There’s never been another filmmaker quite like Dusan Makavejev. Even in the 1960s, when all of cinema’s steadfast rules seemed to be breaking down and artists such as Godard, Cassavetes, and Marker were dissolving the boundaries between fiction and documentary, Yugoslavia’s Makavejev stood alone. His films about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, raucous, and ribald. Across these, his wild, college-like first three films, Makavejev investigates—with a tonic mix of earnestness and whimsy—love, death, and work; the legacy of war and the absurdity of daily life in a Communist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen.

Eclipse Series 18 Includes:

Man is Not a Bird (Covek nije tica)
A copper-factory town in the mountains serves as the unexpected site for a strange brew of sex, hypnosis, and Beethoven in Makavejev's dizzying debut.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T.)
The romance between a young telephonist and a rat exterminator lays the groundwork for a tragic, funny, and modern look at relationships in sixties Belgrade.

Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zastite)
In this documentary-fiction hybrid, one of Yugoslavia's most infamous (and ridiculous) lost films becomes the canvas on which Makavejev colorfully paints a violent national history and an absurd biography of a real-life escape artist and acrobat.