Dušan Makavejev (1932 - )
Lifespan: 1932
Related: Freudo-Marxism - cult films - European cinema - the sexual revolution in the cinema
Films: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) - Sweet Movie (1974)
Scene from:
Sweet Movie (1974) - Dušan Makavejev [Amazon.com]
Biography
Dušan Makavejev (born 1932) is a Serbian film director, born in Belgrade. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusan_Makavejev [Sept 2004]
Interview by Ray Privett for SensesOfCinema.com
As the man responsible for scenes of public sex on a boat adorned with a giant head of Karl Marx in Sweet Movie (1975) and of a Soviet soldier abandoned in Germany attempting to clean bird shit off the head of a giant statue of Lenin slated for dismantling in Gorilla Bathes At Noon (1993), Dušan Makavejev has helped the world survive the Cold War and its aftermath with his playful and subversive filmmaking. This filmmaking has also undoubtedly helped Makavejev himself deal with the complications and vicissitudes of a nomadic life which he has followed from his early days in Yugoslavia during World War II, through his forced exile in the ‘70s, to today, where he lives in France but cautiously ventures occasionally to post-Communist, post-Milosevic Serbia.
Makavejev answers his phone with a gruff "hello," entertains visiting film critics with long nights of drinking and story-telling, surfs the web, and continues to plan adventurous multi-media projects. He remains the consummate satirist, always openly examining how the structures of power in the world around him operate, and exposing how funny they are.
I spoke with Makavejev in the fall of 2000, while preparing material for a video re-release of six films he directed through the company I work with, Facets Multimedia in the United States. Our conversation focused on the six films I was working with, but as one might expect when speaking with the writer and director of WR (1971), which juxtaposes the love life of a Soviet figure-skating champion with an exploration of the life and work of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, our conversation happily segued into numerous related and unrelated topics. -- Ray Privett, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/makavejev.html [Sept 2004]
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