Dusan Makavejev and His Political Sexploitation Movies
“The greatest gift were the years and moment that made us believe that films could change the world for the better; the worst thing was to see the world emulate the uglies schemes and prophecies from B-movies” (Makavejev 24)
Dusan Makavejev and His Political Sexploitation Movies
It is usually difficult to prove that art and specifically cinema have significant social impacts, but still so many artists are trying to alter the world and human defects with their art works and their thoughts. Dusan Makavejev is one of those artists who has his own ideology and all his art works are like messengers of his beliefs. Makavejev’s movies are rough, reckless, and frank. He illustrates sex and nudity in the most shocking ways and they are explicit, wild, and usually surprise the audiences. Even though his movies are considered as exploitation/sexploitation movies, they still have heavy meaning and carry significant ideologies.
Makavejev was born in October of 1932 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). He is famous in Yugoslav cinema for his groundbreaking films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of his works belong to the Black Wave, which is a blanket term for Yugoslav film movement of the 1960s and the 1970s. Lorain Mortimer in her book Terror and Joy explains the Black Wave term: “ these films are known for their non-traditional approach to filmmaking. Their dark humor and their critical examination of Yugoslav society at the time” (Mortimer 3). Makavejev before being an artist or filmmaker was a political/creative activist linked to the liberation movement of the 1960s. Garry Moris calls Makavejev “The master of free cinema” because of his lack of inhibition in his art. (Mortimer 3). Makavejev has made so many short and feature films and in almost all of his films he is fighting for individual freedom and developing personal awareness about the human body and society. His films always have a great potential to encourage anybody who cares for human rights (Mortimer 18).
Usually for Makavejev cinema functions as a tool to spread his ideas about the world, society and his own country. He clearly criticizes the West’s capitalism and bureaucracy and makes an effort to picture or introduce the Freudian Marxist and satirize anti-Marxists. Two of Makavejev’s main Ideologies are: Marxism and sex therapy, which comes from Whelm Reich ideology about free sex. He usually uses the nude body and sexual actions in his movies not just for making an attraction, but also for breaking conservative taboos against sex. Makavejev criticizes the Western ideology about sexual action that has become more like a mechanical habit than a natural act of freedom and passion.
Makavejev demonstrates all his political beliefs in his last two feature films of the late 1970s, WR: The Mysteries of Organism and Sweet Movie. He always denied his affiliation to any specific political party or ideology but his opinions can be deduced from symbols and images in his movies. Makavejev was under the influence of Eisenstein, Marx and he was really fond of Camus’s literature because he appreciated Camus’s point of view about politics. Mortimer in her book explains Makavejev’s intellectual taste:
Makavejev’s subversiveness and vulgarity constitute a refusal to participate in ideology activism. Referencing albert Camus’s nation of relative utopia, shows how Makavejev like Camus objected to any form of oppression and defended the rights of the individual against tyranny, this is illustrated with examples from WR and Sweet Movie in particular. (Mortimer 336)
Makavejev’s life has a significant effect on his point of view in art. The post-war situation in Europe, ongoing civil war inside Yugoslavia, popularity of Marxism, and the domination of Soviet Union on Eastern European countries moved Makavejev’s thoughts towards politics and the quest for individual freedom. “ Dusan Makavejev studied at the Belgrade academy of theatre, film and television; writing essays and critism; and making his first feature film in 1965” (Mortimer 7). Makavejev’s talent in storytelling is undeniable and it is clear in his movies. He is a master of combining different elements and symbols together and making a unique story out of them. Makavejev believes that “ the cinema is a symbolic language made up of figures and images; a language whose specific grammar consist in establishing links between elements that are a priori separate, and very often contradictory” (Mortimer 6).
Makavejev usually makes a film like a collage, with various environments, situations, moods, characters, and meanings. He makes fiction but also borrows documentary aspects. Subsequently his movies are the combination of different layers with completely different meanings. Mortimer indicates that “Makavejev is a very special intellectual filmmaker, combining documentary and fiction, tragedy, comedy and always radical, that is going back to the root of things.” (Mortimer 18). While watching his movies the spectator is always startled at the realization that he really does not aim to please the audiences’ desires or expectations but rather builds a specific structure that is based on his own taste.
WR: The Mysteries of Organism
One of most controversial Makavejev’s films is WR: The Mysteries of Organism. The film was made in 1979 and has caused much controversy. Before making WR Makavejev had made so many popular movies but the main reason of the film’s certain reputation was for its sarcastic language and sexual images. The film is fictional but it also includes some documentary footage from Welhem Reich’s psychological experiments on people. In fictional narrative the main character is Milena, a feminist, communist woman who is practicing Reich’s teachings and following Marx’s rules. Milena falls in love with a famous Russian ice skater, Vladimir Illich who comes to Yugoslavia for a performance. She invites him to her home and they have a symbolic challenge about their different political ideologies. She absorbed his words about communism and wants to know more about the Soviet Union, which is a communist utopia.
They do not know what makes a person or a nation happy. Vladimir Illich tells her that he and his fellow Russian respect their attempt to find their own way, and the woman side, sexually. While the Yugoslavs are proud and independent people, he and his fellow countrymen believe they will find in their own experience that the Russian way is the best. (Mortimer 166)
However he has a hard time reciprocating her passion. When he finally does let himself go after making love, he finishes by decapitating her in an old rusty boat with his ice skates. WR talks about politics, war, sex and desires. Makavejev’s works, specifically WR, consistently denied the audiences’ expectation of “entertainment” and confronted us with the incompatibility of bourgeois structures and revolutionary morality. The movie is full of erotic scenes and real sexual intercourse and from the first scene the audience faces the harsh reality and the strong language. The opening scene is a long shot of a couple who are having sex in the woods and a narration about the meaning of life and its connections with Reich’s theories about sex. In another scene Milena comes home while her roommate is having sex in the middle of the living room. Milena and her roommate exchange some dialogue. Milena changes her clothes and wears a short sexy military dress, sits and sip her tea and reads a newspaper. The newspaper’s big article is “Marx falls in love” and there is a big poster of Stalin on the wall in the background. In one of the most famous scenes Milena argues with a neighbor who is complaining about Milena’s roommate’s sex and its annoying noises. Milena argues for individual freedom and the value of sexual activities. She gathers all the neighbors in balconies and has a long speech about Wilhelm Reich and Marx’s ideologies. Finally she is accompanied by her neighbors, when they are chanting for freedom.
Makavejev wants to challenge the world politics. The erotic images in WR are the metaphors of desires, which have been suppressed by political rules and laws. Joan Hawkins in his article “WR and midnight movie culture” explains the bold political tips and contemporary metaphors about war and peace: “the countercultural political themes of the film were attractive to an audience still engaged in fighting the Vietnam War” (Hawkins 170). Milena plays the role of an activist; she is the symbol of anger, fear, and a suppressed love. She immediately falls in love and sacrifices her own beliefs and desires for the sake of Vladimir’s interests and communism. She is the victim of femininity. David Paul in his book Politics, Art, and Commitment in Eastern European Cinema, describes Milena as an ideological heroine and emphasis that “She battles for principles of free love against the determined resistance of a representation of Leninist-Stalinist dogmatism- the visiting people ‘s artist and champion figure skater, Vladimir.” (W.Paul 141). Milena makes an effort to get close to Vladimir but external factors prevent her from attaching to a new love or political ideology.
The story of WR mostly focuses on the confrontation of America, imperialism and Eastern European communism. The film is full of documentary footage and real acts. Makavejev chooses some country-cultural radical American leftist like Tutli Kupferberg (the famous poet of 1960s) and follows him in NYC streets (W.Paul 141). Tutli was an activist who was sexually radical. He stalks through the streets of NYC in guerilla theatre battle garb, pointing his gun menacingly at passers-by. The film is full of cuts between America and Eastern Europe. One other documentary scene shows Tim Buckley of screw has a plaster cast made of his erect penis by sculptress Nancy Godrey. Immediately after the image of the plaster penis the film cuts to Stalin’s face that announces, “We have just completed the first stage of Communism.” By these cuts the main contents of the film reveals the opposition between Western modernity and Eastern Marxist about human existence.
Makavejev’s beliefs about free love embraced all kinds of human activities, not only sex. Mortimer indicates: “the current sexual freedom of the permissive society, Makavejev believed was the freedom to discharge ourselves as machines. Sex has become a consumer society device amongst numerous other kinds of technological devices” (Mortimer 161). Despite the fact that WR is not only an erotic movie to see and get entertained by, the film is placed in the category of sexploitation movies. WR is a sexual political movie and the erotic scenes easily offended audiences. The release of WR in the United States engaged discourses about pornography, the function of art cinema, Wilhelm Reich, and sexual politics. It also highlighted certain market trends within the intellectual community and engaged the growing cultural tensions that existed between different generations and social formations within that market. But it was something new to combine these techniques in a work of fiction. (Mortimer 98)
Makavejev collected all his melancholic thoughts and portrays them as a collage to make a drama. Makavejev in his interview in Lopate and Zavatsky magazine, explains how he made his movie WR:
I made the whole film not only with these small jumps, but you have also bigger connections between beginning, middle, and end like a big switch board, Like a network of ideas, and the understanding that you have a number of things in the film, and you can see something connected with Reich, some things connected with Russia, connected with Communism, something connected with the McCarthy period, of sides ideas. Then I developed this idea of shifting gestalts. (Mortimer 176)
Makavejev created increasingly complex and multilayered film collages, which challenged the viewer to move freely within the film’s open spaces and multiple imagistic associations.
Sweet Movie
Makavejev is one of the most radical Eastern European filmmakers who broke all the boundaries and taboos. His movie WR was banned immediately after screening and the government of Yugoslavia forced him to leave the country. Subsequently Makavejev left Yugoslavia for the West to make his new project, a movie calls Sweet Movie. Sweet movie was shot in 1974 in three countries: West Germany, France and Canada. Sweet Movie is also in the category of sexploitation movies. The sexual elements in Sweet Movie are sharper and dreamier. The narrative is following the same path of fiction/documentary collage. Political elements are the same thoughts as WR was, but in different frameworks. Sweet Movie has a great sense of humor and exuberance. David W.Paul explains that Makavejev works like an anthropologist: “He noted charms and peculiarities, documented rituals and artifices. He deliberately excelled in a sort of insolent collage, where, as on a news paper page, horror, human courage and trivia are mixed together.” (W.Paul 44)
The movie divides in two different stories, one about the Miss World (miss Monde) who is awarded for her virginity to get married to Mr. Kapital (the richest man of the West), and the other story is about Anna Planeta (the prostitute of revolution), who has a journey on a river with a boat full of corpses. The boat has a unique shape and it is like coming out of a fairy tale. The name of the boat is survival and there is a giant sculpture of Marx’s head in front of the boat. The Miss World starts a journey from a live TV show, which is for choosing the Miss Virgin of the World. After getting married to Mr. Kapital she is rejected by him and accidentally travels to France in a large suitcase. On the top of the Eiffel Tower she falls in love with an attractive south American singer and they start making love right on the last floor of the tower. They have intercourse but their sexual act is interrupted by a group of nuns and penis captivus happens. The Miss World is found by an artist community. The community practices liberty sessions, where a member, with the assistance of the other members, goes through a rebirth experience. Most of the scenes inside the commun’s house are documentary footage. In the scene that the Miss World and other members are sitting around a table, the act of eating turns to some unexpected actions. They start vomiting and urinating on the table and the Miss World is watching them in silence. She takes out the penis of a man, who is sitting next to her and fondles and kisses the penis. In reality the actress, who is playing the role of the Miss World gets disgusted by this scene and quit the production. In general the film has some scenes that are not easy to watch, like a scene that three of commun’s members are shitting on plates and Makavejev calls the scene: Shitting Fes. The commun’s members are a symbol of breaking social/ political rules and they follow no rules.
In the second narrative Anna Planeta boards a young sailor, Luv Bakunin, on her boat and they start making love on the deck and inside the boat on the bed of sugar. Anna warns the sailor so many times to leave the boat, because the boat is full of corpses, but he denies. Eventually, once they are making love on the bed of sugar she stabs him and kills him. Anna Planeta also seduces children into the boat, which is full of sweets and candies and she stripteases in front of little boys. Ultimately she is arrested by police and so many corpses, which are in plastic sacks, found in her boat. The film in general went too far, even for today’s viewer, in the scene where she gets nude for young boys. Mortimer says that “the most controversial scene for the audiences today is planeta’s striptease for a group of young child boys enticed on to her barge with candy while Russian Orthodox liturgical music plays on the soundtrack” (Mortimer 196).
Sweet Movie is full of symbols and metaphors, and at the same time because of the existence of documentary footage, it is not possible to differentiate the real world from symbolic world. Mortimer indicates that “the distinction between the symbolic, metaphoric and reality, is just as important as the relationship between them: lives can depend on our ability to make such distinctions” (Terror 197). The survival boat is full of sugar and candies and Anna Planeta seduces people with sweetness. The Miss World never experiences something sweet until she floats in a tab of melted chocolate for a commercial at the end of the film. The Miss World immersed herself in chocolate ruthlessly. Chocolate, sugar, and in general sweetness are symbols for revolution, a sweet revolution for freedom. Sailor Luv was murdered or sacrifices himself in a bed of sugar and children were seduced by candies. In the last scene of the movie the corpses, which have lain on the ground next to the river, start moving and coming out of sugar sacks and it seems like a resurrection. This is a sign for hope, which comes out of this sweetness. Anthropologist Sydney Mintz in her article, Sweetness and power noted that:
The Indo-European root Swadish the ultimate source of both sweet and persuade. In his historical-political economic tracing the links between sweetness and power he explores the way sugar become one of the leading motivations for making overseas agricultural experiments of mixed sort that is with Capitalist means and unfree labor. (Mortimer 192)
Makavejev’s desire to portray the darkest sexual scenes is unlimited. In fact he goes beyond a sexual image and wants to inject more meanings into the scene. Accordingly, the picture turns to something more bitter, more raucous, and anarchist. Sweet Movie explored the limits of personal and political freedom with graphic scenes of sex and atrocity. Makavejev in all his works is following the same path and thoughts; he focuses on sex and Marxism and criticizes capitalism. One of the most important differences between WR and Sweet Movie is that the Sweet Movie gets further from the reality and linear narrative. Sweet Movie is Makavejev’s furthest and most daring departure from traditional realist narratives. It is a mixture of humor, horror, eroticism, music, color, defilement, excrement, and murder. Once again the director combines documentary and fiction but this time the connections collide more harshly. The scenes and happenings are irrelevant. The famous film critic Richard Corliss has no interest in the film’s narrative and the montage, for Corliss what ended up on the screen was a “Chaotic rough-cut of a film, one that opens up many political and sexual wounds but provides no sutures on coherence that would heal the wounds and tie up the film” (Mortimer 201).
Makavejev saw Sweet Movie as more satirical and dreamy than his earlier films. He tries to illustrate the stories in two completely different narrative and structure. Although this may be true that the content of his stories are the same, but the modes of the two main journeys are different. Mortimer explains that: “There is a satirical story of miss world, that includes almost comic strip ideas about what American marriage is and how rich people live, then there is a story about Anna Planet, which is like a political fairy tale about a ginger bread house on the water” (Mortimer 29). Makavejev in an interview with Chicago reader says:
Sweet movie is like a boat of revolution, but it is not real revolution. It is like a dream of an alternative. It corresponds to the late sixties. Whatever confrontational situations we had in Germany, France, America and all over the world in the late 60s were really fights of people who did not want power against people who wanted to keep the power at any price. (Wexman 37)
Makavejev’s works are like a statement about sex and politics. In general, before the 1950s the majority of movies were playing the role of entertainment or they were educational. After World War II, cinema was also used as a tool to portray political beliefs. Long before the invention of motion picture, art and specifically literature played a political role in Europe. Later films became a part of this cultural intellectual tradition.
Communism was one of the most important political ideologies that made its role explicit and sought to specify the nature of the art’s social responsibility in definite terms (W.Paul 7). For instance Eisenstein was the most famous artist who directly devoted his art to his beloved political ideology: communism. Martin Walsh in his article “WR: The Mysteries of Organism and Makavejev” defines how Dusan Makavejev is affected by other artist and ideologist and proves that Makavejev’s achievements are that he has absorbed and expanded on the aesthetic contributions of Eisenstein and Godard:
His montage is not one of static images but of mise-en-scen, a juxtaposition of moving images, of narrative invention and newsreel documentary the extends the essentially (frigid) propagandist purpose of Eisenstein to a witty humanness of response that involves the co-existence of existential pessimism (Godard) and potential optimism (Renoir). (Mortimer 175)
Despite the fact that most of the reviews consider Makavejev’s movies dark sexploitation, inarticulate art, or destructive sexual images, they all have some sparks of hope. At the end of all Makavejev’s movies a resurrection takes place. If he demonstrates pessimistic points of Communism, eventually he portrays some positive points, which gives hope. In the last scene of WR, Milena’s decapitated head inside of the white plate starts talking and smiles to the camera or in Sweet Movie dead children rise and look at the camera. No matter how darkly critical of sex society has been in the past and is still in the present, Makavejev’s movies end with a form of rebirth and hope. Mortimer indicates that Dusan’s works are so optimistic, so powerful, full of life, and absolutely free of hatred. His films are just about as cheerful as they are analytical in relation to the post-communist characters and situations concerned (Stojanovic 7).
Certainly, each society, culture, artist, drives from its own artistic, historical, and social past. Makavejev provided a unique style of art in filmmaking, various tastes in the order of ideas. He wants to criticize the Yugoslav and American approach to individual freedom and sex. For him, good and bad does not exist. Makavejev’s Reichian ideas are making his ideologies’ structure in art and cinema. He is the strongest, most rollicking, iconoclast. Indeed, by making outrageous jokes about sex and politics, he offers a rather solitary example of the tempestuous power of irony. This joyful freedom led him to daring forms, too. His films are hilarious collages of fiction, where facts and documents create an ingenious barrage aimed at the artificial separation of sex and society.
Bibliography
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