Among the most idiosyncratic auteurs of avant-garde film, Dusan Makavejev was championed from the early 70s as the herald of art cinema's next wave.
For example, it has been said that Eisenstein's theory of "intellectual montage" achieved its most kaleidoscopic realization in Makavejev's practice.
Intercutting his narratives with elements of cinema verite and citations from vintage documentaries as well as passages from other fictional movies, Makavejev created a unique style of filmic collage.
In this regard, cinema itself - the stuff of our collective subconscious - is always a major theme of Makavejev's films, along with his exploration of ideological and psychoanalytic realms. Showing the human body as a symptom of ideology, Makavejev insists on the psycho-ideological constitution of our human organization, an organization in which the psycho inevitably takes over the ideological. In other words, what seems so rare in Makavejev's avant-gardism is precisely his status as one of the most engaged cineastes of our times. While his films are classics of postmodern pastiche, they offer uniquely powerful accounts of Western modernity's major mythologies, from the master-narratives of Western liberalism, erotic individualism and consumerism to the revolutionary yearnings of communist utopia, allegorized in Sweet Movie by the barge called Survival, loaded with sweets for future generations and with the ghosts of its victims from generations past. This volume proudly presents an array of essays that explore Makavejev's double commitment to social and formal cinema.
Editors: Vadim Erent and Bonita Rhoads
Contributors:
Louis Armand,
Nevena Dakovic
Vadim Erent
Goran Gocic
Benjamin Halligan
Patrick Kinsman
Ivana Kronja
Phillip Lopate
Katarina Mihailovic
Lorraine Mortimer
Richard Porton
Maxim Pozdorovkin
Bonita Rhoads
Zoran Samardzija
Anna Schober
Steven Shaviro
Nevenka Stankovic
Aida Vidan
Art:
Marina Abramovic
Julianna Ostrovsky
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