Short Fiction Films by Dušan Makavejev: Story and Style

The contribution explores the stylistic and thematic characteristics of Dušan Makavejev’s short fiction films, which he shot for the Belgrade Cinema Club in the period of the so-called amateurism, that is, The Seal (Pečat, 1955), Anthony’s Broken Mirror (Antonijevo razbijeno ogledalo, 1957) and Don’t Believe in Monuments (Spomenicima ne treba verovati, 1958), and establishes their connection to avant-garde and modernist currents. These films are significant for Makavejev’s later works, primarily due to the construction of film narration and the accompanying editing processes that, in this period, are not as radical as later. The topics of loneliness and alienation, political repression and sexuality, which are developed through the conventions of morality and melodrama under the stylistic influence of expressionism and surrealist eccentricity and oneirism, grow into existential metaphors. Makavejev will later further develop and radicalise this principle in his canonical films.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!