Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Ben Sheetz ★★★★½ 5

  I just got my Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical Eclipse set in the mail today. I'm pretty excited to dig in.

  Man is Not a Bird is Makavejev's daring first film. It's a dense film that chronicles an expert coming into a mining town and finding love with a young blonde. The story is dense in its rejection of singular linearity, as it contains several smaller vignettes intertwined within the main storyline.

  The biggest thing that popped out to me was the brilliant cinematography. This film used classical Hollywood style in parts, while in others using handheld footage and documentary stuff. Really ahead of its time, but I expect nothing less from Makavejev.

  This film really digs at the clash in…

• 

  Review by Robert Beksinski ★★★½ 2

  I am not completely sold on Dusan Makavejev's feature length debut but I do know it is an amazing cinematic achievement for a debut. I think with his second attempt (Love Affair) he takes what excels in this film with his experimental editing and keen visual eye and wrapped them into a more substantial story to where his aesthetic could grow and prosper. Here it kind of lacked certain direction and was traveled multiple paths, some successful others not as much (none whatsoever being deemed "bad").

  Man Is Not a Bird is a combination between documentary realism (as Makavejev recruits an entire mining town to help film) and Hollywood fiction all while filming through an avant garde lens. The cinematography…

• 

  Review by Jenna Ipcar ★★★½

  We’re all sleepwalking through life and sometimes it takes a bad experience, or a hypnotist humiliating you on stage, to realize it. Not that realizing it changes too much, but at least it can help you self correct onto a slightly better version of the same path if you’re lucky. 

  But this is Dusan Makavejev so really it’s just about sexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxXXXxxxx

  Some striking framing, some genuinely funny one liners, amazing industrial factory shots, but not a whole lot else to grasp onto here. Bizarre little film that comes alive when it’s focusing more on boning.

• 

  Review by Horrible Reviews ★★★★

  Man I lowkey kinda loved this.

  At first sight a simple love story between an older man who comes to a small mining town on assignment and the daughter of his temporary landlords (portrayed by the absolute radiant Milena Dravic, who would go on to become one of Yugoslavia's biggest stars). But at the same time also a bit of slice-of-life cinema about said mining town. The free-flowing, mostly handheld up-in-their-faces documentary-style cinematography really helps here.

  This in combination with the more traditional almost Hollywood-like narrative makes for an interesting contrast. Throw in some social commentary (work, class, love-life, there's something here, right?) and you have a pretty great directorial debut from one of the key figures in the Yugoslavian Black Wave movement of the 60s and 70s.

• 

  Review by Halcyon ★★★

  Yugoslavian neo-realism, Makavejev's debut feature is daring and challenges filmmaking conventions. Sexual tension is part of his social commentary, generously inserted into the dialogue whenever possible, even quite artistic in its depiction of the act. It's an arthouse excursion comparatively, utilizing documentary-style shot direction and patient landscape pans, relatively inventive at the time. The editing is especially impressive during the first sexual encounter, where fast-cutting produces a genius combination of lighting against shadows emphasizing flashes of motion. Man Is Not a Bird carries the sizeable weight of the nation's communist dogma, irrevocably at odds with the notion of working-class happiness. Hypnotism is an initial warning in the opening act, then reappears as a criticism of hivemind ideology that has convinced the masses of…

• 

  Review by Richmond_Hill ★★★★

  The similarities between the featured Bor Mining Belt community and Mortville in John Waters’s Desperate Living, are striking and aren’t as flippant as they may seem. Both films share a blackly rough-and-tumble rambunctiousness: one of locale certainly, but of attitude too. Life can be dirty, so dig in. 

  Not that Waters was critiquing much of a lived reality. Like it or not, he was from bourgeois stock sitting fairly pretty in a comfortable country only starting to show material signs of spiritual exhaustion. 

  Makavejev was in the eye of a Communist storm: there are real targets to critique here not just the convenient excesses of consumerism. These people couldn’t go home at night to anything like the comfort or certainties…

• 

  Review by Milos ★★★

  Dušan Makavejev‘s erster Langfilm Man Is Not a Bird ist auf den ersten Blick nicht wirklich speziell und konnte mich mit seinen tollen Shots dennoch begeistern. In Kombination mit der Musik und den tollen Darstellern war er schlussendlich doch irgendwie überdurchschnittlich und definitiv eine Sichtung wert. Den ganzen Film gibt es hier auf Youtube mit englischen Untertiteln zu sehen.

• 

  Review by mosquitodragon ★★★½

  The love between two people cannot be understood by law or by government or even by the other people in your community. Love does not follow a logic other than our primal need to connect with another person, and our choice of that other person is not a choice at all but an inevitable result of who knows what? Biology or just the deepest recesses of our unacknowledged desires and fears?

  The institutions and mechanisms man constructs to impose his pathetic understanding of the universe on the universe itself will array themselves against your individuality and your embrace of a love match will enrage the cogs of the machine, who can't bear your love's unspoken statement of independence from the…

• 

  Review by baba_visnja ★★★★

  Moj prvi film jugoslovenskog crnog talasa (bar mislim). Zanimljiva estetika, nisam sigurna da li mi se sviđa ili ne. Milena Dravić je prelepa. Kapiram da Makavejevo ludilo ne može baš tako lako da se stavi u reči

  (IZVINI STEVKE GLEDAĆU ODISEJU OBEĆAVAM<333333)

• 

  Review by Rakestraw ★★★★

  My very first Dusan Makavejev film.

  I've been wanting to watch his films for the longest time but for whatever reason I've never been able to bring myself to actually sit down and watch one. Until now. I also happened to start with his feature-length debut.

  Man Is Not A Bird follows two parallel story-lines - a love affair between Jan (Janez Vrhovec) and Rajka (Milena Dravic) despite their age difference and the tribulations of a lowly worker at the town's mining complex, Barbulovic (Stole Arandelovic). The film's narrative structure is pretty straight-forward, closely resembling a Hollywood picture at times given the traditional score at certain points.

  The hints of Makavejev's radical ideals come in the form of criticizing social…

• 

  Review by Jacob Gehman ★★★½

  Without checking, I probably have this rated about the same as Dusan Makavejev's better known films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. That's more a sign I need to rewatch/rerate those films than a suggestion that Man Is Not a Bird is on-par with them. Not that Man Is Not a Bird—Makavejev's first full length film—is rubbish by comparison, but rather his later eye for searing political commentary via searing WTF imagery isn't present here. (Well, I'd guess there's some political commentary, but I sure won't know what it was until I read some reviews from smarter people than I.)

  Yet Man Is Not a Bird is a gorgeous film. The smoky black & white film perfectly captures the…

• 

  Review by Silversaxophone ★★★★

  Within the blasted landscape of Bor, a copper mining town on the border of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, workers are celebrated for their dedication and heroic contributions to the greater good. Makavejev focuses on two such men. They're great at their jobs, but their personal lives are a mess. They can barely articulate why they're so unhappy or why they do what they do. But they move with purpose because the system in which they live tells them what they must do. The disruptive element is sex, but dealing with women requires them to be alert and engaged, but neither of them has a clue. Also in town is Roko the hypnotist. His manipulation of people, his ability to turn them…