The Great Movies III

The structure of the documentary is roughly chronological. We see the fields being prepared, the stage being built, the traffic jams forming. We see crowds trampling over the fences, and there is the moment when the event, conceived as a profit-making enterprise, is officially declared a "free concert" because obviously there was no other option. (There is a moment when Bill Graham, a San Francisco concert promoter who always kept his eye on the gate, advises the organizers, facetiously I think, to fill ditches with flaming oil to keep the gate-crashers out.)

Woodstock is a beautiful, moving, ultimately great film. It seemed to signal the beginning of something. Maybe it signaled the end. Somebody told me the other day that the r96os has "failed." Failed at what? They certainly didn't fail at being the r96os. Now that the period is described as a far-ago time like "the 192os" or "the 193os," how touching it is in this film to see the full flower of its moment, of its youth and hope. The decade began with the election of John F. Kennedy and ended as the last bedraggled citizens of Woodstock Nation slogged off the muddy field and thumbed a ride into a future that would seem, to many of them, mostly downhill.

LL I started making films, sex and humor were considered as very serious matters-even high treason." Dusan Makavejev is remembering the uproar over his WR-Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a film of sex and comedy that had a mixed reaction: best director at the 1971 Chicago festival, around-the-clock screenings at Cannes, an uproar in New York by followers of Wilhelm Reich, banned in Yugoslavia and at the Venice Film Festival, denounced as pornographic, irresponsible, anti-Soviet, anti-American, anti-cinema.

"Maybe it is like a mirror," Makavejev told me late one night in Chicago. "People hold it up to themselves and see reflected only what they are most offended by." That has a way of happening with his work. Sweet Movie (1974) was described by Time as "not a movie-a social sickness." At that crucial period in history spanning the late 196os to the late 1970s, Makavejev (born 1932) was the most eclectic, eccentric, impenetrable, jolly anarchist to come out of Eastern Europe.

He was from Yugoslavia, that late country, and ethnically Serbian, but international to the core.' he director of the first Serbian talkie has a line in Makavejev's Innocence Unprotected (1967) that could apply to Makavejev himself. "Gentlemen, I assure you the entire Yugoslavian cinema came out of my navel. In fact, I have made certain inquiries, and I am in a position to state positively that the entire Bulgarian cinema came out of my navel as well."The movie, a comic treasure, contains most of the footage of the 1944 talkie, about an acrobat whose daring stunts were recycled as patriotic resistance to the Nazis. Makavejev revisits the director, the acrobat, and others who were involved.

That night in Chicago we were walking up Lincoln Avenue to see the Biograph Theater, where Dillinger was shot by the FBI. Makavejev was in the city for a retrospective of his work at Facets Multimedia, and eventually he and several Facets workers ended up in my kitchen, eating vegetable soup and solving the problems of the cinema.

In a real way, Makavejev is his films. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Guy Maddin, Russ Meyer, or Alejandro Jodorowsky, he cannot help but make the films he makes, and no others. In his early career in Yugoslavia, in movies like Love Affair; or, the Case ofthe Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), he delighted in sneaking political parallels past the censors; he was not anticommunist but anti-authority. The man in charge of film funding in Yugoslavia was an old classmate of Makavejev's. Faced with one of his scripts, the man sighed: "Dusan, Dusan, Dusan! I know what you are really saying in this screenplay, and you know what you are really saying. Now go home and revise it so only the audience knows."

Bald, burly, and bearded, Makavejev has fashioned a career out of poverty, windfalls, luck, and genius. The year Sweet Movie played at Cannes, he had a suite at the Carlton Hotel. The next year, I asked him if he was staying at the Carlton again. "Wife and I have tent on beach," he said. "Some years Carlton, some years beach."