of the very dynamics of consciousness. Through this encounter between cinema and consciousness, the filmmaker, in making the film, and the viewer, in experiencing it, ‘produce’ film-truth.

Makavejev’s debt to Vertov can be seen in his commitment to reality, to realism, to the power of cinema to register and capture life. His depictions of working class life, his elevation of the everyday, and his profound respect for his subjects, irrespective of their colliding virtues and vices, attest to Makavejev’s interest in life as it is lived and humans as they are. Just as Vertov accentuates the mechanical nature of filmic reality, Makavejev obsessively portrays industrial processes, labor, hands working, humans in contact with machines. But, Makavejev’s commitment to cinema’s power of capturing reality extends to the reality found in-between public and private spaces. Makavejev’s interest in the interstices, the underbelly of industrial production, plays out through his wasteland settings: junkyards, slag heaps, mud flats.

What is striking here is Makavejev’s ability to synthesize two theories of film (Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s) that are typically seen to emerge from the same soil but stand in diametrical opposition. This is Makavejev’s dialectic in full operation. Although they may approach the matter from opposite ends, Eisenstein and Vertov both arrive at film being produced at the intersection of film and mind. Makavejev fully embraces this notion and expands this to film colliding with the body. Where he departs from his Soviet forebears is his relationship to ideology. Whereas Eisenstein and Vertov were making films as part of the project of constructing ideology, Makavejev vehemently and satirically deconstructs that very ideology, which had grown oppressive since its initial post-revolutionary fervor.

Ideological Hypnosis / Hypnotic Ideology

Makavejev’s first feature film Man is Not a Bird (1965), opens and closes with Roko the hypnotist. The director explains that, ‘I wanted to show how people are permeated by ideologies and how their conduct, gestures, opinions, thoughts, are unconsciously influenced by ideological hypnosis.’ Hypnosis is a kind waking dream state. Under hypnosis, one is not in control of one’s actions and, in this highly suggestive state, is thus open to regression. It is significant that Makavejev opens his first film connecting hypnosis with ideology. Those under the hypnosis of ideology are not aware that they are. They are not aware of the extent of their unfreedom. The crowd laughs at those hypnotized on stage, but they are the ones who are unknowingly hypnotized by ideology.

This is the backdrop against which Makavejev’s cinema unleashes its guerilla operations to snap us out of it, to shock us out of our lethargy and to shake us into feeling. Navigating the local and global, the particular and the universal, the personal and the political, his dialectical filmmaking not only rouses us from our somnambulism but opens the possibility of individual transformation, and this transformation, along with Wilhelm Reich, unleashes certain energies. Just as friendship, for Aristotle, is the bridge between individual character and political life, sexuality is Makavejev’s bridge between the individual and the collective. In both cases, a doubling occurs, a movement of the lone individual toward the other. For Makavejev, the political is not a matter of abstract notions of freedom or of the perfectibility of the individual, rather politics deals with bodies enmeshed in the networks of power that manipulate and control the vitality and creative freedom of life. Cinema as guerrilla operation… Cinema as lifting repression… Cinema as ideological demystification… Cinema as revolutionary orgasm…

© 2020 Christopher Zimmerman