Dusan Makavejev once said that he filmed his debut feature, Man Is Not a Bird (1965), in "seventeen shades of gray." It's the grays that make it the remarkable work it is. Not the literal grays attached to black and white film, but the grays, the shadings and meanings, that Makavejev finds in the gaps and the traps that lie like land mines throughout his externally simple tale of a rural love affair that cannot take wing in Eastern Serbia's Bor industrial basin. Co-existing alongside the film's emotional core is a liberal critique of the dehumanizing forces implicit in ideology trampling human needs, even that of the relatively mild Tito regime of the postwar years. Man Is Not a Bird, though, is no mere political cartoon, as are so many films attacking capitalism and state socialism.

Makavejev, who was born in 1932 and came of age during and after WWII, took his university degree in psychology. Like many who grew up during a wartime atmosphere, he seems to inform his work with the kind of awareness of one forced to grow up fast, and with few illusions. By temperament, he's more inclined to trust earthiness than ideology. He knows and ruefully loves the human animal, and has few illusions about what drives our wayward species. And he gravitates toward observing what is, not abstract ideas about what ought to be. Before he gets to the film's central characters, he marks out his turf with playful zest, introducing his film with a monologue by a circus performer, a hypnotist, who earnestly advises his audience not to believe in magic. And yet, student of psychology than he is, Makavejev realizes that it's one thing to tell people to be rational, and quite another to believe they will be. Most of us, he realizes, are driven by ancient imperatives that long predate rationality.

In the world of the film, this creates several kinds of blindness, starting with a factory manager on a phone to Belgrade, demanding a beginning to the assembly of huge turbo-processors that will modernize the extraction and smelting of copper, iron and gold and vastly increase production. As he's talking, he turns from a panoramic view of the bleak, immense, soul-crushing complex to its framed portrait on a wall of his office, neatly underlining the shift from the real thing to his idealized view of it. The man who will make the transformation happen is an engineer named Jan Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec), who has worked all over the world, a new industrial messiah whose arrival to supervise the assembly of the huge new jigsaw puzzle will lift the factory into modern times.

When the fortyish Jan arrives, he immediately strikes us as a serious type who has worked his way up through the ranks. Dressed like a working man and not as a suited manager, he's stocky, taciturn, even self-effacing, but the intelligence and experience in his eyes also tell us he's good at what he does, and knows it. Stopping in the town's only hairdressing salon for a shave, he's latched onto by pretty, twentyish Rajka (Milena Dravic), who quickly translates his inquiry about where to rent a room into a short walk to the small house she shares with her parents, and his on-the-spot tenancy there. At first, she teases him about his age, but she's clearly interested in him. When her parents go off to visit a nearby village for a few days, she coquettishly maneuvers him into her bed. If this sounds coldly calculating, it isn't. At least that's not all it is. Rajka is young and vital to the point of lusty. She's ready for a man in her life, more than ready to move out of her parents' house, and sees in Jan a ticket to a better life.

Yet their discreetly photographed sex scenes in her bed with its black fur coverlet matching her black cat have real heat and even the beginnings of affection. Unattached, he obviously has spent much of his peripatetic life being lonely. They go for walks, hold hands, and their gradual warming to one another seems the real thing, especially in a long shot over a cracked, arid landscape strip-mined of all signs of life but them. Soon, though, her worries about whether he has a wife back home - not that he seems to have a home - are succeeded by her fear of a new and more formidable competitor - his job. More than just dedicated, he's a workaholic. We're not sure how much is professional pride and how much he's influenced by the promise of big cash when he says yes to superiors urging him to finish ahead of schedule so they can grab a lucrative contract from South America.

To Rajka, this is not good news. Not only does it mean that Jan will leave sooner, but she will see even less of him now since he has agreed to work nights. Even if he takes her away with him, as he promised, she realizes she'll play second fiddle to his work. She begins to have second thoughts about a young truck driver whose advances she had kept fobbing off; Bosko (Boris Dvornik), who has known her since grade school, keeps dropping into her shop for shaves, even when he doesn't need them, obviously to hit on her. Jan's seriousness, meanwhile does not escape his work crew. One buoyant fellow (Dusan Antonijevic) is angrily told by Jan to stop fooling around and swinging by his legs from a rope ladder up high. When the high-flyer airily says he used to work in a circus, Jan slowly climbs a ladder to get him down. "You're not a bird," he says, giving the film its title, "You can't grow a new head. A worker has to be firm on his feet. Your frivolity will be the death of you." Having the last word, the cheeky underling replies, "And your seriousness will be the death of you."

When Rajka's parents discover the couple in an intimate pose, they angrily order Jan to leave. As their relationship goes downhill, his performance at work rockets upward. After he completes the job two months early, his bosses bypass the cash bonus, giving him a medal instead. And a gala. An orchestra is brought in to crown the event with a performance of the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, with its soaringly idealistic vision of universal brotherhood. Makavejev's handling of it illustrates perfectly the multi-stranded complexity of his seemingly simple film. The music is treated with nothing but respect, including by the factory staff attending compulsorily, and performed with a passion that unlocks its ecstatic energies, but Makavejev interweaves it with a couple of bold contexts. As Jan, seated up front in a borrowed suit, listens alone, the camera cuts to Rajka, who has finally given in to the truck driver's importuning, and is having sex with him in his truck parked a short distance from the concert, climaxing as the music climaxes, ending in orgiastic transport before subsiding. Makavejev also works irony into the picture. As the factory personnel file in to listen to Beethoven's glorious celebration of the ideal of brotherhood, they unquestioningly accept the segregated seating they've been assigned - smelters over here, agglomerators over there, office workers in their section, etc.

It's been foreshadowed by an arresting surrealistic sequence, in which two huge painted panels depicting workers' hands are trucked in to the hall and installed at the back wall, only to be dismantled and removed on the whim of a boss. As counterpoint to the Rajka-Jan story, we see a primitive brute of a worker named Barbool (Stole Arandjelovic) in several pointed contexts. Arrested at the film's beginning for being in the middle of a barroom brawl, he's furious because he's innocent of starting or participating in it. Released, he then becomes nothing but guilty of offenses to which he's utterly blind. Trudging home in a sour mood, he bullies and browbeats his wife (Eva Ras), demanding dinner. When he throws a loaf of bread at her, she meekly picks it up and returns it to him, standing mute alongside him and underneath a framed portrait of a Communist Party official - in case anybody misses the institutionalization of brutal paternalism.

When Barbool's wife claims her three best dresses are missing, Barbool shuts her up. Later, at the market she sees one of her dresses on Barbool's mistress, attacks her, and winds up alongside her in the police station. Barbool is as mystified as he is embarrassed. Yes, he says, it was his wife's dress, but as he bought it for her, isn't it his right to take it back and give it to his mistress? And what's the world coming to when he can't even beat his own wife? His blindness extends to the workplace and his impending extinction in it. His job is to break up steaming hunks of slag and load them into big iron vessels for removal. There he shovels, day in and day out, among toxic gases and by-products. The factory boss, leading a school tour, points Barbool out as an outstanding manual worker, adding in the next breath that such workers will be phased out as soon as the new turbo-processors are installed. Barbool is about to become human slag, and is too stupid to see it. Anyone who missed in the removal of the iconic workers hands mural the lip service paid to workers, in contrast to the way they are in fact dishonored, can't miss it here.

On their way in to the concert, in an aside, a gowned musician's stole catches fire as she and her colleagues make their way through the factory to the stage. (During the filming, completed in 36 days on a sub-atomic budget, Makavejev recalled, the stockings of one of the women in the crew dissolved on her legs during a day of shooting in the acid slag heap!) Ironies abound in Man Is Not a Bird, yet it's the antithesis of a cynical film. Makavejev embraces his characters. Never is he contemptuous of them. His understanding gives it a fullness and a warmth missing from most of the output of other '60s films that thought of themselves as consciousness-raising, making the cinema of most of his Western contemporaries, including celebrated ones like Jean-Luc Godard, seem little more than nursery tantrums. He respects leftist ideals, even though in practice they departed radically from the socialist dream. He's Dionysian, on the side of the wild and anarchic, as opposed to the Appolonian mindset that gives rise to authoritarianism. If there's a villain in Man Is Not a Bird, it's ideology, which he sees as something that separates people.

It's no accident that at the middle of the film and again near the end, he brings back the ragtag circus with its hypnotist. It's more than an innate predisposition toward pop culture and a corresponding wariness of the bourgeois consumerist approach to so-called high culture. The hypnotist, Roko (Roko Cirkovic), ups the ante by needling his audiences, urging them to refute their primitive belief in magic, whether it takes the form of hypnotism or ideology - a statement of no small radicalism in a film from a Communist country! In the film, he has a taker - Barbool's wife, who casts her timidity aside, then casts Barbool aside after listening carefully to the hypnotist's statement of what a fraud hypnosis is. It works on a stageful of audience volunteers, but only because of their complicity in their own submission to it. When a friend asks Barbool's newly enlightened wife what she's going to do, she replies with the decisiveness of a convert: "No more hypnosis."

In short order, we see her seated at the circus on its final visit to the workers, smiling and laughing with the new man in her life - the light-hearted aerialist Jan had chided for being literally and figuratively flighty. As for Jan, his medal seems pretty extraneous as he sits in a café holding it in one hand and Rajka's comb in the other. When a gypsy ensemble enters and digs into its raucous upbeat repertoire, it's more than he can stand. The hitherto stolid Jan throws a bottle into a mirror, smashing it. At the end, we see him in another long shot, alone, trudging away from the bleak industrial landscape into the sunset, presumably toward his next job, looking not so much alone as isolated. Self-isolated, if we can accept the film's suggestion that Jan has hypnotized himself with work to the exclusion of all else. His feet are indeed on the ground. Maybe he should have been a bird, at least once in a while. It's an ending of unflinching integrity, yet it's compassionate, not punitive, another reason why the relatively unheralded Man Is Not a Bird deserves a place on any short list of great debut features.

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: Dusan Makavejev
Cinematography: Aleksandar Petkovic
Art Direction: Miodrag Jeremic
Music: Petar Bergamo
Film Editing: Ljubica Nesic
Cast: Milena Dravic (Rajka), Janez Vrhovec (Jan Rudinski), Eva Ras (Barbool's Wife), Stole Arandjelovic (Barbulovic 'Barbool'), Boris Dvornik (Vozac kamiona), Dusan Antonijevic (Zeleznicar).
BW-81M.

by Jay Carr

Sources:
Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev, by Lorraine Mortimer, University of Minnesota Press, 2008
IMDB