From Klassiki:
This gleefully subversive, formally skittish, and surprisingly moving oddity from the inimitable Dušan Makavejev is a high point of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Centred around the doomed romance between a Hungarian switchboard operator Izabela (Eva Ras) and a Muslim, middle-aged sanitation specialist Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudić), this parable about the political implications of free love jumps freely between tense personal drama, pseudo-documentary addresses from sexologists and criminologists, and grotesque comedy. A perfect entry point into the radical, off-kilter humanism of the Black Wave, with its concern for the marginal and the unhinged.

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Makavejev burst upon the international film scene with this unpredictable, ironic, and erotic “love story” which in its portrayal of humanistic, personal values as against official, ossified ideology represented the new values of the Eastern young. Alternating between clever comedy and casual tragedy, it cast a tender but cruel eye on a bizarre affair between a switchboard operator and a rat exterminator, proclaiming that the ultimate values are in the fascinating trivialities and senseless moments of life. “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.”

Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice PTT (1967) Dusan Makavejev.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 8 min
Size: 	2.57 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 027 kb/s
BPP: 	0.101
Audio
#1:  	Serbian 1.0ch AC-3 @ 320 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/8276FA39C373C85/Ljubavni_slucaj_ili_tragedija_sluzbenice_PTT_(1967)_Dusan_Makavejev.mkv

Language(s):Serbo-Croatian
Subtitles:English, Portuguese

The post Dusan Makavejev – Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. AKA Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is a bored, depressed American housewife, married to a rich Swedish businessman with two seemingly perfect children. She tries to “spice up” her existence by surprising the family when she eats their entire dinner, setting the bedclothes on fire and poisoning the pet dog’s milk and then advising it not to drink (the dog does not drink). Eventually Martin, Marilyn’s husband, decides to show her to a psychiatrist, but that only serves to further her frustration.
One day, when she decides to accompany her husband on a business trip, Marilyn gets detained by security at the airport on a technicality. After missing her plane, she is befriended by a group of Serbs and is taken to a club they run, bearing the odd name of “Zanzi-Bar.” There, Marilyn indulges in their fantastic, surreal world of shovel fighting, lamb roasting, striptease and free love. It all culminates with Marilyn having a passionate fling with a young man named Montenegro (Svetozar Cvetkovic) who works in a zoo.
After spending the night with Montenegro, Marilyn realizes that even though she adores this world, she is a stranger in it. Completely snapping upon this realization, she kills the young man and returns home. Once there, she serves her family a gourmet dinner, followed by a light dessert of fruit, which turns out to be poisoned. The final intertitle states: “The story was based on real events”.

1.12GB | 1h 36mn | 706×427 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D99C4C7CCE18515/Montenegro.1981.Makavejev.KG.x264.mkv

Language:English/Swedish
Subtitles:None

The post Dusan Makavejev – Montenegro (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A Russian Expatriate Adrift in Berlin
The most striking image in “Gorilla Bathes at Noon,” Dusan Makavejev’s whimsical cinematic collage set in present-day Berlin, is a gigantic statue of Lenin that stands as a ludicrous anachronism in the post-Communist era. In one of the film’s zanier scenes, Victor Borisovich (Svetozar Cvetkovic), an expatriate Russian soldier and the film’s main character, impulsively hoists himself on ropes to the statue’s head to wash its face. Moments later, the police arrive and ensnare him in a net from which he protests, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Not long afterward, workers begin detaching the head of the statue from its body. Lifted by crane, the severed head is lowered slowly onto a flatbed truck and carted off through the streets of Berlin. So much for Communism and kitsch monuments exalting its heroes.

“Gorilla Bathes at Noon,” which opens today at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, is a throwback by the director of “The Coca-Cola Kid” and “Montenegro” to the Godard-like style of his more experimental films of the 1960’s and 70’s. In playfully evoking Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, the film maker, who was born in Belgrade, interweaves surreal vignettes with documentary scenes and vintage film clips to create a vertiginous sense of political and social disorientation.

Victor is a soldier without a cause who finds himself adrift and homeless in Berlin. In an early scene, he is ousted from his rooftop perch by a friendly policeman who admires his uniform, even though that uniform has lost its political significance. Victor eventually ends up living in a grubby urban commune with other foraging expatriates. When he rescues a baby from a burning house and brings it back to the shelter to be brought up by him and a girlfriend, he is talked into selling it. In the absence of totalitarianism, the social fabric has unraveled into a cheery, makeshift anarchy.

The statue of Lenin isn’t the only Communist artifact that the film uses to comic effect. Woven into the film are several excerpts from a wretchedly acted 1949 Soviet epic, directed by Mikhail Chiaureli, called “The Fall of Berlin.” In one scene, thousands of victorious Russian soldiers swarm up the steps of the Reichstag and raise the Red Flag. In another, slavishly adoring throngs greet a godlike Stalin as he emerges from an airplane. Propaganda this grandiose and blatantly artificial must be seen to be believed.

“Gorilla Bathes at Noon” isn’t nearly so incisive when it is following Victor around the streets of Berlin. He regularly visits a zoo where he observes a Siberian tiger and feeds bananas to the monkeys. The analogies are clear enough. Without ideological programming, human beings are as selfish and aimless as these bored, hungry animals. Or as one character observes, a man without a uniform has no past and no future.
Stephen Holden, NY Times, March 29, 1995

696MB | 01:19:24 | 640*464 | avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/FE1EBA4270F815C/Dusan_Makavejev_-_Gorilla_Bathes_At_Noon_1993.avi

Language(s):Russian / German / English
Subtitles:English, hard subs

The post Dusan Makavejev – Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Innocence Unprotected was originally filmed in 1941 under the title Nevinoz bez Zastite; it was meant to be the first all-talking feature ever made in Serbia. Yugoslav gymnast Dragolijub Aleksic wrote, produced, directed and starred in this simple tale of a young man who rescues his lady love from her wicked stepmother. The film was never released, falling victim to the Nazi censors; later on, the film was condemned as pro-Nazi (huh?) Flash-forward to 1968: documentary filmmaker Dusan Makavejev unearthed this forgotten film, expanded upon it with newsreel footage of Dragolijub Aleksic performing his athletic feats and filmed interviews with the surviving cast members, and came up with Innocence Unprotected. The result is less a dramatic film than a montage-like celebration of Yugoslavian customs, folklore, and humor. Makavejev referred to Innocence Unprotected as a “montage of attractions”; viewers will no doubt find those attractions most attractive.

http://nitroflare.com/view/66C82F457696458/Nevinost_bez_zastite_aka_Innocence_Unprotected_%28Dusan_Makavejev%2C_1968%29.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/0D46A9AB5E20572/Nevinost_bez_zastite_aka_Innocence_Unprotected__Dusan_Makavejev__1968_.idx
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/588E0E055B21FD9/Nevinost_bez_zastite_aka_Innocence_Unprotected__Dusan_Makavejev__1968_.sub

Language:Serbo-Croatian
Subtitles:english sub+idx

The post Dusan Makavejev – Nevinost bez zastite aka Innocence Unprotected (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An early (1967) film by Dusan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro). The passionate affair of a telephone operator and a Marxist rodent exterminator is intercut with lectures on criminology and sexology, with occasional cooking lessons. It’s very funny and, with its ragged arrangement of warring styles and ideologies, very original: it’s like a smutty, sticky-fingered Godard. – Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader

Given that four of Makavejev’s first five features are essentially the same film, it seems increasingly unlikely that he’ll ever improve on this, his second movie, the most interesting and concentrated treatment of his recurrent themes. A tragi-comic love affair between a switchboard operator and a corporation rat-catcher starts out idyllic, but turns sour under external pressures; Makavejev breaks up the time sequence of his story with constant flashes forward, and brings in a lot of apparently extraneous material, from lectures on sex in art to a poem about rats. The disjunctions and contradictions yield a lot of ideas about personal freedom and oppression (especially within a ‘socialist’ state), and the profusion of images is well enough organised to make the movie continuously provocative and suggestive. The use of historical newsreels is finally as glib as in W.R., but the emphasis on the banalities of day-to-day living is trenchant, and more than compensates. – Tony Rayns, Time Out London

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/42F3390C13F8232/Ljubavni.Sluc.1967.720p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264.mkv

Language(s):Serbo-Croatian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Dusan Makavejev – Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. AKA Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Dušan Makavejev’s anarchic 1974 comedy goes even further than his previous W.R., depicting more trangressions than the average viewer’s imagination could conjure up.

From Time Out London:
Potentially one of the most scandalous films ever made—except that it has been little seen outside France and has not aged well. Seemingly completely episodic, the ‘plot’ follows the adventures of a beauty queen (Laure), a certified virgin who escapes a disastrous honeymoon with the richest man in the world to join a group of carefree sensualists. The latter are the once-notorious Otto Muehl troupe, who delight in pissing and shitting as a public spectacle. This is cross-cut with the journey of the good ship SS Survival (which sports Karl Marx for a masthead) on the Seine. Laure herself sought legal suppression of certain shots which, in their blanked out form, ironically suggest even more sexual activity on her part. Sadly, this highly idiosyncratic melange of sex and politics, for all its liberating pretensions, only served to put Makavejev’s career back a good few steps. –David Thompson

From the Chicago Reader:
Dusan Makavejev (Montenegro) set out to shock the bourgeoisie with this scatalogical extravaganza featuring everything from food fights to shit baths—and did such a thorough job of it that he didn’t work again for six years. Though much of the content is scandalous, the title is ultimately an accurate one—the sensibility behind the images is innocent, enthusiastic, and childlike (1974). –Dave Kehr

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/A8FF61F8DE0CCE6/sweet-movie.1974.720p.web-dl.aac2.0.h.264.mkv

Language(s):English, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Dusan Makavejev – Sweet Movie (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Dušan Makavejev’s debut feature, establishing his freewheeling, exploratory, and often childlike style.

From the Chicago Reader:
[One of the best Chicago releases of 1974.]  “His first, seen here last, like all his others only better. A parable on Socialist living, enacted on the playground of peasants in the industrial landscape.” –Myron Meisel

From Time Out London:
Makavejev’s first feature is a delightful, typically eccentric concoction, centred very loosely indeed around a story about an engineer who visits a new town to assemble mining machinery. There his devotion to work fouls up his relationship with his beloved, while a fellow worker encounters problems when his wife discovers he has a mistress. A freewheeling kaleidoscope mixing comedy and social comment as it deals with both labour and sexual politics, not to mention many seemingly unrelated topics such as hypnotism and culture (there’s a marvellous climactic scene with Beethoven performed in an enormous foundry while the heroine conjures her own ode to joy), it defies description but is extremely entertaining. – Geoff Andrew

Cast
Milena Dravic……………..Rajka
Janez Vrhovec……………..Jan Rudinski
Eva Ras…………………..Barbool’s Wife
Stole Arandjelovic…………Barbulovic ‘Barbool’
Boris Dvornik……………..Vozac kamiona

Directed by Dušan Makavejev.  Written by Makavejev and Rasa Popov.  Cinematography by Aleksandar Petkovic.

https://nitro.download/view/CE9E456B3413867/Covek_nije__tica.1965.720p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264.mkv

Language(s:Serbo-Croatian
Subtitles:English(hardcoded)

The post Dusan Makavejev – Covek nije tica AKA Man Is Not A Bird (1965) first appeared on Cinema of the World.