Dušan Makavejev: Eros, Ideology, Montage

Among the most idiosyncratic auteurs of avant-garde film, Dušan Makavejev was championed in the early 70s as the herald of art cinema’s next wave. In those years, film critics were calling Makavejev’s early movie, Love Affair (1967), the best film that Godard never made. Innocence Unprotected (1968) was pronounced a tour de force of cinematographic collage. WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) received a thirteen-minute standing ovation as well as the Luis Buñuel Award at Cannes & was later lauded as a subversive masterpiece & as “the flagship of ‘philosophical cinema.’” Francis Ford Coppola invited him to direct Apocalypse Now. Instead, Makavejev made Sweet Movie (1974), a conceptual sequel to WR, a politological, erotological, scatological, scandalous & unapologetic work which received practically no distribution, ending his honeymoon with film critics & with financial backers, nearly killing his career.