In the 1960s, almost every major national cinema seemed to be in the throes of revolution. Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut led the charge of French New Wave rabble-rousers, overturning the tastes and assumptions of a previous generation's "tradition of quality" (as Truffaut put it in a landmark essay).
In Japan, Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura were mounting assaults both on social taboos and on the filmic conventions of their more classically minded predecessors. But some of the period's most scathing and elaborate subversions came from, of all places, Communist Yugoslavia, where the best-known cinematic iconoclast was, and remains, Dusan Makavejev, the master of the kinky political comedy.
The Yugoslav New Wave was also known as Novi Film (literally, new cinema) and as the Black Wave, a pejorative term coined by local critics who had trouble with the bleakness and dark humor of these movies.
Makavejev's first three films, vintage specimens of the Black Wave's anything-goes anarchy, are being released this week in a boxed set by Eclipse, the midprice line from the Criterion Collection.
His most notorious provocations, 1971's "W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism," an absurdist burlesque that draws freely on the ideas of the orgasm-obsessed psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and 1974's "Sweet Movie," a scandalous panorama of gross-out sexual perversions, are already available through Criterion.
Born in Belgrade in 1932, Makavejev started as a critic and documentarian, and by the time he made his first feature, "Man Is Not a Bird," in 1965, he already had had several short films banned for their explicit content. The film, which follows the budding romance between an engineer, newly stationed at a copper refinery, and his landlord's daughter, a free-spirited hairdresser, introduces what would become Makavejev's trademark mode: a patchwork of fact and fiction, notable for copious digressions, eccentric framing devices and sporadic insertions of documentary and archival footage.
With its unvarnished sequences of men at work (the film was shot in an actual factory), "Man Is Not a Bird" is a pointed response to the official depictions of the proletarian hero in works of socialist realism, the didactic style that dominated film production behind the Iron Curtain.
