Sezgin Boynik - ON MAKAVEJEV, ON IDEOLOGY

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Sezgin with Minna and Roza in Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP) Underground Printing House Museum in Tbilisi. Photo by Soso.

the Concrete and the Abstract in the Readings of Dušan Makavejev Films[1]

1. New Science for Reading the Films

Amos Vogel who is one of the most prominent populariser and theoretician of ‘subversive film’ genre propose an epistemological origin for this cinema genre based on discoveries in science, especially discoveries in Quantum Mechanics and Theory of Relativity. They created such a conception of the world that according to Vogel, who quotes Einstein, the science became a version of the religion which should be specified with the terms of “the impenetrable” and “the incomprehensible”. The opaqueness of this new science is new state of being of world which has an immense consequences to our political, philosophical and artistic conceptions as well: “to withstand these [changes] we need a new breed of man: flexible, tolerate, innovative and questioning.” [2] This “new man” which is at the edge of the “decline of Western hegemony and bourgeoisie civilization” (p. 18) accordingly needs to replace a terms of the art, or of the modern art, as: “dissolution, fragmentation, simultaneity and decomposition”.

In sum this is definition for the subversion, which is scientific, political, philosophical and artistic replacement of the logical with the illogical in shaping of new policy of “fight against the growing international trend toward totalitarianism” (p. 1) could be described as some kind of kaleidoscopic world-view.

The political and artistic consequences of this new epistemology, has definitive effects to the practice of the cinema, which has to be subversive or not at all. This practice of cinema similar to the complexity of science is, as recently Alberto Toscano put referring to turn fashionable in contemporary social science, based on the “refusal of reductionism.”[3] This refusal , as very concisely described by Toscano, “suspends the criteria for distinguishing between the ideal and material” (p. 181), and could be furthermore clarify as the “(re)turn” to vitalism which at the last instance of its theoretical operation suppresses the antagonisms between the materialism and the idealism. Complexity turn in social sciences, as well in the aesthetics, is based on the assumption of “world’s unpredictable and dynamic richness” (p. 183) where the cognitive position becomes impossible. This ultimate “indeterminacy” (as Vogel-Einsten’s “impenetrability” and “incomprehensibility”) of the world is fully penetrated by the ideology of science which is constituted by the denegation of the antagonistic contradictions. In this beautiful and harmonious complexity, objects knowledge are in endless re-figuration between the idealism and the materialism. This constant re-figuration which suspends the decision between the antagonisms is the core of this philosophy. What was once material might reappear as ideal, or vice versa. Philosophical effects of this complexity turn is not the abstraction of the thought, but the dis-qualification of the singularity and the “partisanship” of the thought which should based, as Toscano writes on the antagonistic principles of materialism.

In reading of the films of Makavejev, Vogel is most explicit in describing this “complexity”; according to him Makavejev’s “viewpoint is cosmic: fragmented, kaleidoscopic and multilayered.”[4] This “cosmos” is completely different from the classical cosmos of the XIX century men; it is based, accordingly, on the most novel conceptions of the scientific knowledge which “[as his films] express time-space continuums, the absence of linear realities, the proven inability of our sense organs to ‘understand’ the world around us.” The epistemology which is based on the “conventions of finitude, predictability, narrowness, and order” as was case with the linear and narrative cinema no longer exist for Makavejev: “the world is now seen as infinite, more complex than ever imagined…” (p. 51). This inability is ideological not only because it is enabling the decision between the antagonistic contradictions, but also because it is suspending the contradictions between the antagonisms. Vogel is dreaming of science (or of Heisenberg’s principle or Schrödinger’s cat) and retrospectively of cinema-science which could allow whole different spectrum of antagonistic positions or conventions to co-exist in one strange but nevertheless harmonious whole. This utopia at same time does have very social and political consequences, and Vogel is drawing these consequences through the reading of Makavejev’s WR: film is “representative of a new breed of international subversion between October Revolution, Consciousness III (in USA) and Wilhelm Reich.” (p. 53). Utopia of this tripartite is introduced as the ideological re-formulation of contradictions as the complexity where the antagonisms of the structure are frozen in conceptualization of wholeness. This is sure the philosophy of the New Age and apart from epistemological stalemate it also re-produces the politics based not on struggle but on peaceful co-existence.[5]

Writing on Dušan Makavejev’s films in her book length study thirty years after Vogel, film scholar Lorrain Mortimer is insisting as well for the new and more complex science for understanding the films of this cinema. This science which Mortimer is hoping to develop as a guiding principle in reading of Makavejev’s films is based on the complexity of antagonisms where the peaceful opposition is not anymore between materialism and idealism, but between the philosophies of the two different interpretation of “material”. These “materials” has different nature, one which is abstract, intellectual, sophisticated and cultural contrasting the other related to the concrete, real, sensual, carnal and human. Even throughout the book Mortimer seemingly prefers the second “material”; there is not an explicit tension between these two which would open the field for the theory of contradictions. Again, antagonisms are not thought as the contradictions, and the complexity between these two “materials” are stalemated in the utopian co-existence. Most clearly we can see this in her interpretation of the end of the film WR: Mysteries of Organism, where bewildered and confused Vladimir Illich who just cut off the head of his lover Milena (as the result of irresolvable tension between the intellectual and emotional, or ‘ideological’ and ‘real’ part of his consciousness) walks through the woods and forest where the Gypsies are seating around the fire accompanied by the soundtrack of song by Bulat Okudzhava. “That is harmony with communal ethic” writes Mortimer and interprets the conclusion as “the Marxian ideal of creating a society that provides for each according to his or her need, one that respects all living beings.” Finally Vladimir Illich joins a group of gypsies warming themselves around a fire in the snow. [6] The harmony which Mortimer is recovering from the last sequence of Makavejev’s film is psychological because it is appearing as the post-traumatical solution to the irresolvable tension of psyche. Nevertheless this harmony has also more effective ideological function, as it is based on the co-existence of two antagonistic positions of “material”; the one which is a abstract material (Marxian ideal) and another one which is related to the concrete material (real needs of human being). But the Ideology of co-existence in Mortimer’s reading of Makavejev is not fully realized before this inner tendency toward the harmony is not rested at the natural set of the Gypsies warming around the fire. This pattern of “natural” which is strictly ideological is crucial in most of the readings of Makavejev. We have to grasp this “nature” in its full complications. In order to realize this, first we have to understand the epistemology of the Mortimer’s cinematic theory. This epistemology, similar to Vogel’s, is based on the replacement of the old scientific paradigms with the new ones. Mortimer is very concisely describing this new science as non-euclidean and immediately she emphasizes the political consequences of this knowledge as: “’Euclidean mind’ haunting our thinking about utopia since Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot Cambodia.”(p. 58), and she is adding to this also “the Tito’s Yugoslavia without Milovan Djilas” in pages following the mentioned quotation. This “Euclidean mind” which is the episteme in the core of all the various totalitarianisms is at the same time the scientific foundation of the classical thought. The “non-eucliedan mind” as the ontology of the XXth century men with its n-dimensionality, Theory of Relativity and complexity altogether are the epistemologies of the new science which Mortimer intends to evaluate in the readings of the art of Makavejev. With every respect to the complexity of the Mortimer’s theory we could reduce her system to two successive sources of thought; to rational which roughly corresponds to the first or abstract “material” of human knowledge, and the irrational which is corresponding to the second, or concrete “material” of human knowledge. This concrete and irrational mind is what designs the cinema of Makavejev, but not in its absolute dominancy, it has to be in the “dialogue with the rational.” (p. 29). Resurrection of the category of co-existence and harmony is performed by the inclusion of the cinematic theory of Edgar Morin who in his The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man book written in 1957 whose English translator and introducer is Mortimer herself, imagines the “country where the animal, vegetable, and mineral, the spiritual and material, are in some kind of mobile continuity” (p. 28) which is battling against the paradigm inherited by the Descartes, of “disjunction/reduction/simplification that leads us to shatter and mutilate the complexity of phenomena.”(p. 29). [7] This idealist irrationalism has very special relation to thought, and Mortimer is in the introduction to the Morin’s book drawing further political consequences from it: “It was the ‘mystical epileptic reactionary’ Dostoyevsky, rather than all the great secular thinkers, who had more clearly seen the fanatical spirit of Bolshevism before it came into being.”[8]

Love Affair

Mortimer takes this thought further in the field of anthropology by elaborating on the early writings of Dennis Wrong on critique of “over-socialized conceptions of human nature” concluding that “discursively produced and abstracted human conceptions are repressing the real human existence consisted of flesh, blood and bones.” (p. 51-53). Conjunct to this anthropology is the theory of Michael Jackson on re-enchantment based on “libidinal and occult economies”, which are not against the reason, as Mortimer feels obliged to stress, but against “the fetishization of a logocentric notion of reason…that has eclipsed our sense of the variety of ways in which human beings create viable lives – emotional, bodily, magical, metaphorical,…practical and narrative.” (p. 54). With this two elaborations we arrived at the kernel of conception of the “nature” in the Mortimer’s reading of the world (of Makavejev), critique of over-socialized abstraction and introduction of sensuous magic, but we have yet to describe the “materiality” of this universe of imagination, re-enchantment, and concrete. Precisely we have to arrive at the core of the philosophy of the “natural”.

“To talk about Makavejev and his context we need to talk not only of fruit and flowers, of animals, even rats and mice, but of the installation of a shower, the baking of strudel, a strongman hanging from plane by his teeth, a man singing to a horse in the snow and addressing him as God, and the magic of the severed head coming to life and speaking of its convictions.” (p. 7) writes Mortimer in very beginning of his book on Makavejev. All these small and big things, normal and paranormal, organic and inorganic are the “materials” of Makavejev. This “materials” primarily are alluding to a concrete existence of the things, but more important and apparent allusion of this concreteness is that the “material” is related to the human nature. In many readings the materiality of Makavejev’s films, as we will see more in coming examples, is concerned with the human concreteness which has been described as the sensual or carnal. Mortimer is from this “materiality” and “concreteness” constructing a specific epistemology based on the ontology of the body, or sensual. The “carnal truth” as she names it, is epistemology of trans-cultural and directly related to a “phenomenon of the men”, which has its “visible continuities” through his historical being. This is why, as she explains, we are affected by the old ethnographic photos of people from different cultures. Their laughter, anger, worries or happiness is the same as ours. Throughout the centuries and millennia’s nothing has changed, we are still what we have been always, the men in this world. Knowledge of “carnal truth” is nothing more than the tautology of everyday obviousness; it speaks as Louis Althusser described, with the ideological language of repetition and identity. It is not only the idealist philosophies which are infected by this everlasting sameness of the human “materiality” that guarantees the continuous re-production of the trans-historical “men” or “human” of ideology.[9] Mortimer is so much concerned with this “carnal truth” based on the re-cognition of the obviousness of “materiality” (sameness of the smile, cry or fight) that is not even much bothered if this “truth” is in contradiction with the truth introduced by the sociological, cultural or political facts; for example the fact that Frank Sinatra was a puppet of mafia and corrupted pop star is not bothering her, because Sinatra is speaking of “carnal truth”, or as Mortimer puts: “whatever he said or sang the layer of tenderness in the grain of his voice [will always] gave him away.” (p. 31-32). We will see soon that in the theory of Mortimer, even if less explicit, this is also confusing the “understanding” of the carnality of the Radovan Karadzic’s racism. But nevertheless, Makavejev is master of the “carnal truth”; his mice, his acrobats, his partisans, his fascists, his gypsies, his hippies everything in his movies, and all his “materials” are telling this truth of the human nature.

Sweet movie

Things in the cosmos of Mortimer get more complex when she confronts this “truth” to the concept of ideology. Considering the proposal that this “truth” is obvious, spontaneous, idealist, trans-historical, and based on re-cognition we can easily conclude, following the writings of Althusser, that this is not a “truth” or cognition at all, that this is based on the spontaneous knowledge of the ideology. But in confronting the concept of ideology to the “carnal truth” Mortimer is drawing two parallel conclusions which are speaking with very different language than of Althusser’s. Even if in complete opposition to Althusser’s problematic, Mortimer’s interrogation of ideology is in communication with Althusser, in fact she is trying to develop the counter-Althusser theory related to the “truth” and ideology. In principle Mortimer is claiming that the body and sensuality are speaking of “truth” which the discursive and constructed elements of the ideology (such as sociology and culture) are distorting. More we are close to our bodies, less we are manipulated and distorted by the ideologies. She has a social and a epistemological approach to this claim; socially it is related to the Makavejev’s films subject of the “Eastern European real people”, or to the place where “the young are the most mad and mature” which is the exact opposite of the films and lives of petit bourgeois free world, where young bourgeois intellectuals in the crisis of “post-pubertal” leftism endlessly and dogmatically, and abstractly discuss about the revolution. (p. 71). This “westerners” were so much under the influence of the political-theoretical “anti-humanism” of Althusser’s Marxist structuralism, writes Mortimer, that they could “had not learned lessons from history or contemporary realpolitik about the ways that the sovereignty of an idealized “people” could be used to bludgeon actual human beings, to legitimize tyrannies and maintain the domination of those who loved wielding power” (p. 72). As usual, humanism is on the agenda here with the strategically calculated position of disqualifying the politics of the Eastern European left with the realm of their sensuality. In this trans-ideology what matters is not the “left” or “right” but the definitive truths which the bodies of these “left” or “right” men are reproducing in their everyday lives. This is the “concrete” condition of the human, where they could “appear in their existential plenitude, free from their ideological loading.” (p. 74). Epistemological relation of carnal truth to the ideology in Mortimer’s book has been most illuminatingly described in the passage where she compares the work of Makavejev to the work of Jean Rouch. She claims that both men had the ethnographic dimension of the knowledge in their movies, but this dimension would reveal itself only in of “unpredictability and mystery”(p. 100). Apart from political and social circumstances of socialist conditions which as the dogmatic ideologies prevents the “truth” being practiced, also there are academic theories which distort or eliminates this “truth” to be re-cognized. In introduction to Edgar Morin’s book, Mortimer is clear with specifying which academic theories are obstacles in realization of this “imaginary cinema”, that “stripped of flesh, poetry, scepticism and imagination from film studies”; it is a theory of cinema “inspired by Louis Althusser’s brand of Marxism, film scholars advocated a kind of surgical practice, on that tended to cut out the heart, soul, even the guts of the film experience to get out the cancer of ideology.”(p. xi). Here we have two Althusser’s, one which is the ideologue of the political dogmatism, and second the surgeon of the sensuality of real experience. We will in following pages make more explicit the philosophical and historical conjunctures of this denegation of ideology from the cinema studies, but now we have to deal with the content of the “truth” which Mortimer recognizes in the Makavejev’s carnality? This “carnality” is generally manifested as two antagonistic fields of Makavejev’s “cosmos”; one is sex and other is death, or joy and terror.

Sweet movie

2. What is Ideological in Sex?

Almost all the readings of Makavejev’s films are linking the “sexuality” issue which is explicitly manifested in his films, with certain ideological background. In these readings the sex as the affirmative “material” of Makavejev’s concreteness has clear ideological association. In this chapter we will try to make this relation between the Ideology and the Sex more explicit. According to these readings, if alienation from the sensual means that human beings are under the spell of ideology and abstraction than the practice of sex has to have automatic affirmation of the un-ideological. This formula, as it is operating in Mortimer’s conceptualization, could be proscribed as: where is the sex there shall not be an ideology. But things get its famous complexity when we apply the structural dichotomy familiar to the “complex theories” to the issue of the sex. According to this schema there has to be a concrete, real and a true sex in opposition to the abstract, intellectual and false sex. The readings of Makavejev, including Mortimer, are reproducing these dual sex experiences, as the dichotomies of alienated and non-alienated sex, or as the practices of fixed ideological and non-ideological positions. Many of these readings are related to the two different and antagonistic sexual orientations (Milena’s and Vladimir Illich’s) as the main forces of the dialectics of the film WR: Mysteries of Organism. This two orientations are strictly categorized with their political ideologies; Milena’s orientation as the Reichian whose ambiguity (“she is dressed but talks about fuck,” or “she rather talks about it than does it”) reminds the policy of Yugoslavia’s non-alignment or in-betweeness, whereas the Vladimir Illich as the determined communist with the Soviet origins has more direct but Pavlovian approach to the sex. Milena’s ambiguity will cost her head, but Vladimir’s narrowness and simplicity will cause him to lose his political beliefs. As we remember, Vladimir in the end of the film kills the Milena and joins the “natural” state of being. Vladimir can not survive the real and concrete sex, because he is dedicated to the abstract and kitsch sex of his ideals which is obstacle for him to fully penetrate into the materiality of the “earth”. Translating to the terms of the previous discussion this would mean that he was too academic and ideological to have sex with the liberated Reichian woman. Raymond Durgnant in his full length book on WR: Mysteries of Organism is most exemplary in description of Vladimir: “its dominant ideology, rational, altruistic, Behaviourist, would construct his mind, his sense of self, in toto. Vladimir’s dismissal of ‘dying for love’ as ‘brutishly zoological’ evokes Marxist dismissal of Darwinism, psychoanalysis, biology (and ecology).”[10]

In order to see the connection between Vladimir’s ideology, his scientific postulates, and politics with the sex we have to look at the Thomas Elsaesser’s early text on the Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator published in 1968. Switchboard Operator, the second feature film of Makavejev is also dealing with the impossible relation between free-woman and the rigid-man, which ends with the madness of man and death of woman. The man’s name is Ahmed.[11] In Elsaesser’s interpretation Ahmed’s enthusiasm for Dziga Vertov’s film and Berthold Brecht/ Hans Eisler’s music is not part of the Makavejevian irony and pastiche.[12] He is aware and sure of the euphoric and emancipatory role which these cultural products are playing in the minds of Ahmed (and of Makavejev), but he is adding that the real problem starts when this euphoria and emancipation is frozen in reality and resides only as the abstraction in the memories of its believers, or its practitians. Real problem is, accordingly, than that the revolution lost its permanence or its concreteness and recuperated to the realm of ideals. This recuperation is most explicit in the field of sex and love: due to the “communism’s backwardness in recognizing human emotional needs and gender problems” where together with the strong working ethic prevailing in socialist countries “traumatizes the relations between the sexes.”[13] Elsaesser is adding to the familiar pattern of Makavejev as the “film maker of concrete versus abstract”, a new nuance which has the deeper historical and epistemological implications. Namely the euphoria and emancipation of the socialist countries had this essential drive of revolution which went wrong. The revolution as the dense experience, vitality, vividness of the concrete has vanished during the course of the scientific socialism and turned to a memory “which became too impersonal, too abstract and schematic.”(p. 323) Sexologist and criminologist who during the film of Switchboard Operator are explaining scientifically the film’s plot are according to Elsaesser the main reasons of this recuperation. Then, Ahmed as the true communist who loves Vertov, Brecht and Revolution loves them as the idea which lives in his head, and can not see the real emancipation of the revolution in his everyday which is the joy, euphoria, excitement, and orgasm altogether.

Sweet movie

The article of Constantin Parvulescu on the politics and sexual revolution of three Eastern European film directors is most explicit with this claim that “sexual revolution” is a redundant term, since “revolution always, necessarily, is also a sexual revolution.”[14] This pleonasm Parvulescu is deducing from the works of Marta Meszaros as the contradiction between the class origin and the love relations in the Socialist state (Hungary) or from the conflict between the labour and the sex policy through the work of Milos Forman related to another socialist state (Czechoslovakia). Labour policy of socialist states is in both examples a real cause of the sexual problems; it is formulated with the dull and gaunt terms as “love and sexuality are distractions from the important things on the agenda of Soviet-style communism: production and five-year plan.” (p. 87), this disability of management of the sex issues inevitably will haunt the communist states and this repression would ruin the revolution. With this we are at the field of the Herbert Marcuse who in his book Eros and Civilization developed the hypothesis on the political causes of socialized psychoanalysis; or the concept of the popularized Freudianism adopted to the organism of the social whole. Parvulescu is taking this tension between sex and revolution to the ontological sphere when by asking the crucial question related to the problematic of Makavejev’s films: how much (sexual) revolution can man (and woman) endure? (p. 92). Considering the pleonasm of terms the sex and the revolution we can easily claim that this problematic of “how much man can endure the revolution?” is also familiar with another problematic of Makavejev, the one regarding the abundance of the corpses in his films.

Raymond Durgnant well justified this conflict between the men and the revolution with the Beatles’ song Revolution from 1968 which he took as the parole in his reading of the Makavejev’s WR: “You say you want a Revolution/ well you know…” What is this revolution about? It is best described by Pavlevescu, through the character of Reichian Milena, as the consciousness-thing based on the “spontaneity, noise, and “natural” which supports the values of “diversity and originality.” (p. 100, 101).[15] The complexity effect of this “revolution” is immediate task, even if we accept its impossibility (or as Pavlevescu puts: “no revolution is ready to have these values as its ultimate goals”, p. 101), we should not forget, as this reading argues, the catastrophic effects which re-pressed libido and pleasure caused to the million’s of peoples of various socialist states. From Milena’s neighbours chanting in the chorus that “life without fucking isn’t worth a thing” Pavlevescu is drawing far reaching conclusions on the relation between sexuality and fascism, especially on the (red) fascism of the Soviet republic: “the promotion of free love is an opportunity to criticize the legacy of Stalinism.”(p. 99).

At the end of his intellectual elaboration the author has reduced Makavejev’s problematic to Frommian dilemma of anxious man escaping from the freedom; one more time we arrived at the affirmative concept of the men with “wealthy and colourful nature” endlessly reproducing itself in the presence of the “earth”. [16] This is the “men” of most of readings of Makavejev, the man for whom his own manhood is sole proof of his un-ideological nature of its concreteness, and “materiality”.

Nina Power in her brilliant recent article on sexuality of Makavejev’s features re-formulates the above mentioned discussions on relation between sex and politics from the materialist point of view, by asking the question on the content of the “materiality of Makavejev’s work?”[17] Her answer is direct and unconditional; it is the “dark force that lies beneath the surface of both everyday and the universal.” (p. 44). With this we are now in completely different terrain than of the previous readings where “beneath” the Makavejev’s “earth” lays the affirmation and the positive life drive waiting for the emancipation. This “dark material” as constitutive force of Makavejev’s films, has also a visceral effect, but this is not linked with the celebration of sexual liberation. Power referring to the materialism of Deleuze and Guattari is claiming that the destructivity in Makavejev’s plots is due to the “quick ‘deteritorialization’ of this desire [or material].”(p. 47) Furthermore she is suggesting that at the core of Makavejev’s politics lays the gradualist policy of the “step-by-step organization of liberation” [18]. Theoretically for us, today, watching the films of Makavajev it would mean that instead as it is suggested in the agnosticism of the immediate flow of the uncontrollable force or the spontaneous expulsion of the revolutionary drive, we have to handle with these forces within their own terrain and with their own terms. This is indeed the practical position, but it is allowing possible theoretical and materialist reading of Makavejev detached from the ideology of the human, freedom, “nature”, tendency of this nature, and from all kind of “spiritualisms”. It is against translating the terms of sensuality to the terms of knowledge; or to put in philosophical language using Althusserian terms it is to avoid the “abstract empiricism” of confusing the object of knowledge with the real object. [19]

Or as Alain Badiou, discussing sex as one of the “passions for the real” of the twentieth century claimed through the reading of five cases of Freud, argued that this insertion of meaning to the object of sex has ended up in “culturalist” and “spiritualist” formalizations: “the enduring aim of this ploy is to reintroduce meaning into the place of, and instead of, truth, thereby injecting the ‘cultural’ into libido. This is hermeneutic ploy, and Freud immediately saw it as an insidious negation of his discovery. Briefly, it was necessary to come back to bare sex and to its radical absence of meaning.”[20]

Otherwise we would end up at the constant misanthropy and nihilism of the sexual politics, because as Power rightly warns all “politics based on the desire will be [always] unfair.” (p. 47).

3. Corpses and their “Times”

This dark forces which Nina Power has named as the “materiality” of Makavejev’s work is also constitutive part of many idealist readings of the Makavejev. Usually this dark force is related to the “death” or “corpse” and apart from their concreteness being constantly underlined, another ideological effect of these readings is “re-humanization” of these corpses which is either related to the processes of rehabilitation or reconciliation. As Mortimer wrote: “I want to get blood, flesh, and bones in the picture, to bring back not ‘the body’, the reified and abstracted one of much social theory, but the tortured, slaughtered, decaying bodies of people whose lives were cut short, people loved and remembered by others” (Mortimer, p. 189).

Famous film critic and film theoretician Cavell, after watching the film-experiment of Makavejev at Harvard University in1978, where he compiled the silent sequences from Ingmar Bergman’s various films and produced a strange cinematic experience, wrote a long article on Makavejev’s films in general which is still very influential and largely cited work. Point of departure for Cavell is that Makavejev’s films are truly “concrete” works of art, writing on the Sweet Movie he claims that “it is most concentrated work that follows the idea that the way to assess the state of the world is to find out how it tastes.”[21] Immediately after this methodological proposition, Cavell adds that “orthodox epistemologists” establishment in Film Theory can not penetrate to this truth. Cavell proposal is gustatory methodology of knowledge, or as he expresses it with the language of exorcism, the method to makes these things “to work itself out.” (p. 18). According to him the films of Makavejev are formally and spiritually complex structures (for example they are endless variations between the documentary and the fictional form) which he is describing as the “films of excavation” (p. 19). This method which would possibly lead to the gustatory experience of the art work is in the end a “reconstruction of something lost or broken” which eventually could contribute to the better understanding of ourselves, or as Cavell puts: “this search [the excavation] at once traces the integrity of the individual strata of a history and plots the positions of adjacent strata.” This is not only important as the practices of excavation popularized by the spiritualized psychoanalysis of “digging to unearth buried layers of the psyche.” (p. 19), but this methodology has at the same time very far reaching philosophical consequences. This philosophy based on a “principle of aligning the adjacent strata” according to Cavell is familiar with overall film-form of Makavejev’s work. This is the principle of Makavejev, and this alignment has different meaning than the montage of Eisenstein and the collages of Surrealists. Alignment of the history and plot in positions of adjacency is possible only with the reintroducing of historicist conception of the history. The ‘historical time’ which has its own tendency, linearity, integrity, and homogeneity is the history of ideology, practical field which makes it possible is the similarity or adjacency between the moments of the linear development. Before dealing with the consequences of this historicism to the Film Theory we have to ask what the “materials” of this adjacency are. Or we could ask: what constitutes the kinship between various “materials” (wars, plots, revolutions, fascisms, etc…) of the historicist development. Philosophical answer to this would obviously, by the logic of its own schema imply that the absence of the contradiction between different “materials” is pre-condition for the realisation of the alignment. But this move is not enough to “theoretically” satisfy the adjacency between this proximal materials; this thought would need one more step in this operation to fulfil the task of historicist application. It has to name this historical “materials” as the “concretes”, as the “real” things, which are beyond the earth and history, which actually will reside for a long time in their “materiality” beneath our conception. These historical materials are, as Cavell puts the real bones of the famous and infamous actors of the various plots of history. This principle of historicism based on the materiality of the bones has “significance as the intersection of nature and history, as a task of a continuous and natural unfolding of interpretations, each felt as a complete and each making possible the next, until a human form of life fits together.” (p. 20). The same principle of alignment with adjacency is also operative in the film editing technique favoured by Andre Bazin as ‘continuous shooting’ which Cavell compares to the excavation method. This principle which Bazin primarily developed in his analyzes of Orson Welles films has been described by Andrew Dudley as the “invisible montage” and it is most clearly explicated in the writings of Bazin related to the technique of sequence shooting as the new language of decoupage. Bazin describes this technique as: “If, through a deliberate effort of attention, we try to see the ruptures imposed by the camera on the continuous unfolding of the event represented, and try to understand clearly why we normally take no notice of them, we realize we tolerate them because they nevertheless allow an impression to remain of continuous and homogenous reality…this is universal psychological experience.”[22] This is very sensitive issue to deal in such a short notice, but we have to note that Bazin has underlined the intelligibility and the abstractness of this process of realization of reality. But in his philosophy this realization is too quickly happening without necessary detour for abstraction, which is based on the postulates of revelation driven by the metaphysical conception of the history propagated by Mounier or de Chardin.[23] If the sameness of the concrete materials of the world constitutes its “nature” and “history” through continuity, the film art which is claiming to be real shall be structured in the editing table as the continuous experience as well. Art has to gain its lost wholeness, “to reconstruct its break” or to claim its integrity. This mimicry of the world by the film-art is not a simple mimicry of the Aristotelian classical schema; it is based on complex set of elements. This would be clear if look at the thought operation of Cavell from the point of his discovery of continuity; after this discovery he proceed his philosophy with a claim that Makavejev uses a natural time of the continuity at such a extent that his films could appear to us as a real world which could be “tasted”.

The possibility of this taste is acquired not only by the historicist ideology, but at the same time through the ability of these films to reveal the hidden things, or the hidden history. In order to achieve this, the film-work has to investigate its truth not by the rational logic of its own discourse, but by the “intuition” which would make the invisible montage of the world apparent. In this case the films of Makavejev are not about the conceptual configuration of the world, it is directly related to the world. It is film which becomes the world. This ideology is taken further by the film critic Charles Warren who under the influence of Cavell described Makavejev’s films as the earth-like, or “commitment to the body, a quality of earth, which insists on the body and physical quality of what is before the camera.” Furthermore, according to Warren these are the “moments of history apprehensible as such.”[24] This apprehension to Cavell happened at the moment of intuition of his thought which following the feast-scene with Otto Muehl’s Commune in Sweet Movie that associated him of Karl Marx’s characterization of religion as the heart of the heartless world (?!) arrived at Carl Gustav Jung’s archetype-haunted dream on the “secrets of the earth”.[25] The”missing heart of the world” is compensated by the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness; or the world of Marx healed by the para-psychology of Jung. In the archetypal-dream the secret of the earth is revealed to Jung as the bones resting in the trans-historical time at the bottom of the cave. It is not surprising that Cavell in his intuitive investigation comes to the same end; the bones and the corpses of the history as the real earthiness of the world and the Makavejev films. His moment of history of this apprehension is the Katyn Forest massacre which he describes as the “ultimate evil” of the modern history. This sequence of the dark side of history is as the archival material re-presented in the film Sweet Movie. This intuition apart from establishing the materiality which is ‘concrete’ of the films of Makavejev, is also describing this material with the terms of the death and terror. With underlining the Katyn massacre as the ultimate of this dark forces Cavell is proposing a political explanation for this morbidity, which is the Stalinism. We will in following pages see what this Stalinism stays for, but for now it is important not to drop from the line of intuition of Cavell, which ends the story with a moral tale: that even if Sweet Movie is “picturing the earth with full of corpses”, its ultimate lesson is that “fight for freedom continues to originate in the demands of our instincts, the chaotic cry of our nature, our cry to have a nature.” (p. 26)

Lorrain Mortimer took this intuition even further, and developed the whole historicist explanation of the world through the films of Makavejev. In this world the bones and the death occupies very crucial place; they are not resting in the memoirs of the people, but at the core of our understanding of the world which is based on the carnality. The bones are ultimate’s of the carnal truth. They are the guarantors of our “nature” which is yet to be reconciled in the over-socialized and the secular world. They are according to Mortimer, the imaginary, emotional and somatic part of our knowledge which in many cases has more far reaching consequences than the economical, political or cultural realms. Not to listen and understand this realm will inevitably end in cataclysm, as it was case with the Yugoslavia as Mortimer tries to demonstrate. The fact that Communist authorities in Yugoslavia discouraged the villagers from opening the sites and removing remains of those massacred by the Partisans had haunted the mind of the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian men for the decades, writes Mortimer. Referring to an article written by Aleksa Djilas in the beginning of the eighties that this resistance by the Communists to re-concile with their own horrors (“not properly buried dead bodies”) might have “implications for the future of the country” is according to Mortimer a prophetic statement. This is prophecy of the “carnal truth” which does not need ‘sociology’ in order to justify itself. Actually this discourse on postponing the re-conciliation (“proper burial”) was crucial element in ideological construction of Yugoslavian break-up and devastating transitional aftermath.[26]

This is not anymore about the dead who bury the dead as Marx warned, but the step further from this, about the dead who buries the living and captures them in their trans-historical immobility.[27]

4. Abstract as the ideology, Concrete as the Life

At the current philosophical “cosmos” where we arrived, the two dichotomous strata is determining entire readings of Makavejev’s world; an abstract world represented by the ideologies which its ultimate expression reached with the Fascism and Communism, and the concrete which is the real material of the Makavejev’s world: the sex and the death. The complexity which this schema implies is actually based on the mutual re-configuration of the idealist and the materialist philosophies; it is suspending any world which is either materialist or idealist. They are both at the same time. There is not a dividing line, which is essential in any philosophical intervention.[28] Silent assumption of this world view is that of vitalism, which at the last instance reproduces the philosophies based on the idealism. In this case the concreteness which is essential for Makavejev’s world is not a material of the materialist philosophy; this materiality as we have shown has very strange character. It is a concreteness of the idealism, or the reality of the ideology. It has its own life, ontology, tendency and homogeneity. Furthermore this concreteness is the merit of the ultimate truth, which has been labelled as the “carnal truth”. This carnality reveals its truth either as the real spatial performance as in the sexuality or joyfulness (because fucking takes place) or in the level of the spatio-temporality of the death and the bones (bones are taking place for a longer time). So concreteness as the idealist imagination can take place both in space and time as the real continuums of our ‘cosmos’ (the word which continuously reappears in these readings). Only those having the real and sex and the deep feeling of history can live the life of un-ideological.

This tautology is visible in almost all humanist ideologies, or as the Althusser showed the humanism is constantly reproducing itself in its absolute self-referentiality. Althusser in his famous article Marxism and Humanism where he developed his anti-humanist hypotheses is primarily dealing with the humanist Marxism of the Eastern European thinkers. It is performed a theoretical reversal of this situation by re-introducing the concept of the human (via concrete and real) at the film studies where the theory of Althusser was most effective; this reversal is most strongly performed in the readings of the Eastern European cinema, especially with the readings of Makavejev films.

The book of James Roy MacBean on Film and Revolution dealing mostly with Godard’s political films is aiming at the very rigorous Marxist analyze of the cinema based on counter-Bazinian position of anti-mysticism and the critical reading of Metz’s denegation of the concept of ideology.[29] Especially dealing with Godard’s Althusser influenced materialist films of “the break” MacBean is aiming at the theoretization of the anti-humanism of Godard’s films. For example referring to the political conflict between Godard the materialist and Glauber Rocha who has the spontaneous approach does not fail to describe the position favoured by the first: “Godard rejects the emotional approach as one which plays into the hand of the enemy, and seeks to combat mystification in any form, whether it comes from the right or the left” (p. 137). The book which is devoted largely to the political-work of the Godard in the chapter dealing with the work of Makavejev (Sex and Politics: Wilhelm Reich, World Revolution, and Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism) after describing the formal similarity between the two directors (“experiments with montage and collage”) is repeating famous comparison that “Makavejev’s films have a greater emotional density than Godard’s most recent films”. (p. 241). This emotional density is re-appearing in MacBean’s reading of the famous ending scene with Bulat Okudzhava’s song as the invocation of the concrete humanisms of the “Communist commitment to a just distribution among all citizens, but which also touchingly evoke the personal plight of the individual, who, no matter how great his ideals may be, remains as frail and emotionally vulnerable to the life’s troubles as the rest of us…even if his name happens to be Vladimir Ilyich” (p. 252). This humanism is appearing as the social equality, of “each according to his need” (p. 253).[30] Even a very strict materialist analyzes based on the critique of Bazinian mystifications, at the field of the Makavejev’s cinema are letting their rigour to loose and the emotions to erupt. Why is this a case with Makavejev, what makes him so appearing to the concrete humanist Ideologies? I think that relation of Makavajev to two antagonistic communist figures, of Stalin and Marx, would bring us closer to this Ideology of concreteness.

5. Makavejev and Stalin

The emotionality of Makavejev in contrast to the intellectuality and the rigour of Godard is most common comparison between these two. Nina Power, who very successfully de-mystified the Ideology of sexuality in Makavejev’s interpretation, has still insisted on Makavejev’s “viscerality” and described him as “the anti-Godard” (Power 2010: 47), Mortimer has reproduced this difference with far reaching political and religious consequences: “Godard’s work is marked by a denial of the actual and the sensuous in their own right…he is a Calvinist whose passions are articulated in a cerebral, masculine, ascetic-religious mode akin to those of many ‘revolutionaries’ in the past and present; Makavejev is ‘principled pagan’: hungers to understand things as they are, his intelligence wedded to a passion for living in this, our only world” (Mortimer 2009: 87-88), or in Raymond Durgnant the “vivacity” of Makavejev’s Mao is in contrasts with La Chinoise whose flaming youth studies its Little Red Books like Christians some Guide to the Inner Light”.[31] This division can be sum up as the Makavejev the filmmaker of the emotions and the sensuality, and the Godard as the filmmaker of the intellect and the cerebral; or Makavejev as the artist of concrete in contrast to Godard the artist of the abstract. This division of concrete and abstract is further contrasted with Makavejev’s relation to Stalin, which ultimately is transcribed as the freedom contra dictatorship.

Stalin is ultimate evil, and theoretically it is representing the highest position of the abstractness; of total elimination of anything real, concrete and the human: it is the ultimate spectacle, and as such corresponding to everything opposite of truth. He is the ideology.

We can approach to this Stalinist ideology in relation to Makavejev’s work from many different aspects:

1. Stalin as the heir of the Lenin: in the film of WR there is a scene where Vladimir Ilyich (who obviously represents the Lenin) hits the Milena after their disagreement; Milena looks at him from bellow completely petrified and sees his V.I. (Lenin) turned to Stalin. The Stalin which Makavejev uses is not a real Stalin, but the acted one from the movie of Mikhail Chiaureli The Vow. This scene according to many interpretations of Makavejev is direct proof that Makavejev’s philosophy is based on the fact that Stalin is Lenin went mad; or as Mortimer observes with her pop-psychoanalytic phraseology: Lenin was a true neurotic who wanted to change people and help them. His ascetism, nonetheless, paved the way for Stalin’s rule” (Mortimer, p. 183). MacBean is also describing Stalinism as the psychopathological “domination which turned all of the Soviet bloc into an enormous network of insane asylums” (MacBean, p. 251; passing notice: he mistakes the Nazi Germany asylum footage which Makavejev uses in WR as originating from Soviet Republic) and specifies the Stalin-Lenin juxstaposition as the “attempt to trace the authoritarian and repressive trends in Soviet Communism to Lenin himself” (MacBean, p. 248). But actually the scene where Makavejev is juxtaposing the image of Stalin to an image of Lenin is based from the Chiaureli’s film where Stalin is crying to the gone Lenin, or the Lenin which is not among us anymore. The suturing effect of ideological continuation from Lenin to Stalin is based on the absence, the absence of the Lenin as the signifier. But nevertheless this causality between Lenin and Stalin is not necessarily a political or philosophical (for example it does not always claim that seeds of Stalinist evil lays at the Leninism), it is based on the dichotomy between the concrete and the abstract. Both Lenin as ascetic, neurotic and idealist and Stalin as dogmatic, stiff and alienated are abstractions, in contrast to the real people’s concreteness. This will lead us to the second important aspect.
2. Stalin as Abstraction, Abstraction as ideology: one of the first critiques of image of Stalin, as represented in the cinema, is written by Andre Bazin earlier then Khrushchev’s attack on the cult of personality. In now classical article which caused many problems to Bazin at the time when FKP was over-Stalinist he is describing Stalin of the Soviet cinematography as the kitsch abstracted from the real contradictions of the world, which could likely to be compared with the Tarzan of the Hollywood. With one difference between Stalin and Tarzan is that the films about the latter don’t pretend to be documentaries. [32] The mighty as he is represented in the movies is without any faults, or lacks, it is ontological rather than psychological. It is because he is no longer ‘human’ wrote Bazin, that even while living could be main character of a film.(p. 36) This is Stalinism of Milan Kundera’s totalitarian kitsch where the shit does not exist; the Ideological totalitarianism of absolute. Most important thing is that this Stalin is abstract, detached from the real people, and from their pleasures and bodies. This is also Stalinism of Svetlana Boym who in her article on the Soviet Perestroika documentaries locates a general form of the history of the Russian documentaries: it cancels the clear division of ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’. Russian documentaries of Stalinist period, are staged and camouflaged, and echoing Bazin’s Tarzan she is stating that “they are more like the ‘docu-dramas’ on American television and must be treated with caution”.[33] As a conclusion, nothing is true in the universe of Stalin. Makavejev films are principally anti-Stalinist because their subjects are determined with their “earthiness” as in the account of Charles Warren. This earthliness is defined and structured with three mutually dependent categories: of humour, people as people or un-idealized people, and the sex.[34] This humanist tautology of “people as people” can be traced in many different Makavejev and Yugoslav Marxist problematics; Warren juxtaposes this two and declares that “Yugoslavia is not USSR and it resists Stalinism. Milena tells to Vladimir that Yugoslavs care about ‘personal happiness’ and do not blur that with State concerns’ (Warren, p. 227). Yet we have to see that in case of Yugoslavia this has been very much blurred, and especially the anti-Stalinist state policy which was also widely supported by the ‘dissident’ philosophy of Yugoslavian Humanist Marxism known as Praxis, did based its critique of Stalinism to the tautology of the human. This is how Gajo Petrovic one of the founders of Praxis reflects this philosophy: “What makes man man is the general structure of his Being, which Marx called ‘praxis’”[35]. Man the man of Petrovic is defined by the ontology of his manhood, ‘the praxis’ which somehow structures the Philosophy as contra Stalin. This anti-Stalinist Marxism in the case of Praxis is neither materialist nor idealist, it is “consistent naturalism and humanism” (p. 29) which they derived philosophically from the Erich Fromm’s version of “authentic Marxism”. Apart from being positively defined, this concreteness of the people is at the same time far from being grim and serious, and it is full with the joy. This is how Andrew Horton describes carnival laughter of the Makavejev’s in spite of the apparent Marxism in his films: “laughter of the people, by the people, and for the people as individuals emerges as form of salvation”.[36] That’s why according to this position the Stalinism cannot grasp the irony, joy and pleasure.
3. Stalin the Hitler: “He was a true Red Fascist!” these are the last words of Milena describing Vladimir in WR. Red Fascism as the merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism is political terminology par excellence. It has played crucial role in post Second World War America for constructing its policy of anti-communism which was paved through the difficult road of equivalency of Hitler with the Stalin. Apart from generating the discourse on the acuteness of this task, it had also served to the fantasies of what might happen: for example, we have to look at the Hitler of thirties in order to avoid possible coming of Stalin’s Fascism.[37] This fantasy is somehow at the core of totalitarian ideology, as a bizarre psychopathological paranoiac state confusing the abstract and the real. This is how Stanley Cavell in his article on Makavejev describes the archive materials of ultimate evil of Stalinism, or the Katyn Forest massacre shown in Sweet Movie, as a “dreamlike sequence” and ask the great moralist question of a freedom lover: “isn’t that forest a name for the region inhabited by regimes who no longer know that there is a difference between dream and reality, acting out the one, wiping out the other?[38]. Stalin mistook the concrete for the abstract, and according to his critics it is this confusion which makes him so uncanny. This imagination of the totalitarianism is best described by its highest ideologue and architect of the “containment policy” Georg F. Kennan as: “When I try to picture totalitarianism to myself as a general phenomenon, what comes into my mind most prominently is neither Soviet picture nor the Nazi picture as I have known them in the flesh, but rather the fictional and symbolic images created by such people as Orwell or Kafka or Koestler or the early Soviet satirists. The purest expression of the phenomenon, in other words, seems to me to have been rendered not in its physical reality but in its power as a dream, or nightmare. Not that it lacks the physical reality, or that this reality is lacking in power; but it is precisely in the way it appears to people, in the impact it has on the subconscious, in the state of mind it creates in its victims, that totalitarianism reveals most deeply its meaning and nature. Here, then, we seem to have phenomenon of which it can be said that it is both a reality and a bad dream, but that its deepest reality lies strangely enough in its manifestation as a dream…”[39]
4. Re-Stalinization of de-Stalinized Yugoslavia: Gajo Petrovic discussing about the encouraging developments in the field of philosophy in Yugoslavia does not fail to mention that there are certain “remnants of Stalinism in us opposing free discussions on philosophy” (p. 30). This is similar what Makavejev told to Jonas Mekas in interview in 1972: “I feel that in my country Stalin’s ghost is living in different corners and comes out from time to time just to tell us we are not as free as we believe we are.” (Mortimer, op. cit., p. 169). How we could understand these statements, coming from the philosopher and the artist of the country which officially declared its socialism as the non-Stalinist? This we could understand only as the part of the observation that true de-Stalinization is possible only with the arrival of the concrete and the polyvalence to the scene of the socialist politics. The Yugoslavian self-management with the process of de-Stalinization did not detach from the abstractness of the socialism which is constitutive element of the orthodoxy and ideology of Stalinism. Their detachment was false, it didn’t imply the cosmic re-order of things, or it was never able to introduce the un-ideology of the concreteness. Or as Herbert Eagle noted the concern of the Makavejev’s films, as the philosophy of the group Praxis was this failure of Yugoslavian socialism to foster individual development.[40] Accordingly the Man is not a Bird is film about the “un-freedom”, and as Eagle put it is “central conflict of all Eastern European societies, is between Marxist humanist praxis and repressive regimented institutions” (p. 136). The possible emancipation which humanist Marxist films might introduce is most clearly described by the Daniel Goulding as “[daily practice] of transforming a single collective mythology into a multitude of private mythologies”.[41] Goulding is quoting from the Makavejev’s essay on another representative of New Yugoslavian Film, Kokan Rakonjac, that the physiognomy of this new tendency is based on “viewing the world as it is, without hierarchy and ideological intervention” (p. 72). Since Goulding has based his idea of Socialist Yugoslavia to the fluctuating theory of successive policies between the centralist (latent Stalinist) and liberalist (self-managing) tendencies as developed by the Dennison Rusinow in his classical book The Yugoslav Experiment 1948-1974, the “liberated cinema” of Yugoslavia was accordingly never truly liberated from the constrains of the Stalinist strata. According to this philosophy it should be declared that Makavejev’s utopia of un-mediated ‘real’ society (“as it is”) is logical oxymoron in any state affair, because it is categorically suspending the possibility of the spontaneous expression of concreteness of the human creativity. Probably it is something more than the matter of style to name this currency as Stalinism.[42]

6. Makavejev and Marx

Another important pattern in reading of Makavejev films is that they could have very different meaning according to position of looking at them, and according to ocular regimes or ideological beliefs of the spectator who enjoys in them. As Durgnant referring to Hitchcock’s Strangers in Train noted, this cognitive polyvalence could be proclaimed with the term of joy of analyzing it forever. This polyvalency has been constitutive philosophy of the whole New Yugoslav Cinema, including Dušan Makavejev who described this as policy of multi-reading influenced by the psychological investigations introduced by the Gestalt theories. Soon we will see that these readings could suggest that Makvejev’s films could be reduced to the primary tension between the artist as individual and the society as collective, where the role of the artist is as the creative emancipator to represent the full potentiality of this individual, and the subject. After everything said and done, this would lead us to the ideological position of Makavejev films as the guarantor of the freedom in spite of the repressive socialist state. The re-occurring Stalinism of Yugoslavian ambiguity and the discourse of sexual emancipation as the political freedom could likely end up as the Marcuseian cultural policy of n-dimensional man, where Makavejev’s central problematic would be labelled as Martin Walsh did in his text on WR as “ultimate disparity between individual and the state: sex/the individual versus politics/the state”.[43] Since the potential ghost of Stalin has been haunting the Yugoslavia in the spaces of this “politics/the state” field, this policy of the individualism is un-conditional for the emancipation from constrains of society and ideology. It is this philosophy of “personal is political” which appeared before the post-modernism, which encouraged Durgnant to label the WR as the “humanist postmodern” (Durgnant, p. 69). But Makavejev before being humanist postmodernist he was for a long time a cinematic representative of the “humanist Marxism”. This cinematic Marxism, or cine-marxism is contra to Stalin and it is in direct anti-thesis of the Godard’s Althusserian Marxism.

How is Makavejev thought in relation to Marx? How is the principle of Makavejev based on the individual freedom, sensual, carnality, emotions, the sex, the cosmos and the polivalency of all of these, connected to the Marxian theory and practice? It is possible to grasp the Ideological discourses related to these questions once we clarify Makavejev’s Marxism as related to the dichotomy between the individual and the state. Up until now we have seen many examples of how this discourses criticized the film studies influenced by certain dogmatic brands of Marxism which repressed the concreteness’s of human being such as pleasure, hedonism and sensuality. Durgnant as many others named them as “political correct” film studies “underestimating the hedonistic counter-cultures, and emphasising Althusser-style syntheses of structuralism, Leninism, Maoism…” (Durgnant, p. 88).[44] But still there is a fact that Makavejev himself was the Marxist, humanist or not, that has to be dealt by his appreciators. Polyvalence of his films has been the key for introducing the peculiarity of Makavejev’s Marx. This was most clearly agitated by the Marxist aesthetician and the founder, long time international authority and the high representative of the Naturist and Free Beach Movement, Lee Baxandall in his article on Eastern European Cine-Marxism. This peculiar cine-marxism is differing from the original Godard’s version, with the fact that this Eastern European version fully grasped the Brecht’s rule of “never failing to give the pleasure”.[45] Apart from this local specificity, Baxandall is introducing the ontological multiplicity of Marxism as: there has not been one Marxism, but many” (p. 73), with his open preference of the “real” one which has full “awareness of the value of subjectivity”. This Marx is precisely the opposite of Marx as “’scientist’ impostor concocted by such interpreters as the neo-Stalinist Louis Althusser, who was said to have stifled the ‘humanist’ in himself to go on to discover the laws of ‘scientific materialism’” (p. 83). The Marx of Makavejev is humanist, we understood that, but how does this humanism correspond to the polyvalency? Since the humanism could be as well signifier of the ‘project of men’ initiated by the collective socialism of the Stalin, it is not so easy to connect the polyvalency with the humanism. Usual answer is that Stalin’s humanism is based on the abstract, ideological or kitsch concept of man, whereas the real humanism is based on the real man, or “the human genotype, the innate nature that undergoes socialization” as Baxandall clarifies (p. 92). Crucial element here is concept of human “nature”, as eternal and complex reality of concrete. This schema allows the “humanist Marxist” to avoid the possible paradoxes of the “individual versus collective” dichotomy with the polyvalence of Makavejev: according to this schema, what has been labelled as the collective in socialist countries does not have the polyvalence nature, it is abstract and the stiff, or granite of univocal ideology. The nature of the individual is in its elements based on the complexity of the concreteness, and it is truly a polysemic. This is why it is so distinctly subversive, as Amos Vogel calls it as “the eternal subversion”: essence of life, under all circumstances and in all societies, was eternal change, the constant transformation of all forms and systems” (Film as Subversive Art). We arrived to the main Ideological pattern of the reading of the Makavejev’s polyvalency: it is referring to the multiplicity, richness, multi-colourness of the naked men un-mediated by any ideological abstraction with full flowering of his concrete nature. Real concrete is evidence of polyvalency.

Marx is redundant here, as Durgnant who is a non-Marxist admirer of Makavejev observed: this ambiguity makes up the socialist position, which is not, after all, among one man’s vision, but a range of positions, and not a single statement, ‘once and for all’, but a progression of reflections, a network of changing ideas. Many of which non-Socialist can share” (p. 63).

Conclusion: Concretely Watching Films (of Makavejev)

In fact we arrived at the main dilemma of the relation between polivalency, change, knowledge, arts and the politics. The readings based on the ideological conception of the concrete are not able to propose any dividing line between the progressive and regressive politics and following this hibernation the “carnal truth” can not generate any other thought except the obvious knowledge on its own “nature”, or “material”. We can demonstrate this by showing the political implications of carnal truth in case of Mortimer.

Mortimer’s attempt to derive any correct political conclusions from the carnal truth ends up with ambiguous morality of the confusion. She might call this confusion beautiful, as in the case of the tenderness of Frank Sinatra’s voice, but things get disturbing when she links this carnality with the specificity of the subjects of Makavejev’s films. This specificity is ‘Yugoslavian people’, with underlined Balkan origins. She is very determined when explicating the emancipatory potential of these Balkan bodies in reading the immigrants Dionysian joyfulness at the Zanzi-Bar in Makavejev’s film Montenegro: “vitality of the immigrants, their genius for resourcefulness, the obstinate and inveterate art of surviving, whether the circumstances” (Mortimer, p. 239). This inveterate capability of lasting might be part of their special material, of their different and more enduring bodies; but also these Balkan bodies are representatives of the different epistemology, which Mortimer is picturing through the character of Alex who “embodies what serious ideologues find hard to appreciate: an active vulgarity that goes against too earnest and abstract a conception of the person on the wrong end of the immigrant worker/capitalist exploiter, poor country/rich country continuum. It is a vulgarity that is a part of human being.” (Mortimer, p. 232). Antagonisms of the capitalist colonization and antagonisms of the class struggle in this “cosmos” is erased as the political correctness by Mortimer, and furthermore posed the critique for this correctness as the theoretical reductionism of people to social designations “performed by the right-minded thinkers” (?!), which as the effect doubles the already existing social diminishment (Mortimer, p. 233-234). The political emancipation of the Balkan immigrants, according to this, is based on nothing else than their own bodies which is the proof of their durability, their resourcefulness. We know all this things. Throughout the article with examples and discussion we have seen that carnal and sensual truth is based primarily on reference of its own resources. It is all about the concrete truth on the concrete things; or the real knowledge of our bodies. But is there not any antagonisms in the core of carnal truth itself, doesn’t the sensual vulgarity contradicts with itself? Or, how to explain the confrontation of two different concrete bodies, what is the limits of their “truths”, is there any “dividing line” between their truths, or the most crucial question: is there possibility to divide right from the wrong in the carnal truth? At the end, how to explain the violence of concreteness? Mortimer is in this case, as well, re-producing the two different violence’s, the “hot” one which is more of the direct, erupted and spontaneous violence; and the “cold” violence of the calculated, opportunistic and analytical mind. For example according to her at the Srebrenica there were two kind of violences operating, the “hot” violence of Ratko Mladic and his pupils “equally drunk on plumb brandy and ethnic paranoia” and the “cold” violence of the liberal democracies of the Dutch officers (Mortimer, p. 181-182). Trying to explain the “material” of Radovan Karadzic himself, who is assumed as the representative of the “hot” part of the world, Mortimer is not able to say the last word. At once Karadzic is a representative of the abstractness which is far descent of the Lenin-Stalin “ascetism” and alienation (p. 182-183); but at the same time he is the men of the Balkan, with his grotesque of the carnality. He is, as Mortimer explains in the pages discussing the Montenegro movie, one of Montenegro’s (referring to Karadzic’s Montenegrian origin) shameful sons (p. 250). He is a Zanzi-Bar Dyonisos went mad, or went “uglier and more brutal”. But still there is no possibility to divide this monster from Dr. Frankestein; neither the class or colonial antagonisms nor any other discourse of “cold”, politically correct and abstract world can help to make this decision. At the end there is only one perspective for the carnal truth in order to operate in the world of politics: it’s the “trust”, the trust to its own truth, or as Mortimer puts: “in the end it is the question of t r u s t” (p. 178).[46]

Throughout the text I have deliberately based on the examples of the ideological readings of Makavejev in order to make clear their theoretical and political consequences. These consequences are un-dialectical approach of sameness ending most of the time in the historicist interpretation of the development (which consequently opens variety of regressive and retroactive political positions). This process is grounded on the knowledge which is strictly based on the self-referential and absolute truths, through the text referred as ‘concrete’ or precisely as ‘carnal’, ‘natural’ or ‘sensuous’ are strictly related to the human nature. Thes readings, whose abundance is amazingly impressive, are without the exception almost in each cases reproducing the ideology of the re-humanization of the theory and especially the film theory. The lure of these theories are their insistence on the concept of concrete, as material of our everyday, of our intimacy, essence, obviousness and human nature which continuously hangs on our daily worries of bread, water, love, sex, wine or loss. These hypotheses are not naïve; they are reproducing the most conservative and regressive thoughts on society and politics if not handled with caution and reserve. Their obviousness is their lure, but at the same time it might guarantee their succession, which considering the current state of affair in film theory it would be fair to announce this theoretical caution as acute.

As I mentioned earlier this text is not about the new proposal of reading Makavejev, its sole purpose was to deal with the ideological origins and confusions which some idealist and phenomenologist inspired readings generates. What is most striking, to say it scandalously, is that Makavejev films which supposed to have polyvalence of readings and patterns are always ending in the same pattern of identity, carnality, sensuality, and humanist tautologies. Are there not any other patterns which the polyvalence of Makavejev’s films could offer to us? There are signs of this; we can mention the reading of Pavle Levi who clearly indicates the simplicity of reduction of Makavejev to Herbert Marcuse’s “essential incompatibility between the notion of human freedom and the various institutionalized and reified forms of social and political life”.[47] Levi is instead proposing more active conception of polyvalence, which could offer a possibility of “debate” for the spectators of Makavejev films, “possibility accompanying the freedom granted to him or her, to choose a specific perspective, a concrete idea, he or she will stand for” (p. 34). This is a full possibility of polyvalence, or the possibility for cultural policy through the polyvalence, which according to Levi, “does in the end, implicitly presuppose a basic leftist political inclinations of its viewer-participants” (p. 34). This reading is crucial in underlining under-estimated possibility of pedagogy of the Makavejev films which is continuously de-negated in the idealist readings based on ‘psychologization’ and ‘personalism’.

Another reading, but less affirmative one, is based neither on policy nor the culture is recent elaboration of Black Wave, primarily referring to a work of another of its protagonist Zelimir Zilnik, by a Boris Buden as a practice of disengagement with the representational identity policies of the Yugoslavian socialism. The films of Yugoslavian alternative cinema known as New Yugoslavian Cinema, or better Black Wave, probably for the first time, has been interpreted in this reading with the non-represenattional politics, which is neither the critique of that system (the socialism), nor any engagement with this representation; “the black” stands for what it is, without any extrapolation of culturalism, or as we have said earlier on “the sex”, without any further additive meaning. It is this “black” which is the material of the Makavejev, and which is the driving force all the avant-garde arts, the negation; not the subversion, but the simple and concise negation. Or as Buden puts: “[the black of black wave] is about where the society as society is absent and about what politics, however democratic, cannot represent.”[48]

 

This position of negation is important in the case of Makavejev films, not only because his films are constituted by the “dark” materials, but that this negativity is a theoretical partisanship for further investigation of possibilities detached from humanist affirmations, phenomenologist tautologies and spiritual communions. It is not exaggeration to claim that the negation is starting point for the materialist reading that could bring us more closely to the concrete.

 

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[1] This text was published in: "Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema", (eds.) Kirn, G., Sekulic, D. & Testen, Z., Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 2012, pp. 106-152.

[2] Amos Vogel, Film as Subversive Art, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974.

[3] Alberto Toscano, Partisan Thought, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory 17:3, 2009, p. 181.

[4] Amos Vogel, Makevejev: Toward the Edge and the Real...and Over, Film Comment 9:6, November-December 1973, p. 51. Vogel employs the complexity and the impenetrability criteria in many cases of his film criticism, but as far as I know he was most explicit and enthusiastic with Makevejev and Werner Herzog which he describes the latter as:”…working solely with the materials of reality, Herzog, in a cosmic pun on cinema verite, recovered the metaphysical beneath the visible. It is only in such works that we achieve intimations of the radical humanism of the future.” Amos Vogel, On Seeing a Mirage, in Films of Werner Herzog, ed. by Timothy Corrigan, Methuen, London, 1986, p. 46.

[5] Publication Revolution and Film: Materials for Film Festival edited by Dušan Makavejev and Lazar Stojanovic in 1971is also example of this peaceful co-existence of conglomerate epistemology. Apart from October Revolution, Consciousness III (Psychedelic Revolution, Parapsychology, etc.) and Reich also book includes translation of Mariguela and Black Panther’s manifesto’s, Situationist International pamphlet, Cuban Cinema discussions, Anarcho-Feminist manifesto’s (SCUM) among the others. But this “complexity” could be described with the effect of pedagogical and didactical policy of Makavejev which is important part of his general cultural policy of what he understood as socialism.

[6] Lorrain Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2009, p. 185. Bulat Okudzhava is “underground poet-singer” which enjoyed popularity in Soviet Union at sixties and seventies and as well in Yugoslavian films. His songs can be heard among others in in Aleksander Petrovic’s The Master and Margaret (1972) and in Milos ‘Misa’ Radivojevic’s, The Promising Boy (1981).

[7] As quoted by Mortimer.

[8] Translator’s Introduction to Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or Imaginary Man, transl. by Lorraine Mortimer, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2005, p. xvii

[9] There are attempts as well in the Marxist theory such as Sebastiano Timpanaro’s who in order to strengthen the materialistic theory of human condition and the continuity of its existence derives the theses on constant dimensions of aesthetic-cultural-biologism: “But we should not forget either that this cultural continuity – through which, as Marx observed, we feel so near to the poetry of Homer – has also been rendered possible by the fact that man as a biological being has remained essentially unchanged from the beginning of civilization to the present; and those sentiments and representations which are closest to the biological facts of human existence have changed little.” S. Timpanaro, On Materialism, transl. by Lawrence Garner, New Left Books, London, 1975, p. 52.

[10] Raymond Durgnant, WR: Mysteries of Organism, British Film Institute, London, 1999, p. 47

[11] Durgnant is describing Ahmed as the “Communist with the Muslim roots” and derives the explanation for the tragic end of the film from the “affinities between Islam and Socialism” (p. 88).

[12] Makavejev is in interview for Cahiers du Cinema saying that many people who heard this song in film thought, because of the German language, that it is a Nazi song. He is adding that he deliberately chose this song in order to play with this association. Michel Delahaye, “Dušan Makavejev: Ljubavni Slucaj [Love Affair]”, Filmske Sveske, number 1, January 1968, Belgrade.

[13] Thomas Elsaesser, Of Rats and Revolution: Dušan Makavejev’s The Switchboard Operator [1968], in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2005, p. 323.

[14] Constantin Parvulescu, Betrayed Promises: Politics and Sexual Revolution in the Films of Marta Meszaros, Milos Forman, and Dušan Makavejev, Camera Obscura 71, Volume 24, Number 2, 2009, p. 77.

[15] The noise in this description shall not disconcert us; in many examples of film, music or literature this “noise” is manifesting as the criteria of “natural”. Recommended reading would be Juan A. Suarez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday, University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, 2007

[16] Makavejev told in many interviews that during the making of WR: Mysteries of Organism he was completely Reichian and only 5% under the influence of Erich Fromm. Also he is adding that even at the time of Switcboard Operator he was thinking through the problematic of Fromm, he was “subconsciously” a Reichian. Christian Braad Thomsen, Lets Put the Life Back in Political Life: Interview with Dušan Makavejev, in Art Politics Cinema: The Cienaste Interviews, ed. by D. Georgakas & L. Rubenstein, Pluto Press, London & Sydney, 1984, p. 84.

[17] Nina Power, Blood and Sugar: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, Film Quarterly, Spring 2010, Volume 63, Number 3, p. 44.

[18] This step-by-step is the part of Makavejev’s policy which he best described in a famous interview for Film Quarterly as: “we have to fight power with spontaneity and humour, but in a more organized way than it is done…kind of well organized anarchy”. R. Sitton, J. R. MacBean, Ernest Callenbach, Fight Power with Spontaneity and Humor: An Interview with Dušan Makavejev, Film Quarterly, Vol. XXV, no. 2, Winter 1971-72, pp. 3-9.

[19] Louis Althusser & Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, Verso, London, 2009,p. 148.

[20] Alain Badiou, The Century, transl. By Alberto Toscano, Polity, Cambridge and Malden, 2007, p. 78.

[21] Stanley Cavell, On Makavejev On Bergman, in Cavell on Film, ed. by William Rothman, State University of New York Press, 2005, p. 2005. This “experiment” (in the classical sense of it, as the experimenting with the effects of film to people’s behaviour) was part of the “Bergman and Dreams” conference organized at Harvard University. The papers of the conference together with the Makavejev’s statement which he co-authored with M. Duda (Bergman’s Non-Verbal Sequences: Source of a Dream Film Experiment) and the earlier version of Cavell’s text were published in the book which Vlada Petric edited: Film & Dream: An Approach to Bergman, Redgrave, New York, 1981.

[22] Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, tranl. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Elm Tree Books, London, 1978, p. 77.

[23] Bazin described this retort and un-detoured abstraction as neccesity: “Obliged to exercise his liberty and his intelligence, the spectator perceives the ontological ambivalence of reality directly, in the very structure of its appearance” (p. 80). For Bazin’s metaphysical origins see Dudely Andrew, Andre Bazin, Oxford University Press, New York, 1978, p. 66 -69, p. 106.

[24] Charles Warren, Earth and Beyond: Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of Organism, in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. by C. Warren, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover & London, 1996, p. 206.

[25] Interesting comparison: in his film Hole in the Sou l (1995), Makavejev is quoting his friend and famous Jungologist of Yugoslavia Vladeta Jerotic saying that his problem is having “hole in the soul”. There are considerable accounts of references on Jung in Makavejev, apart from his last film, he is referring to Bergman as a director of Jungian soap-opera (in statement Bergman’s Non-Verbal Sequences: Source of a Dream Film Experiment co-authored with M. Duda), furthermore his speech in Source series starts and ends with Jung ( Dušan Makavejev, Little Monkeys Crawling on My Shoulders, Source of Inspiration Lectures, 6. September 1994, Sources, Amsterdam, 1995).

[26] Not only in Yugoslavia, but as Katherine Verdery tries to show in her anthropological study, ‘proper burial’ and post-socialist transition has direct link in many other countries: Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-socialist Change, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999.

[27] This historicist view is clearing off the discursive terrain for many retroactive readings on the break-up of Yugoslavia. It is not surprise that some texts are directly performing this retro-active reading through the films of Makavejev; there are many examples for this, but probably most amazing is Warren who from the formal language of the WR draws this conclusion: “the explosion in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia may seem anticipated in a film such as WR, with its harsh juxtapositions, its tearing in so many diferent directions.” (p. 227).

[28] [Intervention] consist of ‘drawing a dividing-line’ inside the theoretical domain between the ideas declared to be true and ideas declared to be false, between the scientific and ideological”, in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, Transl. By Ben Brewster, Monthly Review press, New York, 2001, p. 37.

[29] James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution, Indiana University Press, Bllomington and London, 1975.

[30] It is exactly with this same words that Althusser describes the Ideological “novelty” of Marxist humanism: “it called on man finally – no longer in the imaginary world of religion, in the ‘heaven of the State’, or in the alienated abstraction of Hegelian philosophy, but on the earth, here and now, in real society – to ‘realize’ his true essence, which is the human community – ‘communism’”, Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?[1975], in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists & Other Essays, Verso, London and New York, 1990, p. 233. In which circumstances MacBean’s anti-humanist hypotheses related to Godard throughout the book turns to its opposite of Okudzhava’s communion humanism in case of Makavejev is probably one of the crucial question for us dealing with Yugsolavian studies to thoroughly handle with.

[31] Raymond Durgnant, WR: Mysteries of Organism, British Film Institute, London, 1999, p. 52. Or Makavejev’s difference from the post-modernist Godard (Andrew Horton, The Mouse Who Wanter to F..k a Cow: Cinematic Carnival Laughter in Dušan Makavejev, p. 225), “Godard finds in everyday-trivial the lack of ral contact and communication that is reflected in the spatial vacuums and awkwardness of his visual compositions, Makavejev discovers a means of expressing the essence of the intimacy” (Martin Walsh, WR: Mysteries of Organism, p. 14), or “Where Godard suffers from constipation as Basil Wright has remarked – Makavejev irascibly liberates his floating mystery” (Yvette Biro, Pathos and Irony in Eastern European Films, p. 44).

[32] Andre Bazin, The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema [1950], in Movies and Methods Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, p. 35.

[33] Svetlana Boym, Stalin is with Us: Soviet Documentary Mythologies, in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, ed. By C. Taylor and D. Spring, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, p. 203.

[34] Charles Warren, Earth and Beyond: Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of Organism, in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. by C. Warren, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover & London, 1996, p. 206.

[35] Gajo Petrovic, Marx in the Mid-twentieth Century: a Yugoslav Philosopher Considers Karl Marx, Anchor Books, New York, 1967, p. 171.

[36] Andrew Horton, The Mouse who Wanted to F..k a Cow: Cinematic Carnival Laughter in Dušan Makavejev’s Films, in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. by A. Horton, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, 1991, p. 232. In same volume article by Charles Eidsvik is picturing this concrete and abstract dichotomies with more complex and surreal terms: “Eastern Europeans lived in paradoxical, multiple and incongruous realities. In such realities what is normally taken for humour is serious and seriousness itself is comic”, Mock Realism: The Comedy of Futility in Eastern Europe, ibid, p. 103.

[37] Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Peterson, Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s-1950’s, The American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, April 1970, pp. 1046-1064.

[38] Stanley Cavell, On Makavejev On Bergman [1978] in Cavell on Film, ed. by William Rothman, State University of New York Press, 2005, p. 30.

[39] George Keenan, Totalitarianism in the Modern World, op. cit, Les Adler and Thomas Paterson, ibid, p. 1062.

[40] Herbert Eagle, Yugoslav Marxist Humanism and the Films of Dušan Makavejev, in Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema, ed. David Paul, Macmillian, London and Basingstoke, 1983, p. 133.

[41] Daniel Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985, p. 66. Actually this policy of polivalency was primarily developed by the theoretician of the Yugoslavian New Film Dušan Stojanovic.

[42] For example attack to the New Yugoslavian Film as “Black Wave” was interpreted by Goulding as Stalinist counter-offensive move of latent nationalists, and the initiators been labelled following the style of Stalinism as “Jankovicevites” (referring to a local “Stankhovitevites” [p. 83])

[43] Martin Walsh, WR: Mysteries of Organism, Monogram no. 5, London, p. 15.

[44] The brand of Yugoslav Marxism known as Praxis is usually linked, as in Herbert Eagle’s observation, with the Makavejev’s film-philosophy. The fact that the journal of Yugoslav Marxist’s The Praxis in 1965 refused to publish Louis Althusser’s article due to its “Stalinist positivist” theses is seen as extra encouragment for the idea of linking films of Makavejev with the philosophy of Praxis.

[45] Lee Baxandall, Toward and East European Cinemarxism?, in Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema, ed. By David Paul, Macmillian, London and Basingstoke, 1983, p. 88.

[46] Reffering to Wilhelm Reich’s attackt to FBI investigators approaching his property, a sequence also mentioned in the film WR, Raymond Durgnant writes that: “this may well be left-wing ‘direct action’ against incipient Fascism, but it is also right-wing anarcho autonomy, against democratic state tyranny”, p. 21.

[47] Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2007, p. 29.

[48] Boris Buden, Shot it Black! An Introduction to Zelimir Zilnik, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 25, Autumn 2010, p. 47. In his earlier article dealing especially with Makavejev, Buden took a risk of “sociological” explanation of this non-representative a-culturalist position. This risk ended up in the intensification of falseness of the Yugoslav socialism; which materialized, as Buden interpreted in the last words of Milena’s in WR: Yugoslavia was already a capitalist when it claimed it was socialist. Boris Buden, Behind the Velvet Curtain; Remembering Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of Organism, Afterall: A Journal of Art, context and Enquiry, no. 18, 2008.

Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema", (eds.) Kirn, G., Sekulic, D. & Testen, Z., Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, pp. 106-152.

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