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Yugoslavia has its Roma Città Aperta and its auteur is somewhere between Houdini and Popeye, the virtuosic resurrection-collage is "ornamented and conducted" by Dusan Makavejev. The objet trouvé is the first Serbian talkie, a 1942 melodrama of creaky naiveté and mysterious experimentation shot clandestinely under Nazi rule by a muscle-bound ham. In the occupied nation's fantasy, the stout acrobat (Dragoljub Aleksić) is "mother's little babe of steel," suspended over Belgrade by his teeth when not defending his orphaned sweetheart's honor: "Whoever perceived his nerve, admired him without reserve." Twenty-five years later it is exhumed, shuffled, colored and interspersed with newsreel ruination and elegiac-ironic reflection. Snidely Whiplash skulks toward the virginal ingénue, a cut gives the German offensive in vintage maps. Nedić's "peasant state," the escape-artist serenade (suspended cages, explosives, The Internationale), li'l Peter II at the train platform like Lubitsch's student prince. Film strips made from cardboard belts and wooden sandals, the showman upside-down on a pair of unicycles makes it work. Aleksić's own art is on full display: Love songs and thick skulls, abrupt asides to the camera, the paratactic insert that animates a photograph with popping biceps. In wintry '67, he dons a metallic corset and strolls on rooftops with comrades: "See how quickly time passes? Everything changes except us." Makavejev the reflexive archivist knows the pitfalls of nostalgia—one codger kisses a gravestone and gets bird crap on his lips. All the same, his "new production of a good old film" can't help being moved by the elderly tumbler still bending iron bars with his mouth, by the histrionic villainess with her top-hatted dance and the crabby cameraman who declares that "our modern cinema came out of my belly button." A thoroughgoing analysis and appreciation from one disjunctive daredevil to another.
--- Fernando F. Croce |