The Last Yugoslav
A review by Richard Byrne
It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. A breathless dispatch in the New York Times filed from a midnight screening of one of Makavejev's films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival offers a glimpse of his glow:
Somewhere along in every film festival there comes that one film that electrifies everyone, that sets everyone from the man in the street to critics to the president of a major American company talking about it with the same passionate enthusiasm.... A standing-room-only audience...cheered and screamed and applauded for a good quarter of an hour at 2 o'clock in the morning.
Makavejev still surfaces occasionally for retrospective interviews and stints on the film-school and festival circuit, but he has not released a film in fifteen years.
His first three features -- Man Is Not a Bird (1965); Love Affair, Or the Case of the Missing...
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