MAN IS NOT A BIRD Movie Review

Covek Nije Tica

A factory engineer and a hairdresser meet and fall in love in a small Yugoslavian town. The first feature film from the gifted Dusan Makavejev is a disarming and truly bizarre comedy/drama mixing sex, politics, and hypnotism, for reasons that happily defy conventional analysis. This is a freewheeling film that was influenced by the early 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard, but has a sweet and inventive tone that is fresh and new. Makavejev will frequently stop the movie's conventional storyline to deliver weird asides on various topics, and while these scenes are not always completely relevant, they're always fun and weird. Makavejev would move into the international spotlight in a bigger way with his WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro and The Coca-Cola Kid, but Man Is Not a Bird remains his most proudly demented and purely enjoyable achievement. Note: the subtitles on the original American prints of Man Is Not a Bird were not only inadequate as translations, they actually slid out of the frame while they were on screen. They weren't supposed to, but they were applied to the prints so cheaply that no one seemed to have the money to fix them.

NEXT STOP … Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, Innocence Unprotected, Manifesto

1965 80m/B YU Eva Ras, Milena Dravic, Janez Urhovec; D: Dusan Makavejev; W: Dusan Makavejev; C: Aleksandar Petkovic; M: Petar Bergamo. VHS FCT