‘It’s hard to figure out if Rudolph “Rudy” Wurlitzer’s new novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, is newfangled or old hat, a relic or a revolution. In many ways, it feels like it’s being published 40 years too late. Living large and free in the Wild West, altering one’s consciousness and finding enlightenment outside the confines of the culture, these dreams have passed us all by — haven’t they?

‘Literature in the 21st century generally seems more concerned with mapping society than with dropping off the edges of it, in making connections rather than severing them. But the thing about revolutions — as the word implies — is that they don’t just happen once, they happen over and over. Punk rock, for example, might be dead in the historical sense, but every day, kids discover the fevers of creative anarchy and the liberation of DIY. Love songs seem trite until someone figures out how to sing them like you’ve never heard them before. A novel like Drop Edge, with its gorgeously old-fashioned cover, published by the young husband-and-wife owners of Two Dollar Radio, might not take the culture by storm, but there’s a bawdy, lunatic thrill to the tale that still seems somehow radical. It’s the kind of book someone will stick in a back pocket before heading out on the trail into the unknown.

‘Wurlitzer has always been interested in what he calls “journeys to nowhere.” His 1969 debut novel, Nog, followed the aimless wanderings of a nameless character through a surreal and absurd American landscape. The 1971 cult-classic film Two-Lane Blacktop, written by Wurlitzer (and directed by maverick Monte Hellman), begins with a promising Hollywood premise: Two hot-rod fanatics race their cars cross-country, with their pink slips as the wager. But the plot soon goes sideways and never comes back. In the film’s infamous last shot, “the driver” (played by a laconic James Taylor) is drag-racing his ’55 Chevy when suddenly the sound disappears, the film blackens and cracks, and the image burns into nothingness.

‘Four novels and dozens of screenplays later, Wurlitzer still hasn’t given up on his peculiar twin obsession with constant movement and never arriving. The Drop Edge of Yonder is a psychedelic Western, a tripped-out blend of Hollywood convention and ecstatic mysticism: poker games in old saloons, shootouts, prison breaks and lynch mobs mingle with healing rituals, midget shamans, vision quests and an underlying emphasis on the Buddhist concepts of death, rebirth and the wheel of suffering. The novel’s main character, Zebulon Shook, is a rugged mountain trapper who wanders out toward San Francisco’s gold rush via the Panama Canal, chases after his Abyssinian whore lover, becomes a notorious outlaw and even dies a few times along the way. As the novel opens, Zebulon is nearly axed to death by a horse thief named Lobo Bill while he’s in flagrante with a half-breed Indian on a tabletop, and from then on, the novel is a deluge of action and movement, a parade of “bad hombres and doins.”

‘Still, despite all the adventure, love and cholera, the novel feels weirdly static, like an eerie repetitive dream. The man playing the honky-tonk piano in the first saloon is the same man playing in the last one, and when the cards in the poker hand are turned over, the result is always the same: a queen-high straight flush of hearts beating a full house. You feel two myths of freedom colliding: the Western myth of finding freedom somewhere out in “the big empty” of the frontier, and the Eastern belief that enlightenment comes only after divorcing oneself from physical reality and desire. The result is a bawdy, rambunctious, exhilarating book that is simultaneously claustrophobic and stifling. It’s fun to read, but the novel subversively suggests that a true triumph would be to stop reading altogether, to give up on your need for narrative catharsis. In the end, Zebulon goes nowhere, and the last line describes his photograph fading to nothingness, a clear throwback to Blacktop. It’s remarkable how long Wurlitzer has been dedicated to his vision of nothingness and Nirvana, and it’s more remarkable that the idea still packs a kick. Perhaps it’s a story that needs to be told again and again.’ — Nathan Ihara

 

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Further

RUDY WURLITZER [00]
The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer
Return of the Frontiersman: Rudy Wurlitzer in Conversation
Writer Rudy Wurlitzer’s Underappreciated Masterpieces
RW interviewed @ The AV Club
RW @ The Cult
An Interview with Rudy Wurlitzer
WILL OLDHAM & RUDY WURLITZER!
A Beaten-up Old Scribbler
THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER: RUDY WURLITZER RIDES NOWHERE AGAIN
More on Rudy Wurlitzer
On the Road Again
How the West Was Fun
RUDY WURLITZER: TWO-LANE BLACKTOP AND BEYOND
‘Radio On’, by Rudy Wurlitzer
Scott McClanahan interviews Rudy Wurlitzer
Events, of a Sort: The Fiction of Rudolph Wurlitzer
Podcast: RW on NPR’s Bookworm
ON THE DRIFT: Rudy Wurlitzer and the Road to Nowhere
THE GENIUS OF RUDY WURLITZER
RUDY WURLITZER REGRETFULLY DECLINES THE INVITATION TO TAP DANCE ON YOUR RUBBER RAFT
rudy wurlitzer’s nog as california cult classic
Buy ‘The Drop Edge of Yonder’

 

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Extras

Trailer: Robert Frank & Rudy Wurlitzer ‘Candy Mountain’

Walker Q&A with Alex Cox & Rudy Wurlitzer at Basilica Hudson

Excerpts: Philip Glass/Rudy Wurlitzer opera ‘Appomattox’

 

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Films written by Rudy Wurlitzer

Jim McBride Glen and Randa (1971)

Monte Hellman Two Lane Blackstop (1971)

Sam Peckinpah Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

Robert Frank Keep Busy (1973)

Robert Frank/Rudy Wurlitzer Candy Mountain (1987)

Alex Cox Walker (1987)

Volker Schlondorf Homo Faber (1991)

Bernardo Bertolucci Little Buddha (1993)

JoAnne Akalaitis In The Penal Colony (2000)

Wim Wenders, Michelangelo Antonioni Two Telegrams (2020)

 

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Interview

 

L.A. WEEKLY: You’re from the Wurlitzer family — why didn’t you go into the music business?

RUDY WURLITZER: Luckily the whole Wurlitzer empire had collapsed, and my father had become a violin and cello dealer. I was the end of the line, and my father never imposed what I should do. He was always curious about how weird I was, and he wanted to see what I would do.

How did you become a writer?

One summer, when I was 17, I got a job on an oil tanker that went from Philadelphia to Spanish Morocco to Kuwait. And on that trip I started to write. Then, after a couple years at Columbia University, I took a spring vacation down to Cuba, just after Castro had arrived, and the whole thing was completely exuberant, so I stayed on, fell in love with a Cuban, uh, woman of the night, let’s say. By the time I finally got back to Columbia, my career as an academic was in real jeopardy. So I went into the Army for a few years, went up to Hudson Bay to test cold-weather equipment, and when I was there, I wrote even more because it was so isolating. Then I hung out in Paris for a long time, drifted down to Majorca, where I sort of became secretary to Robert Graves, the poet, and he taught me how to write short sentences. Then I published a story in the Paris Review,which turned out to be the first chapter of Nog, and this editor at Random House liked it a lot and signed me up. Those were the days when Random House was open to publishing literature.

Nog is a very strange book. It was praised by Thomas Pynchon (“Another sign that the novel of bullshit is dead”) but also left a lot of people bewildered.

One of the first reviews I got, the first line was: “Wurlitzer is a name that means music to millions, and literature obviously to none.” [Laughs.] Still, if it had said the opposite, it would have been worse for me, because I would have gone around with a swollen head, but instead I went around with almost no head.

Were you part of a group, people who were your comrades in arms? Did you have artist friends?

I’ve never felt that I was a comrade in arms or self-consciously part of any group, except for everyone with a sense of alienation. Which is a big group. Artist friends? Sure. One of my oldest friends is Philip Glass. [In 2000, they collaborated on an opera version of Kafka’s “The Penal Colony.”] We met back in Paris — we were lusting after the same girl.

Who won?

We both lost.

How did you go from traveling the world and writing this bizarre novel to writing screenplays in Hollywood?

Monte Hellman read Nog and thought, “Wow, this guy is crazy enough to write the film I want to do.” I came out to L.A. They got me a room and hotel. I didn’t know a car from a cow, but I hung out with all these car freaks and totally rewrote the script for Two-Lane Blacktop. And it was great because, in the best sense of the word, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know the rules of writing scripts. So it became a very existential process. And it was fun. I thought, Man, what is everyone complaining about?

I know film buffs who feel like it’s the greatest counterculture film, above even Easy Rider.

It was a wonderful mistake, that film. The thing about Two-Lane Blacktop that is interesting for people is that it’s a journey to nowhere, it’s for its own sake. We just filmed these little autonomous moments with nonactors, so you didn’t have the clichés of acting. In fact, most of them were totally somnambulant … due to various influences. After I wrote the script, Esquire read it, and they published it on the cover, saying, “The Film of the Year,” and after the film came out, they called it “The Flop of the Year.” People didn’t get it. The mass audience was going to a film about cars, for races, for winners and losers, and in this film there are no winners or losers, there is no duality in that way.

How did the ending come about?

We didn’t know how to end it. [Laughs.] We were both, like, how are we going to end this fucking thing? And somebody said, “Let’s torch it up, burn the film.” It seemed appropriate.

Your next film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, was also a commercial flop, and has also become a cult classic. What was it like working with Sam Peckinpah?

Peckinpah was great, one of a kind. A real character of the West. He was scary. He would take out a knife and throw it at the wall behind your head. He had this whole coterie of old-time character actors that were on most of his films, and it was like this demented family. So if you’re not terrified, you love a guy like that.

I read that Bob Dylan (who wrote the film score and played a small role) loved Peckinpah, and followed him around the set like a puppy. How did Dylan get involved?

I knew Dylan a little, and he came to see me when he heard that I was doing a film on Billy the Kid, and he said, “Oh, man, you know what? I always thought I was the reincarnation of Billy the Kid.” I said, “I’m sure you are.” And he said, “Well, if there’s any way I can be in it …” So then we went down and met Sam, and he turned to Bob and said, “You know, I’m a big fan of Roger Miller.” I thought, “Oh, no, this might be it.” But Bob fell in love. He was a confrontationist too, so he understood.

It seems like Hollywood was such a different animal then.

Totally different. There was always a certain war with the powers that be, but it was fun. … It was like the outlaws against the big landowner. My connections to Hollywood in those days were all very personal and spontaneous and pretty much off the margins of the studio system. It felt very free to me. I thought, “Wow, this is a way I can have a livelihood and still write my wacky novels.” And for a while, that was true. Then it changed. Now films are worked out in a room before the shooting starts, with about five sales people and three studio people and a director terrified that he’s gonna make a flop. And the poor scribbler is just trying to survive, saying, “Yeah, whatever you want!” A lot of those old directors would have trouble getting work now — guys like Peckinpah, Hal Ashby.

Are you done with screenwriting?

I’m pretty much off the celluloid trail, I hope. But you never know. If somebody calls me up and says, “Hey, saddle up big guy …”

You talk about Two-Lane Blacktop being a journey to nowhere, and that seems to be the theme in Drop Edge, too.

I’ve always been obsessed with episodic journeys, and trying to get lost in the presence of the journey. Each time you take a journey, you separate from what you’ve left behind, and you hopefully burn out all the false attachments and beliefs about who you are, the “me.” When you’ve dissolved all the conditions that you’ve been born into, it’s often very brutal, but that’s what it means to be free.

Your novel fuses these Eastern concepts with our Western notions of freedom: the Old West, outlaws, living as an individual.

Sure, you could say the frontier is a metaphor for freedom. It’s about all these wackos who rushed out there for the gold rush, and how that fueled the whole capitalist system. It’s about greed, desire, ambition, and in this sense, Drop Edge is about how the big empty was filled up and what people did with that emptiness, and how they used and arranged it to feel safe, or make their coin or whatever.

That transition sounds similar to what you were saying about L.A.’s transition from a more wild and woolly place to —

Los Angeles went from being a frontier town to becoming a monocultural corporate town. I see that in America as a whole. I see it everywhere.

Is there still a role for your kind of writing in today’s literary world? Is there even a counterculture at all anymore?

Not like the ’60s, but I think there will be, as the noose tightens, as people become more and more stretched and afraid, and the structure becomes more dysfunctional. There will have to be some kind of alternative, or no one will survive. My heart goes out to young writers — it’s a very perilous path. Look at all the writers around who are in desperate straits, psychologically, emotionally, financially. Magazines, newspapers are going down. Film business has gone into TV land in terms of writing. Novels are on their way out.

Your book is being published by Two Dollar Radio, a small start-up printing press.

They have purity, they love books, they have no idea what they’re doing [laughs], and I’ve never had so much fun! I didn’t need a big advance, and the thought of going up to 57th Street and having one of these publishing lunches — I couldn’t do it anymore. I just thought, Fuck it, I’ll try something different. It’s like the old Grove Press or the Barney Rosset days in Paris. Like-minded common-ground people, and they’re not talking about sales, they’re talking about books. How strange. How radical. It’s like this little secret cabal of book lovers. Soon they’ll have us all arrested.

What was your writing process with Drop Edge?

Well, you write because you’re exploring, you’re trying to figure out what you think, you’re trying to articulate where your shadow world lives, and what your journey is. Life is not a conceptual arrangement, life is movement. Writing is a kind of ritual for me, and you don’t know where it’s going to go, or if anyone’s going to read it, or even if it’s going to get published. You gotta give yourself permission to get lost. If you’re not lost, you can’t be found. If you don’t have a wound, you can’t transcend the wound with a healing.

Cycles of injury and health, loss and discovery are themes in Drop Edge.

Yeah, be grateful for your wounds. They’re a catalyst toward something further. Unless you get dead.

There’s a particularly intense healing ceremony in the novel: “The medicine roared through their bodies in noxious waves until they sank on all fours, vomiting and heaving … [they] wept and wept, haunted by the … approaching shadow of … death.” It reminded me of a description of that Amazonian drug Yage.

Ah, yes. Yage. Yeah, you should try that. You’ll like it. William Burroughs liked Yage a lot. I recommend it. If you’re lucky, it takes you to the edge of yourself. But it’s been a long time since I’ve been on that journey.

I was talking to a friend of mine about Yage, and he said, “Yeah, you can get that on eBay.”

Well, that’s the new world.

 

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Book

Rudolph Wurlitzer The Drop Edge of Yonder
Two Dollar Radio

‘Rudolph Wurlitzer’s first novel in nearly 25 years is an epic adventure that explores the truth and temptations of the American myth.

‘Beginning in the savage wilds of Colorado in the waning days of the fur trade, the story follows Zebulon Shook, a mountain man who has a curse placed on him by a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he murdered, to “drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, of if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming.” Zebulon sets out on the trail from Colorado, venturing to the remote reaches of the Northwest, a journey that traverses the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields, bringing him face-to-face with mystics and outlaws, politically-minded prison wardens and Russian Counts, each hungry to stake their claim on the American dream.

‘A novel of breathtaking scope and beauty, The Drop Edge of Yonder reveals one of America’s most transcendant writers at the top of his form.’ — Two Dollar Radio

 

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Excerpt

Chapter One

THE WINTER THAT ZEBULON SET HIS TRAPS ALONG THE Gila River had been colder and longer than any he had experienced, leaving him with two frostbitten toes, an arrow wound in his shoulder from a Crow war party, and, to top it all off, the unexpected arrival of two frozen figures stumbling more dead than alive into his cabin in the middle of a spring blizzard.

Rather than waking him, the cold blast of wind from the open door became part of a recurrent dream: a long endless fall through an empty sky towards a storm-tossed sea…. Come closer, the towering waves howled….

He opened his eyes, not sure for a moment if the man and woman staring back at him weren’t hungry ghosts. Frost clung to their eyebrows and nostrils, and their swollen faces were raw and crimson from the tree-cracking cold. The man wore a hard-brimmed top hat tied under his bearded chin with a long red scarf, along with a buffalo robe coated with slivers of ice. The woman appeared to be a Shoshoni half-breed. She was wrapped inside a huge army overcoat distinguished by sergeant stripes at the shoulders and, at the chest, two bullet holes, one over the other.

The man sank to his knees, swearing and choking from the smoke pouring out of the cabin’s leaky fireplace and the overpowering stench of a nearby slop bucket. He spoke in a rasping whisper, as if his larynx had been smashed.

“I figured we be dead meat until the breed told me you was camped on the Gila. She knows things that ain’t available to other mortals.”

The man was Lobo Bill, an old trapper and horse thief, known for his wide range of windy tales and maniacal rages, that Zebulon had run into and away from in various saloons and hideouts from Tularosa to Cheyenne. When he removed his top hat, he exposed a face sliced on one side from cheek to jawbone, as if neatly quartered by a butcher’s knife.

Lobo Bill nodded towards the breed, who was standing with her back to the wall, staring at Zebulon with huge empty eyes. “She ain’t one for words, but when she does open her flap, she packs a punch you don’t want to know about. Even so, I owe her. She saved my bacon when a wolverine took after me. Axed it into quarters and sliced me up as well. I won her in Alamosa from a horse trader. A straight flush to his full house. A hand for the ages. She’s half Shoshoni, half Irish. ‘Not Here Not There’ is what I call her, and I’m favored to have her, things bein’ what they is these days, or ain’t, depending on which way the wind blows, and even if it don’t.”

Lobo Bill and Not Here Not There took off their clothes. After their bodies thawed out, they collapsed on a pile of bearskins near the fireplace.

Zebulon spent the rest of the night stoking the fire and drinking from one of his last bottles of Taos White Lightning, pondering memories of Lobo Bill and all the other mountain lunatics he had known, and what he and they used to be, or not, and what he was meant to do, or be, depending on his view from the valley or mountaintop. It wasn’t so much that the old mountain ways were played out, although that day was surely coming. There was something else that Lobo Bill and his breed had brought in with them, a mysterious presence or shadow that he was unable to define. Or maybe it was just the sight of two strange and lost figures snoring on his bed.

It was dawn when the wind died, along with most of his premonitions, enough anyway, to let him pass out next to his guests.

 

Chapter Two

WHEN HE WOKE, A HARD BRITTLE LIGHT WAS SPLATTERING against the cabin walls. There was no sign of Lobo Bill. When he questioned Not Here Not There, she shook her head and rolled her eyes back and forth, which made him think that Lobo Bill had either gone off to find his mules and traps, or he had decided to skip out altogether. Around him the cabin had been swept clean. The slop bucket had been emptied, his stock of flour, tobacco, whiskey, coffee, and dried jerky were stacked neatly in one corner, and split logs were piled up on either side of the fireplace.

The extreme tidiness of the cabin, together with Not Here Not There’s sullen silence, made him uneasy, as if she were harboring secret thoughts or maybe, god help him, some ill-intentioned plan. Never mind, he thought. Whatever was meant to come would come, ready or not.

While they both waited for Lobo Bill to appear, Zebulon hunted for small game and prepared for the annual spring rendezvous by taking down and sorting the hundreds of muskrat and beaver pelts he had stashed in the crooks of several trees.

After three days Lobo Bill still hadn’t returned. Most of the time, Not Here Not There sat on the bench outside the cabin, staring at the river and the dark blue ice that had begun to splinter into large moving cracks. In the evening she avoided looking at him as she cooked one of the rabbits he had shot. After they ate dinner, instead of retreating to the corner she had chosen to sleep in, she joined him near the fire. Looking at him with a sly grin, she took his bottle of Taos White Lightning from him and drained the rest of it, then swayed back to her place across the room.

That night he was woken by her long nails scratching lines of blood down his stomach and across his groin, a violent gesture which she repeated even as she pulled him inside her, locking her legs around his waist as if she wanted to break him in two.

For the rest of the night, she dictated their furious passion on her own insatiable terms. In the morning she left the cabin without looking at him or saying a word.

Two days later she returned in the middle of a thunderstorm. Standing before him, she looked into his eyes as he removed her clothes and positioned her over the table, pinning her arms above her head.

When the door opened, he was plunging on inside her as if they had never been apart. When he became aware that Lobo Bill was standing above them with a raised hatchet, he decided that he might as well go out in the same way that he had been conceived. Part of him enjoyed the prospect, and he was damned if he was going to give Lobo Bill the satisfaction of an apology. He continued to thrust himself inside her with even more abandon, letting out a long mountain yell: “Waaaaaaaaagh!”

His fury broke the table, sending them both to the floor. Lobo Bill’s hatchet missed Zebulon’s skull by an inch and sliced a large hole in the middle of Not Here Not There’s stomach.

Before Lobo Bill could react, Zebulon reached for a pistol inside Lobo Bill’s belt and shot him between the eyes.

Unable to move or speak, he sat on the floor, watching Not Here Not There stagger through the door.

When he finally went after her, she was standing naked on a slab of ice halfway into the river, her hands trying to hold back the blood oozing from her stomach.

“You killed the only man that ever cared for me,” she said. “And now you’ve killed me.”

They were the first words that he had heard her speak.

As the ice sank lower, carrying her downstream, and the black freezing water rose over her legs and hips, she called out to him again: “From now on, you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming. Three times you will disappear to yourself and all that you know, and three times you will -”

She said something more, but he was unable to hear the words as she slowly sank beneath the ice.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Armando, Hi. You know, I haven’t watched ‘The Silence’ literally since I was a teenager, so I don’t know. You’ve made me want to retry it. I’ll find a way. I’ve seen another email from you, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I had to spend all day yesterday filling out a very exhausting grant application. Well, very happy birthday, although you don’t seem like you’re expecting it to be a happy occasion. But still, what the heck, happy birthday! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. No, he seems to be pretty remembered to the degree that films like his can retain cultural currency. The post’s traffic was unexpectedly sky-high for instance. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein’s now legendary Emergency Sale is still extent. David: ‘My Big Emergency Sale of CDs, DVDs and Books is ongoing and more Emergency than ever. New items have been added. Write me at cllrdr@ehrensteinland.com and I’ll be glad to send you an updated list.’ Pick up some awesome stuff and help a maestro out at the same time, why don’t you? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Glad you’re a fan of his, of course. Not me, re: your query, but … Everyone, Question from Corey Heiferman: ‘Have you or somebody else here come across (or inside, hehe) an orgone accumulator in real life?’ New with me? Getting the new GIF novel ready for Kiddiepunk. Film fundraising. Awaiting publisher news. Working on this and that but, yes, thankfully not the TV project thing until ARTE makes its big decision in mid-March. I’m down with go-getter-ism as long as it stays this side of pest. Hope that promising job ponies up. Ah, yes, Paris awaits. I have very mixed feelings about making appearances. I’m not hugely into doing readings, but I do them, and when my novel eventually comes out, I’ll have to. I like hosting film screenings better, probably because I can share the anxiety with Zac. So, yeah, mixed feelings. Kind of depends on my mood, I guess. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Entire films usually don’t last too long on youtube, so it’s always a good idea and jump at them. Very good that your piece got a very good reaction! Best of luck with X-ray. Great idea! Keep the momentum going, my man. ** Misanthrope, Thank you about the gallery. I’ll pass your liking on to curator Jane. I know virtually squat, but can’t high glucose levels arise from eating non-sweet stuff too? I’m vaguely remembering that from friends’ tests? Most of the predictions in my FB feed are based in hysteria, not to mention that they change 100% by the day. Do people actually enjoy outputting and inputting all that shit? I guess so. No Twitter for me. The urge to be there seems pretty much self-destructive in too many cases. ** Steve Erickson, How cool that you got to see a Q&A with him. Yeah, the later films are quite disappointing. Probably for the reason you suggest. Kind of the same thing as with Nemec, strangely. I’m curious about the new Kelly Reichardt. Her films have never quite convinced me, but I feel like I’m always ready to get what her big deal is. I’ll see it when it gets here. Thanks! I have seen Yves Tumor’s new video. Fascinating. ** Right. Today the blog celebrates one of my very favorite novels from the 00 decade and beyond, i.e. the most recent novel by the sublime American wordsmith Rudy Wurlitzer. If you haven’t read it, or other of his novels, you are very strongly encouraged to do so by me. See you tomorrow.

 

‘No filmmaker of his generation from Eastern Europe could match the charisma and originality of Dušan Makavejev. Forever bustling from festival to festival with his inspiring wife Bojana Marijan—who contributed to the sound and music on many of his works—he embodied all that was best in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Long before the six republics descended into bitter, vicious wars of attrition with one another, Makavejev was a unifying spirit, the cynosure for all filmmakers in Yugoslavia. Serbian born and bred, he inspired contemporary directors from Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro with his passionate discourse and his broad-minded dialectic. Over the years his voice grew huskier and his hunched back more pronounced, but his curiosity remained undiminished. He disarmed his critics with a laugh or a quip. “We in Yugoslavia are 100% Marxist,” he loved to repeat, “50% Groucho and 50% Karl.”

‘Makavejev was “First Secretary” of the Belgrade Film Archive Club in 1954 when Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française arrived in Belgrade with a diplomatic trunk filled with works by Clair, Feuillade, and Pagnol and other classics of French cinema—all uncensored. In the years that followed, “Wajda’s trilogy made a huge impression on me,” he told me in 2001. “Then came Jules and Jim, Breathless—freedom of editing without careless editing, plus the casual treatment of the story, with casual dialogue. I liked the dancing camera in Chabrol’s À double tour. He was for me probably more important than anyone else in the early days. Some of the images from Les bonnes femmes have stayed with me for forty years.”

‘Like many aspiring directors in Eastern Europe, Makavejev had to cut his teeth on shorts and documentaries, which set the template for his love of reportage and realism in future years. “One of my amateur films was screened at a festival of amateur cinema in Cannes in 1957. A group of us film society members traveled with two tents to the Riviera in December, and found a place to set them up in the hills behind the railroad at the back of the town, where the Algerians lived, and for one franc a day you could erect your tent!” His maiden feature, Man Is Not a Bird, released in 1965 and selected the following spring for the Critics’ Week in Cannes, revealed a socially committed filmmaker who took risks with both form and content, flashing forward and backward in time as it tells the tale of an engineer visiting the copper-processing town of Bor and falling for a young hairdresser. The visuals are bleak, but Man Is Not a Bird has an irreducible humor and impudence that deftly sidesteps pessimism.

‘Our first meeting occurred in a smoke-filled editing room in the bowels of one of those gloomy government buildings on Belgrade’s Knez Mihailova. It was March of 1967, and Dušan was editing what would become the first of his international art-house successes. The Serbian title was “Ljubavni slučaj,” and Dušan explained that this meant “Love Case” in English. I suggested he should call it Love Dossier, and he accepted this with alacrity. However, better brains than his and mine decided in their wisdom to entitle the film Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator. This enigmatic, amusing, and faintly sinister film opened at the Yugoslav national festival in Pula in July 1967, and was bought by Brandon Films for the U.S. following its New York Festival premiere two months later. It inaugurated the golden years of Dušan Makavejev.

‘Much influenced by Godard, Makavejev pushed to still further boundaries a dialectic that in each of his films opposed interludes of documentary to scenes of fantasy. At the same time he pioneered a forensic approach to cinema. In Switchboard Operator, an erstwhile revolutionary and civil servant who has been relegated to the status of rat-catcher, seduces and then inexplicably murders a young woman in contemporary Belgrade. The sex scenes in Switchboard Operator are stitched together with interviews with a sexologist, images of the autopsy on the victim’s corpse, clips from Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, and laconic comments on the life of rats that roam the city sewers.

‘His next work, Innocence Unprotected, was selected for Berlin in June 1968, and WR: Mysteries of the Organism featured in the first edition of the International Forum for Young Cinema in 1971. Innocence Unprotected portrayed the Serbian athlete Dragoljub Aleksić, who in 1942 had made a film about his own gymnastic feats, interspersed with stretches of wide-eyed melodrama. Makavejev virtually “re-made” this exercise in vanity, tinting some sequences, and bulking it out with a collage of wartime newsreel clips and interviews with Aleksić himself and his original cameraman.

‘At the Berlin Festival of 1970, Makavejev was a member of the jury and showed his mettle off-screen when Michael Verhoeven’s West German entry, O.K., dealing with the rape of a young Vietnamese girl by four U.S. soldiers, aroused the wrath of jury president George Stevens. Makavejev argued forcefully that any filmmaker has the right to speak freely about world issues, and, accused by Stevens of being an agent for the East German government, he finally resigned. Rumors circulated that West German Chancellor Willy Brandt then personally intervened in the crisis, and Stevens agreed to reconcile with Makavejev and his fellow jurors.

‘The initials WR stand for Wilhelm Reich, the Austro-American psychoanalyst who claimed to have discovered “orgone” energy, which enhanced one’s sexual energy. Reich’s written work was still banned in the U.S. when Makavejev began his research for WR: Mysteries of the Organism—and as late as 1960 his books had been literally burned at the request of the Food and Drug Agency of the time. Looking back from the perspective of 2001, Dušan said, “My cinema is one of essays—but the essays are not always evident, they are often hidden.” To some degree WR serves as a disquisition on the life and experiments of Reich; but to an even larger degree it’s a call to arms against censorship and intolerance. Makavejev offers a clear dialectic between the frustrations and stupidity of rigid ideology (read: Communism) and the freedom of a Reichian world. He then proceeds, like Magritte or Braque, to fill his canvas with a cluster of sundry clips from the 1946 Soviet film, The Vow, about Stalin, one of which follows a close-up shot of a plaster-cast phallus. The fictional thread of WR describes a doomed affair between Milena Draviċ and a Russian skater, contrasted with the zestful copulation of Jagoda Kaloper and “Comrade Ljuba.” Theory and practice, the irrational and the rational, thus meet in head-on collision, and the result is a film that mauls the sacred iconography of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, affirming that “Politics is for those whose orgasm is incomplete.” It’s a classic utopian parable, in the mood of Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Animal Farm. Jagoda Kaloper traveled with WR to campuses across America, and I introduced her and the film at the University of Rochester. The undergraduate audience of the early seventies revelled in Jagoda’s nude scenes, even if the political references often seemed out of reach. In Yugoslavia, however, WR was banned without ceremony—for sixteen years—and in many other territories the film enraged the censors.

‘“At the end of 1972, the liberal leadership in Serbia was forced to resign,” Makavejev recounted to me in a 2008 interview. “An ideological/fundamentalist tsunami threw the media into a kind of psychotic vertigo. Already printed books were chopped up into old paper, theatre plays were removed from the repertory, and a campaign against the ‘black wave’ in films treated us as foreign agents.” It was time for this paradigm of the avant-garde to depart for new horizons. He acquired a charming apartment at the foot of the Rue de Seine in Paris, and pressed ahead with his next project. Entitled Sweet Movie (1974), it was shot in Montreal, Niagara Falls, Paris, and Amsterdam, with no contribution from Yugoslavia. A satire on everything from Communism to beauty pageants, and from chastity belts to coprophilia, Sweet Movie also addressed the ghastly crimes of the Stalinist era, notably the massacre of Polish officers in Katyn Forest. Scatological in the extreme, scattershot in its relentless assault on bourgeois values, Sweet Movie was premiered at the Cannes Festival. Meeting Makavejev in the Petit Carlton Café after the press screening, I said I had reservations about the film. Makavejev turned on his heel and stalked out of the bar. We would not talk again for several years. Looking back, I think that my disappointment stemmed not so much from the flaunting of taboos in the commune scenes as from the childishness of several sequences (although there’s a fine line between childishness and frivolity, or as Makavejev would say, between chocolate and excrement)!

‘In Montenegro, funded by the Swedes in 1981, Makavejev used such Bergman luminaries as actor Erland Josephson and editor Sylvia Ingemarsson. In Susan Anspach, he also found the perfect actress to play his bored bourgeois housewife, who kicks over the traces by setting fire to the bedclothes, and eventually poisoning her entire family. While her husband is abroad, she finds solace in an underground nightclub, where the Yugoslav immigrant known as “Montenegro” satisfies her sexual cravings. The film marked a return to Makavejev’s provocative form of the sixties and early seventies, even as its linear narrative helped to attract a large audience in numerous countries.

‘In October 2006, I recorded two interviews with Makavejev for Criterion, one on WR and the other on Sweet Movie. There he confirmed that he liked making satirical films, because he could then “smuggle across” some ideas and information that might otherwise be boring, and that for him editing was more important than shooting. The following year, he spoke to me for a book that the European Film Academy published to mark its 20th anniversary. “Our hand-held cameras were curious and critical,” he noted. “Instead of performing, our actors were asked just to be alive. Our stories on film became unpredictable, as in life.” Our final conversation was at the Berlin Festival in 2008, when we talked on stage at the Berlinale Talents program and Makavejev reiterated his desire that people should see his films more than once, that they could return to it as one returns to Mark Twain or Dostoevsky and gleans something fresh and new each time.

‘By the 1990s, Makavejev’s cinema lay like a beached whale on the sands of time. The Coca-Cola Kid, Manifesto, and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, made between 1985 and 1993, all failed to reach a wide audience. The antic wit was no longer so acerbic, the surrealism no longer so engaging, nor the political comment so trenchant as it had been in his heyday. Long into the future, nonetheless, Dušan Makavejev will remain a figure as emblematic of his period as Ken Kesey in literature or Velvet Underground in music. I like to think that Dziga Vertov and Salvador Dalí would have been his lifelong fans.’ — Peter Cowie

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Dusan Makavejev @ IMDb
Dusan Makavejev obituary: the revolutionary ringmaster of Yugoslav film
Dušan Makavejev obituary
Dušan Makavejev @ The Criterion Collection
A Farewell to Yugoslav Cinema’s Greatest Antagonist: Dušan Makavejev
DIRECTOR ON A TIGHTROPE: DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV
Dušan Makavejev (1932–2019): Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Dušan Makavejev @ MUBI
Yugoslav Marxist Humanism and the Films of Dušan Makavejev
A tribute to the great anarchist of Yugoslav cinema, Dušan Makavejev
Dusan Makavejev: Or, the Case of the Messed-Up Serbian Director
Dušan Makavejev on WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM
Blood and Sugar: The Films of Dušan Makavejev
The Last Yugoslav: On Dusan Makavejev
Something Against Nature: Sweet Movie, 4, and Disgust
The World Tasted: Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie
ANARCHY AND ECSTASY: THE INTERMEDIATE CINEMA OF DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV
The Case of Dušan Makavejev
Behind the Velvet Curtain. Remembering Dušan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
Dusan Makavejev’s visionary insolence
Dusan Makavejev and His Political Sexploitation Movies

 

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Extras

Dusan Makavejev & Rambo Amadeus

PORTRETI: DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV – MISTERIJA MAKAVEJEV

Nicely Offensive: Dusan Makavejev interviewed by George Melly

 

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Interview
from Film Comment

 

Do you know the latest definition of hard-core pornography, by Justice William Rehnquist? “Representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, [or] masturbation, excretory functions and lewd exhibitions of the genitals.”

What do they mean by “lewd”?

Well, they would be able to define it. But then, again, no two persons would agree as to whether a certain “exhibition” is or isn’t.

Well, I’m afraid this is not a very good time for critical filmmaking. It goes very much in cycles, and in general—not just in a particular country, though of course in very different keys-the present mood is oppressive and repressive.

Sweet Movie, though, gets away with the first cock on a French screen, perhaps because it’s a gallant quote fromGoldfinger—the “goldcock.”

Oh, I didn’t think of it that way. Anyway I didn’t worry about that; being satirical you’re always allowed to go a little further. I worried more about Pierre Clémenti, a well-known actor, performing in the nude. The “goldcock” is just an insert, a kind of comics-like joke. Clémenti instead is doing his own performance, his own contribution to the film, and we are recording, almost documentary-like, that performance. But what seems to have angered some people most are things that are not at all sexual. They have felt attacked for instance by the commune scenes. As soon as they see others playing with food, some people get petrified, much more than with sex, like Carole Laure putting Cachorro’s cock against her face and playing tenderly with it. Actually this is covered by a black stripe in the print now showing in Paris. As you know, Carole Laure objected to two tiny bits of the film and we had to remove them temporarily. As to this particular shot: she had seen the rushes back in November ’73, and only six months later she started legal action .

Perhaps she needed some time to think it over.

I suppose so. Actually this is not sex or depiction of sexual activity but a kind of very playful, childish, sensual contact, coming as it does after she has been nursed, breast-fed, all in the same vein. Only Cachorro’s self-castration “number” strikes a different note, being a parody of “macho” attitudes. But as soon as the commune starts playing about with food, and they start vomiting, pissing and all, people feel attacked. This is a kind of documentary about a therapy session, and people just won’t admit that into a fiction film. They feel attacked because we’re shifting the ground and they are not able to keep the compartments closed, uncommunicated. Stick to fiction, they say.

But you didn’t fake the pissing or shitting.

In action films where you have fight scenes, the actors or their stuntmen sometimes get carried away and really beat each other; sometimes it’s very difficult to draw the line between faking and real beating. There, of course, is the excuse that it’s the eternal moral struggle of good and evil. It is as if violence was OK as long as it’s not serving any kind of liberation. You’re supposed to accept things. You’re not supposed to throw out. You’re supposed to swallow everything that’s pushed down your throat. The real problem is what to do with biology in this context, what to do with this kind of new knowledge about where our problems are really located.

In Character Analysis, Wilhelm Reich states that our typical phases proceed according to a definite plan which is determined by the structure of each individual case. He lists: “loosening of the armor, breaking down the character armor which is definitive destruction of neurotic equilibrium, breaking through of deeply repressed and strongly attached material with the reactivation of infantile hysteria”-this is where Otto Muehl and your film come in—”working through of the liberated materials without resistance, chrystalization of the libido from pregenital fixations”—this is also in Sweet Movie—”reactivation of the infantile genital anxiety, appearance of orgasm anxiety and establishing of an orgastic policy…”

The interesting thing with Reich is that he never made any of his therapy public, never did any group therapy, always worked on a person-to-person basis, he hated homosexuality. So he had a number of his own hangups in spite of being such a great pioneer and breaking through much stronger than any other in his time or since. But this breakthrough led him directly to what people considered to be lunacy. He was so alone with his knowledge. His understanding of the connection between biological individual well-being and a political social behavior was so unacceptable that he was just left alone. He lived in a kind of ghetto, boycotted in a kind of invisible cage.

In his writings of the last period, before he was “railroaded” and put in jail, he discusses more and more this invisible enemy. He had this theory that “HIGS” were against his work, and “HIGS” were “Hoodlums in Government.” And the truth was that there were, of course, but he was always trying to define, to create new concepts to explain his predicament. He speaks of Moscow agents being sent from Washington; they were actually sanitary agents from the Food and Drug Administration, former Navy men mainly chasing people who were selling rotten food and dangerous cosmetics-you know, pretty tough guys. And they were happy to find this spectacular case of a crazy scientist up north in the Maine hills, who according to rumors had patients masturbate in strange coffin-like telephone booths. They thought they were going to find something sensational, and there were federal agents all over the states renting orgone accumulators, trying to get people to testify about the atrocious goings on at Reich’s.

In the documentary part about Reich at the beginning of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, all the people interviewed in the town near where he lived, look rather funny: small-town American-Gothic types. They remind one of those science-fiction Hollywood movies of the early Fifties, where there always were small communities endangered by giant ants, things from outer space, monsters from the black lagoon, what you will. And in that footage you got in Maine, a community was seen acting in the same way – only The Thing had been Reich.

What’s extraordinary is that these people in American towns in the Midwest live in a very good relation to nature—fishing, hunting, swimming. But in a social sense they are completely isolated in a kind of dreamland of permanent security. These little towns are the proletarian dream: these people have been poor, or their parents were, and came to America and found little plots of land and built Paradise there. Living always in this kind of permanent security, their own economy supporting them nicely, getting a fairly good education, feeling defended by government and army—anything from outside that doesn’t conform to their way of life is bound to be monstrous. This strange German scientist doing his experiments up in the hills was perfect for the part of Monster. They even invented that Reich was keeping children in cages for scientific purposes!

Like Jewish ritual murders, in the anti-semitic mythology. By the way, were any objections risen to the scene in Sweet Movie where Anne Prucnal seduces the children?

The French censors were very nice about it, they said they couldn’t deprive adult French moviegoers from seeing this kind of “research film.” They just had us put a warning in all the publicity, that some scenes may be provoking or hurting to many people’s feelings.

An Argentinian film censor was asked once why he didn’t allow on a cinema screen some footage that had been on TV screens. His answer was that even if more people, in figures, watched TV; they watched it in isolation, never more than four or five, while a cinema audience develops a group feeling, and if somebody booed or shouted at the screen others might follow and a riot could start. That’s a man who knows his job!

Somebody told me that the last military putsch in Brazil started as a right-wing reaction against some kind of left-wing unrest among navy cadets who had been watching Potemkin. It sounded so fantastic—Brazilian cadets only a few years ago watching Potemkin! We have here again the boomerang effect: positive action triggering negative reaction.

Though WR is more developed and aggressive, of course, the basic approach of that film is much the same as in The Switchboard Operator, your second feature. Did it shock people in Yugoslavia back in ’67?

Switchboard Operator was widely accepted by critics and audiences. It became a box-office success and was part of a new trend in non-linear story-telling, mixing documentary and fiction all the way. Also in its fresh approach to subject matter: sex, everyday life, the relationship between work and love and History, and so on. The interesting thing in this experience is that if you have fiction alone, or documentary alone, the audience is geared to this particular genre or level of communication, but if inside a fictional story you insert documentary fragments they become more documentary than in a purely documentary film. Being geared to watch fiction you start discovering in documentary certain qualities that would have passed unnoticed otherwise, but you also start recognizing in fiction all this marginal documentary remains—the way people dress, move, eat, their homes. No matter how transposed on a fictional level, they keep a value as expression of a certain culture, of a given moment in history.

Anyway, I was happy to get many people to watch Switchboard Operator even without this intellectual frame of reference. I feel that all of us, those who started making films after 1960, were condemned to represent what’s called “author’s cinema”—-a kind of intellectual filmmaking. It’s difficult to liberate oneself from this, and try to be just entertaining. The great quality American movies had in their best days was to be made under market dictatorship. They were not afraid to please the market, and just had to be interesting all the time. If they felt like making some intellectual comment, they had to infiltrate it. Besides, ourselves being filmmakers from marginal countries as far as film industry go, we are supposed to express our national cultures. And being interesting becomes a kind of secondary duty.

Take westerns, for instance. Take horses, landscape, trains, guns. These are documentary items, and there is real action being done with them, in them, though the framework may be purely fictional. You get this strong impression of a life force at work, and bad guys against good guys become just a very simple excuse for a kind of biological display. Like the fantastic chases—real people, real horses, real rocks—this is behavior on an ecological level. It’s something we’ve come to reevaluate after these years of intellectual perversion in movies. Going back to roots. And the roots, of course, are in American movies, the only film industry in the world that is supported only by the public.

 

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13 of Dusan Makavejev’s 31 films

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Antonio’s Broken Mirror (1957)
‘In this remarkable short (Makavejev’s first to be shown at the Amateur Film Festival at Cannes), the director was coming into his own as a filmmaker. The nuances of the story can largely be reconstructed on the basis of the film’s cinematography and editing even without the sound, which has been lost. (To remedy this, in 2011, the composer Zoran Simjanović created a new sound track for both Anthony’s Broken Mirror and The Seal, with which the films are now shown). The film’s preoccupation with the reality of psychic desires also betrays Makavejev’s training in psychology, which he studied at the University of Belgrade and which informed his later films. In Anthony’s Broken Mirror, Makavejev already explores both the intense desire one can feel for artifice and the dangers of trusting this desire too much. This dialectic applies to Makavejev’s own relationship to cinema, as seen, for example, in Innocence Unprotected (1968). Indeed, Anthony’s Broken Mirror presages several important stylistic traits of Makavejev’s later professional films: the lyrically inspired plot with just a touch of romanticism; disjointed editing; and the powerful clash between the (neo)realist iconography and surreal plot, as well as between the “objective” point of view of the filmmaker and the “subjective” ones of the characters.’ — Diana Nenadić

the entirety

 

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Don’t Believe in Monuments (1958)
‘A young woman tries to make love to a park statue, but despite her passionate efforts, the monument remains cold and heartless. Don’t Believe in Monuments is an early short, where Makavejev subtly ridicules Yugoslav state-sponsored monument and history worship.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Parade (1962)
‘Parade, one of Makavejev’s best-known films, is view into the preparations International Worker’s Day where the director all but ignores the titular parade. The film focuses on the people – those who work and those who wander the streets, sometimes lost among the throngs, shown in a by-the-way fashion and not without humor. Makavejev claims he sought to show, man as he is …’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Miss Beauty 62 (1962)
‘Sarcastic look at 1962 Yugoslav beauty contest.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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L’homme n’est pas un oiseau (1965)
‘A love romance between older, respectable engineer that came in the industrial town to do some expert job and young hairdresser in whose house he stayed in and the consequences of that relationship, especially after young driver gets involved.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967)
‘Makavejev’s second feature is an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom, about a tragic romance between a young telephonist and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist in Belgrade.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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Innocence Unprotected (1968)
‘This utterly unclassifiable film is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces, assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, a silly melodrama titled Innocence Unprotected, made during the Nazi occupation; contemporary interviews with the megaman who made it and other crew members; and images of the World War II destruction, and subsequent rebuilding, of Belgrade. And at its center is a (real-life) character you won’t soon forget: Dragoljub Aleksic, an acrobat, locksmith, and Houdini-style escape artist whom Makavejev uses as the absurd and wondrous basis for a look back at his country’s tumultuous recent history.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpts

 

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WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)
‘When Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries Of The Organism was presented in 1971 at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street – at that time the premier art house in London – it was only after some wranglings with the censor, who objected to the brief views of an erect penis, albeit one encased in plaster.

‘The Academy was allowed to get away with it, saying that it wouldn’t screen the film at all unless it could show it complete. Later, the situation was compounded by the fact that a great many people referred mistakenly to the film as WR: Mysteries Of The Orgasm.

‘Makavejev’s film – however controversial it was in the early 70s – is not a sex film. But it certainly is a film about sex, since WR stands for Wilhelm Reich, a close associate of Freud and a Marxist who believed, among other things, that sexual freedom was a true expression of communism.

‘This is the fourth film by this highly original Yugoslavian director, and it became easily his most audacious, a landmark in the film-making of the time, after which he never again had quite the same success.’ — The Guardian

Trailer

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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I Miss Sonia Henie (1971)
‘The 1972 Belgrade Film Festival was the place to be. Godina assembled a motley crew of international and domestic festival guests: Tinto Brass, Puriša Đorđević, Miloš Forman, Buck Henry, Dušan Makavejev, Paul Morrisey, Bogdan Tirnanić, and Frederick Wiseman. Every night after the official festival screenings and talks, they went to a tiny apartment with a 35mm camera fixed in a corner. Godina challenged each of his celebrated guests to create a short film, following a set of simple rules: one room, one camera position, no zooms, tilts or pans, a couple of minutes each. And in every short the words “I Miss Sonia Henie”, a famous quote from the Snoopy cartoons, had to be voiced. The rest was left entirely to individual imaginations. The result: I Miss Sonia Henie (1972), a conceptual masterpiece of absurdist black humour, seven distinctively different variations on a ludicrous theme, a cinephile’s wet dreams. The restoration of these significant short films has been completed in the same year in which the Slovenian Cinematheque celebrates its 20th meaningful year of existence.’ — Jurij Meden

Introduction

 

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Sweet Movie (1974)
‘Sweet Movie, full of unenlighted lunacy, is not really a film at all. It is a social disease.’ — Jay Cocks, 1975

‘Sweet Movie [is] in effect the most concentrated work I know that follows out the idea that the way to assess the state of the world is to find out how it tastes (a sense modality not notably stressed by orthodox epistemologists but rather consigned to a corner of aesthetics) – which means both to find out how it tastes to you and how it tastes you, for example, to find out whether you and the world are disgusting to one another.

‘The film attempts to extract hope – to claim to divine life after birth – from the very fact that we are capable of genuine disgust at the world; that our revoltedness is the chance for a cleansing revulsion; that we may purge ourselves by living rather than by killing, willing to visit hell if that is the direction to something beyond purgatory; that the fight for freedom continues to originate in the demands of our instincts, the chaotic cry of our nature, our cry to have a nature. It is a work powerful enough to encourage us to see again that the tyrant’s power continues to require our complicitous tyranny over ourselves.’ — Stanley Cavell, 1979

Excerpt

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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The Coca-Cola Kid (1985)
‘The Coca-Cola Kid has gone down in the folklore of the Australian film industry as a prime example as a project which looked great at the outset, but went horribly wrong in the making. It promised not only the meeting of an internationally acclaimed, radical filmmaker (Dusan Makavejev) with one of the most respected Australian fiction writers (Frank Moorhouse), but also a definitive treatment of a theme beloved of Australian cinema – the uneasy, often hostile, tortuously ambivalent relation between American and Australian societies, allegorised in a tale of the stranger in a strange land. However, Makavejev reportedly had a very difficult time both on set and with his producers, and the finished film betrays fundamental uncertainties of concept, tone and pitch. (For a colourful account of these problems, see Moorhouse’s 1990 book Lateshows.) It is a difficult film to discuss because, thematically, it is completely incoherent. The meanings of individual scenes and certain thematic threads are quite clear, but taken together they make no sense at all.’ — Adrian Martin

Trailer

 

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Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993)
‘Even for Dusan Makavejev, who made some odd movies in his time (Sweet Movie one of them, and also Innocence Unprotected), and while this one, his last theatrical effort ‘Gorilla Bathes at Noon’ (catchy title) isn’t one of his best, it is marked by some moments that startle and confound and you have to keep watching. It’s about an ex-soldier for the Red Army who isn’t going back home to Russia after the Cold War ends – his train left and his wife has left him. So he becomes a quasi-wanderer in Berlin, caught between the old and the new, and sometimes squats with some ex-underground types and a red-haired beauty who plays the flute. … Gorilla Bathes at Noon is best seen as a curio, but one fans of his eccentric style should be able to appreciate. It’s almost like a wise man trying to make a young-man’s movie, and it’s charming, if not totally successful, to see it done.’ — Jack Gattanella

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Hole in the Soul (1994)
‘Part of the series “The Director’s Place,” produced by BBC Scotland, Hole in the Soul (1994) is a 52-minute documentary with Dušan Makavejev behind and in front of the camera. It also features family and crew members, old friends and collaborators, animals, and other illustrious characters (whom one is never sure if they are playing themselves, performing a part, or both). Despite all its beauty, despite being the last project that the director was able to complete (leaving aside his participation in the 1996 anthology film Danish Girls Show Everything), you won’t see many mentions, discussions, or celebrations of Hole in the Soul. It is a shame. A shame that is also a sign of our times.’ — Cristina Álvarez López

the entirety

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** DavidEhrenstein, Thank you for looking into her work. ** August Sander, Zzzzzz. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! I didn’t know there was an Ericka Beckman screening at the Pompidou. I’ve been too inattentive. Damn, I would have gone. I do like her work, yes. Glad you dug them. Yeah, something of pronto-Trecartin going on, right? I never thought about that before. Great that you can come to the PGL screening. Thanks! I saw there’s a new Yves Tumor album but not that he’s playing here. Fantastic! I’ve never seen him perform, and I’m often daydreaming about how he realises his stuff live. Thanks a ton for the alert. And for being here. ** Bill, Hi. She says they’re natural light photos, so I guess it’s due to some of post- trickery? Or pure luck? ** Steve Erickson, Oops, sorry to hear about the Loach, but yeah, he certainly can go that way. I’ll skip it. ** _Black_Acrylic, That’s a nice one. The one you tried to use for the poster. Happy you enjoyed the show. Aces that your friend dug the upbeat piece, and I hope the workshop folks follow suit. Please give a shout about how it goes. So are you sidelining the gloomier story? ** Armando, Hi. Whoo-hoo about your book! I couldn’t find it on the publisher website, but I assume it’ll be added any sec. Great!!! I haven’t seen what you sent me after that yet, but I will. Cool, man! Hugs back. ** Right. I ask you to spend your local daytime today with that marvel of a filmmaker Dušan Makavejev. See you tomorrow.