Covek nije tica (L'homme n'est pas un oiseau) - Dusan Makavejev

il primo film di Dusan Makavejev,  non completo come i successivi, ma già un gran film.
alcune storie e persone che si incrociano, in una grigia cittadina industriale.
amori che non nascono, alcol a fiumi, tristezza.
non facile, anzi, ma è un film che merita di essere visto - Ismaele

…Certamente, sotto il profilo cinematografico, l’opera di Makavejev oltrepassa la visione delle cose genuinamente manichea del vecchio cinema jugoslavo: i suoi movimenti nervosamente plastici, l’influenza del cinema underground e di Godard, l’umorismo come esperienza interiore, i prodromi della geniale fusione tra materiale documentario e materiale riprodotto (in funzione dell’opera come film-saggio), e soprattutto la tecnica del processo sequenziale presieduto non dal rapporto narrativo ma dal rapporto emozionale tra le immagini…

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The debut feature film of Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, best known for his films WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. These are the three films of his I've so far seen (and, along with Man Is Not a Bird, I also own two more in a recently released Eclipse box set). He's very clearly a unique director. Man Is Not a Bird is kind of a mixture of avant garde, semi-documentary film-making mixed with wry comedy, social realism of the sort you often see from countries behind the Iron Curtain and French New Wave stylistic touches. It's a real mishmash, but it works pretty well…

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…Man is Not a Bird is a wild, bold film, with remarkable hand-held camera work and a sly eye for human nature. It's more character-driven than plot-driven, though you shouldn't picture the typical European art-house fare. Makavejev paces this more like a Western, except the characters deal in sex, rather than bullets. In the backdrop is a poor industrial city, seen almost as a new wild frontier…

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Man Is Not a Bird opens with a short monologue delivered by a hypnotist named Roko, who expounds for a few minutes on the folly of traditional superstitions that continue to dominate the consciousness of ordinary citizens even in an age when scientific research routinely debunked such notions. With calm determination, he lays out a clear presentation of just how easily the human mind can be swayed to believe things that are inherently irrational, even nonsensical when subjected to dispassionate analysis. Though it’s easy to agree with his verdict on the  absurdity of old wives tales and customs originating from Europe’s pagan past, what occurs over the course of the film remains so common and familiar to most of us that we can easily overlook Makavejev’s subsequent indictment of other forces, governmental and social, sexual and emotional, that also provoke humans to behave in ways that are no less deserving of ridicule, when stripped down to their essence...

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…Even in this early film, Makavejev is exhibiting a penchant for a freeform style, refusing to be locked down to any particular narrative aesthetic. The story takes many detours, seemingly going off track, but then coming back around to sew each added element into the main fabric. The most notable of these sidelines is the hypnotist (Roko Cirkovic) who provides an evening's entertainment by goading his volunteers into doing all manner of crazy things, like thinking they are birds and then watching them flail around on stage, unable to take to the air. Barbulović's wife directly references this stage act by telling her husband's lover how she believes that hypnotism is Barbulović's true talent, that all men lead women into a trance to get what they want. Man is Not a Bird extends this theory to include all social constructs. The need to work, political ideology, romance--these are all a form of social hypnosis, a great con to make us believe we are happy and that we can escape the mundane. Rakja seeks escape from love, for instance, only to have neither lover take her out of this tiny town. This is why man is not akin to birds, because man can't truly fly free…

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Makavejev's first feature is a delightful, typically eccentric concoction, centred very loosely indeed around a story about an engineer who visits a new town to assemble mining machinery. There his devotion to work fouls up his relationship with his beloved, while a fellow worker encounters problems when his wife discovers he has a mistress. A freewheeling kaleidoscope mixing comedy and social comment as it deals with both labour and sexual politics, not to mention many seemingly unrelated topics such as hypnotism and culture (there's a marvellous climactic scene with Beethoven performed in an enormous foundry while the heroine conjures her own ode to joy), it defies description but is extremely entertaining.
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