L'homme n'est pas un oiseau

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.

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.

As a matter of pure pleasure, a measurement held dear by this auteur, this might compete with the great "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" as my favorite of Machevejev's movies. It's probably not the writer- director's second greatest work, but, with it's movingly alive, yet unflattering depiction of a communist- Yugoslavia mining town, it particularly moved me. The film's critique of Yugoslavian communism: profoundly, but predictably disappointing, yet just barely worthy of affirmation, seemed to me a brilliant description of life itself.

Machevejev may well be the most affirmationally erotic artist in the cinematic canon. Human touch always affirms life, for the better or worse of the subsequently affirmed. Here, all involved turn out okay: they get to continue to enjoy the spectacle that is the socialist circus of life. (For me, Machevejev's affirmation of the existential circus seems much more sincere than that of, say, Fellini.)

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