Dušan Makavejev

Dušan Makavejev (1932-2019) was one of the most influential and controversial filmmakers in Yugoslav and Serbian history. A key figure in the so-called “Black Wave” avant-garde that reimagined Yugoslav cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, Makavejev is known for his sympathy with the marginalised and the desperate, his formal freewheeling, and his deep interest in human sexuality. From 1953 he began making short films and documentaries; the documentary impulse remains powerful throughout his career, as did his tendency to intercut undigested segments from other films into longer works. His first three feature films, Man Is Not a Bird (1965), Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) and Innocence Unprotected (1968), won him international acclaim and set the tone for the Black Wave with their allegorical, New Wave-style commentary on post-war social hypocrisy. His most famous film, 1971’s quasi-documentary ode to “free love” WR: Mysteries of the Organism, was banned in Yugoslavia and Makavejev spent almost two decades exiled from the state’s filmmaking industry. He only returned to Serbia in 1988 with the political farce Manifesto (1988).