Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

If there’s any way to classify Dušan Makavejev’s unclassifiable films, it’s as products of the cinematically revolutionary sixties. And that’s the tack critics took this week in their reviews of our new Eclipse set of the Serbian director’s first three films, Dušan Makavejev—
Free Radical. “Some of the period’s most scathing and elaborate subversions came from, of all places, Communist Yugoslavia, where the best-known cinematic iconoclast was, and remains, Dušan Makavejev, the master of the kinky political comedy,” writes Dennis Lim
in the Los Angeles Times, adding, “In some ways, with his indelible fantasies of sexual freedom and political liberation, Makavejev remains the definitive 1960s filmmaker.”

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr also attests to the works’ persistent vision: “These films may arrive as ghostly dispatches from a vanished country, but thanks to Mr. Makavejev’s bounding wit they seem as full of unruly life as ever.” And IFC.com’s Michael Atkinson finds that “Makavejev’s first three features are dizzy with free love and romantic gravity, reflected in his spontaneous potpourri style of shooting and editing . . . No filmmaker ever had so much high sport with the prevarications of Iron Curtain communism.”

Categories: Press Notes