Dušan Makavejev – short films 1

The drifter Antoni wanders the city entertaining kids and encounters a clothing store with a mannequin on display. He performs for the figure and notices it turns into a woman, only to have the storefront glass foil the encounter. A tale of the power of imagination and disillusionment with reality, this, one of Makavejev’s first films, was shot in an amateur Belgrade film club.

Beekeeper’s Scrapbook is the first in a series of Makavejev’s 1958 shorts about folk art with scripts penned by Vasko Popy. Shot at Ljubljana’s Ethnographic Museum, it shows amazing polychrome-covered beehives from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and takes viewers on a ride through the rich iconography, with absorbing and sometimes even humorous commentary.

For ages, women have woven carpets – that is the starting point of this ethnographically leaning film by Makavejev. Colors Are Dreaming show the patterns as they appear on kilims – their textures and living hues, while the interwoven shots produce abstract images of geometric, plant and animal motifs infused with the colors of dreams.

This nine-minute film presents Serbian folk funeral art, headstones adorned with polychrome relief sculptures that meld Christian icons with motifs of daily life. The editing keeps rhythm to the soundtrack, where images of saints are interspersed with close-ups of grave slithering snails. The film charmed John Grierson, who included it in his The Wonderful World television program.

A young woman tries to make love to a park statue, but despite her passionate efforts, the monument remains cold and heartless. Don’t Believe in Monuments is an early short, where Makavejev subtly ridicules Yugoslav state-sponsored monument and history worship.

In a parody of Snow White told by Yugoslav actor Mija Aleksić, this adaptation of a story by Vlad Bulatovic melds a surreal feel with communist rhetoric to satirize bureaucratic gibberish.

In What Is a Workers’ Council? Makavejev clearly relishes filming a boy and girl visiting a chocolate factory, where they learn the secrets of production and labor organization and are given more latitude than adults – e.g. to yawn during a board meeting.

Inspired by the 1928 experimental film by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich, The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, this amateur short is the story of a man who spends his entire life under the thumb of anonymous bureaucrats. The titular seal adorns everything in life, from birth to death, in a criticism of bureaucracy and power over the individual, in a film that makes stylistic references to silent cinema.