Dušan Makavejev, who has died aged 86, was one of the most important film-makers to come from the former Yugoslavia.
However, he met with official disapproval at home and several of his films were not shown commercially in his own country, despite the relative liberalism of communism under Josip Tito.
This was not surprising, because Makavejev was an independent and anarchic spirit, most of whose films studied the interrelationship of sexual life and socioeconomic structures, while experimenting with narrative forms that challenge traditional notions of film-making.
In his film essays, he was fond of using collage methods, often juxtaposing a series of images in a humorous and dramatic manner. “Narrative structure is prison; it is tradition; it is a lie; it is a formula that is imposed,” Makavejev once declared. He also claimed to write a screenplay as he went along, while filming, except in rare cases.
“A script is a verbal attack on a visual world. Potentially a film has a universe of visuals to deal with. Once you tame it and restrain it within a script that means you have a hundred pages of dialogue. It is heavily cut off in terms of visuals.”
Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Dušan was the son of Sergije Makavejev and his wife, Jelka (nee Bojkic). After graduating in psychology from Belgrade University, he began to make 35mm experimental shorts and documentaries, among them The Seal (1955), a satire on bureaucracy – a dead man recalls all the seals that he came across in his earthly existence. Other titles in the same satirical vein were Don’t Believe in Monuments and Damned Holiday (both 1958), What is a Workers’ Council? (1959), Educational Fairy-Tale (1961) and Miss Beauty (1962).
His first feature, Man Is Not a Bird (1965), shot in a bleak industrial town in Slovenia, tells of a visiting engineer who has an affair with a young and carefree hairdresser (Milena Dravić). With its guiltless eroticism, vertiginous images from hand-held cameras and irreverent attitude to authority, the film came as a revelation from eastern Europe.
Its light side is balanced by its portrayal of the noisy, dirty, dehumanising work done by industrial workers. The provocative ending cross-cuts between a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a special event for local dignitaries at a factory, and the lovemaking of the heroine, finding her own Ode to Joy.
In The Switchboard Operator (aka Love Affair, 1967), a young independent switchboard operator (Eva Ras) sets up house with an Arab rat-catcher who becomes jealous and accidentally kills her after she is seduced by a postman. Using hand-held cameras in the streets, newsreels, asides, and ironic juxtapositions between traditional and modern Yugoslavia, Makavejev invested his second feature with vitality and an anarchic spirit.
Influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard, Makavejev built an elaborate amalgam of documentary-like examinations of rat extermination, stock footage and digressions about how a strudel is made.
Makavejev’s first features placed him as the leading figure in the Yugoslavian Black Wave Movement of the 1960s and early 70s. The group, which included Žika Pavlović, Saša Petrović and Želimir Žilnik, favoured dark humour and a non-traditional style.
An anomaly in Makavejev’s oeuvre was Innocence Unprotected (1968), a documentary about a never released 1941 film of the same name. Dragoljub Aleksić, a circus strongman and the writer-star-director of Innocence Unprotected, and other survivors of the original cast, reminisce about the making of the film and its confiscation by the occupying Nazis.
Although the extracts shown from the film prove it to have been a pretty awful melodrama, Makavejev is never snide about it. In fact, his title refers not to the orphan girl rescued by the hero in the original film, but to the brave and innocent people who made the film, to whom he pays amusing and affectionate homage.
If Makavejev had been unpopular with the authorities for his earlier films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) – a documentary and fictional examination of the theories of the sexologist Wilhelm Reich – made him persona non grata. This shocking, amusing and exasperating film, the title of which can be easily misread, caused offence wherever it was shown and made a lot of money, though not in Yugoslavia, where it was never released.
After that Makavejev was forced to make films in the west. Sweet Movie (1974), which was shot in the Netherlands, Canada and France, in five different languages, is in two parts.
In the first, a Miss World winner (Carole Laure) is wedded to and violated by Mr Kapital. After other humiliations, she ends up at a therapy commune, where the members engage in infantile regressions related to bodily functions.
The second part follows a ship, with a gigantic image of Karl Marx on its prow, sailing under the command of Anna Planeta, who seduces and murders young men and boys, before they are resurrected. Challenging and provocative, Sweet Movie is one of the most potent statements of sexual and political liberation in the cinema. Yet it was also one of the most scandalous and banned of works.
“After Sweet Movie, I was wiped out,” explained Makavejev. “I kept my passport from Yugoslavia, but I was not allowed to work there … I had a Hollywood agent, and had all sorts of invitations, and everybody talked to me. But for seven years I did not make a film. No one in the west would let me do my next film the same way I did my previous five successful ones. I would show them these films, and they would say, yes, we like these films; do another one! And I would say, OK, can I get some development money. They said, no, we have to have a script first. I said that if I have a script first you cannot get this kind of film.”
Makavejev, who had taken up a teaching post at Harvard, eventually was able to make Montenegro (1981), which, despite its title, was set and shot in Sweden. In his unbridled fashion, Makavejev continued to explore the sexuality of politics and the politics of sexuality in this tale of how a bored, middle-class married woman (Susan Anspach) in Sweden frees her libido with some Serbian immigrant workers.
Makavejev’s political and sexual themes were less overt in his next film, The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), an offbeat comedy about corporate ideals, made in Australia. Eric Roberts, in the title role, is sent there to find out why nobody drinks Coca-Cola in a certain area, only to end up questioning his whole existence.
Set in a small European country, where various factions fumble over a revolution, Manifesto (1988), based on a Zola short story, re-explored Makavejev’s abiding subject matter, in a humorous, bawdy way. Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993), another allegory, deals with a red army officer in Berlin in 1989-90, coming to terms with a changing world, into which the director cut scenes from the 1945 Soviet battle film The Fall of Berlin.
BBC television co-produced A Hole in the Soul (1994), a 52-minute tragicomic autobiographical film, which followed Makavejev on a trip around Belgrade, revealing a great deal about the man and the often-misunderstood artist.
In 1964 Makavejev married Bojana Marijan, who worked as assistant director and producer on several of her husband’s films, and she survives him.
• Dušan Makavejev, film director, born 13 October 1932; died 25 January 2019
• This article was amended on 13 February 2019. The Gorilla Bathes at Noon is not set in 1945, but in 1989-90. The film that comes from 1945 is the battle documentary The Fall of Berlin.
