Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dušan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema. —The Criterion Collection
Dusan Makavejev, the most prominent director in new Yugoslav cinema is internationally recognized for his passionate, daring films that blend fiction with reality, and drama with humor. Many of these films contain experimental elements and were considered controversial for their eroticism and sharp criticism of Eastern European politics. Makavejev began making short films during the ‘50s just after he studied psychology at Belgrade University; he then went on to become active in several film societies and festivals while studying direction at the Academy for Radio, Television, and Film. He continued making shorts and documentaries for both Zagreb and Avala studios until the early ’60s. His interest in documentaries can still be see in his later fictional features. Makavejev’s first three features — Man Is Not a Bird (1966), Love Affair (1967), and Innocence Unprotected (1968) — won him international acclaim. In 1971, his fictionalized chronicle of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, WR: Mysteries… read more
The universe is conspiring against me to watch this film. First the controversial seduction scene is removed from YouTube, and now the full cut froze on Hulu+, who are notorious for not bookmarking where you left off on films, an hour and a half before an art show/reunion with an old friend. I do love what I've seen and highly recommend it based on that, it's a Marxist sex comedy and those don't come out very often.
VINYL FLOORING Robert Freeman's 1968 "film" The Touchables never had any reason to exist except to capture some cellophane idea of the zeitgeist
Watch this film naked, with a friend, or twenty.
Feel the primordial shit spread on your own chest
and don’t be afraid to cry.
Scream, fuck, purge, piss, moan, wail.
Revolutionize… read review
I don’t feel “Sweet Movie” is full of death, in the sense that this may be the overpowering conceit of the film. However, the fact of the matter is that “the world is full of corpses” as Sailor Potemkin… read review
“Thinking can sometimes be a very dangerous exercise.” These are true words taken right out of Sweet Movie’s context, and pretty much sum up the entire Film. Sweet Movie starts out in a dream like… read review
Oddball mix of elements in Makevejev’s most way-out fantasia-collage, fusing critiques of consumerism and sexual politics with scatological comedy. However his usually eclectic magpie nest of ideas… read review