البـــــوابـــة
Man Is Not a Bird was the
first feature film of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, who later
achieved cult acclaim for the sexual surrealism of WR: Mysteries of
the Organism and Sweet Movie. In this debut, the themes
Makavejev would explore in those later films — the double-edged sword of
sexual liberation, totalitarianism, Communism, the tense relations
between men and women as caused by social structures — are expressed
through much more conventional means. The film provides a hint of the
origins of Makavejev's sensibility in social realism and
pseudo-documentary observation. There are early traces here of the
irreverent perspective on sex and politics that would appear in
Makavejev's later films, though here his satire is understated and
subtle, ingrained within the framework of a loose narrative centered
around two different working men. One, Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec) is a
famous foreman renowned for his expertise in finishing jobs ahead of
schedule, while the other, Barbulovic (Stole Arandelovic), is a lowly
menial laborer who quarrels with his wife (Eva Ras) and his mistress
alike.
The gulf between these two men, both laborers under the
Communist system, is the gulf between the boss and the mere worker, but
even Rudinski, so well-respected and famed, is subject to orders from
above. He is as much positioned within a rigid hierarchy as the less
fortunate Barbulovic. The film is all about power and the structures
that control and shape lives. To this end, Makavejev opens with a scene
of a hypnotist delivering a speech about the power of his craft, his
ability to overcome people's innate beliefs and superstitions with his
own control. Then Makavejev displays a very different form of control by
cutting to a Communist Party manager giving orders over the phone, and
then still another form of control when he shows a voluptuous nightclub
singer arousing a roomful of drunken man into a frenzy of violence and
spontaneous clamor simply by grinding her hips, shaking her ample
breasts and suggestively licking her full lips. These scenes, each one
exploring a different way in which people lose control over their lives
and actions, establish the film as a kind of treatise on control and
power, on the loss of self that occurs in both sexuality and under
oppressive governmental regimes.
One thread within the film is
the domination of women by men. Barbulovic's cowed, subservient wife is
constantly berated by her husband, who expects her to obey his every
order, to prepare dinner for him, and above all to be silent, never to
question him. What's unstated but very much present in this relationship
is the idea that Barbulovic, who is on the bottom of the chain of
command in every aspect of his life, needs this sense of superiority and
dominance at home. At one point, a tour guide is leading a group of
schoolchildren around the industrial site where Barbulovic works. The
tour guide praises Barbulovic as one of the best laborers, but in the
same breath implicitly puts him down for not being a "mental" worker
with an office job; the unspoken subtext is that this worker doesn't
have to use his brain, or perhaps that as a mere laborer he doesn't
really have a brain worth using. It is in cruel but subtle ways like
this that the state keeps its people in line, convincing them that they
have their place and that they dare not try to rise above it.
In
this atmosphere, Barbulovic needs to feel as though he has someone to
order around the way he is ordered around at work. It is in this way,
perhaps, that the dynamics of power and control corrupt and infiltrate
the realm of sexuality and relationships between men and women. Within a
society where people are rarely able to feel much sense of
self-determination in anything they do, they enact dramas of sexual
domination and exploitation instead. So Barbulovic insists on his wife's
acquiescence to his philandering, his naked betrayal of her: he even
gives away her dresses to his mistress. As it turns out, his wife is not
so meek, and she assaults his mistress on the streets and decides that
she is no longer going to give in to the "hypnotism" by which men keep
women under their thumbs. By the end of the film, this mousy, shy woman
is seen with a new man, laughing and drinking with him, having realized
that men need not be the only ones to cheat or abandon their spouses.
The other story running through the film is
the romance developing between the older Rudinski and the young barber
Rajka (Milena Dravic). Rudinski, like Barbulovic, is trapped by
circumstances and powers beyond his control. He is famed as a great
employee and a great manager, and as a result he travels everywhere,
never staying in one place for very long, always laboring under pressure
to get things done as quickly as possible and move on to the next
place, the next job. His is a life dedicated to work, with little room
for developing meaningful relationships. Thus his romance with Rajka, as
passionate as it is, seems doomed from the start: he knows that he'll
have to move on sooner or later, leaving her behind as, no doubt, he's
left many others behind in the past. And even though he reassures her
with various promises — even telling her he'll take her with him when he
goes — she seems to know as well as him that this is a temporary
arrangement, a temporary love. And so she never quite convincingly fends
off the advances of local boy Bosko (Boris Dvornik), a lecherous
ladies' man who counts off his amorous conquests with notches on the
steering wheel of his truck. She knows, perhaps, that when Rudinski is
gone she'll have to settle for a different kind of romance with a more
geographically convenient object of affection.
Makavejev is
exploring, in many different contexts, how little control these people
(like all people, in some ways) have over their lives, how much they are
at the mercy of outside forces. Throughout the film, he inserts
digressions with a Communist party official who never seems to leave his
office, but whose edicts over the telephone have wide-ranging
consequences. At one point, he is able to tell a group how to vote on an
upcoming decision; "we decided how the Communists would vote, and thank
God you're all Communists," he exclaims. The people at the bottom get
whatever the ones at the top decide to hand down. For his dedication and
skill, Rudinski gets an elaborate party at the climax of the film, a
lavish celebration where he gets a medal and a handshake, small
compensation for his total commitment to his work, while an orchestra
plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. (In a hilarious scene, the orchestra
accidentally wanders into a working area, where they're beset by showers
of sparks, the dress of one instrumentalist catches on fire, and the
site foreman responds to the orchestra's alarmed chatter about the Ninth
Symphony by saying, "we don't produce such things here.")
The
film's finale escalates towards a complete breakdown in the
relationships that had developed throughout the film. The orchestra's
bombast is set off against Rudinski's post-celebration depression, as he
throws a bottle of liquor and shatters a mirror; Makavejev freezes the
image of the shattered glass, capturing the moment of destruction in a
still frame. This freeze frame is matched by another that caps a love
scene between Rajka and Bosko. The pair have sex in Bosko's truck and
then follow it with a joyous sequence in which Bosko playfully sprays a
hose at the truck's window while Rajka presses herself up against the
glass, making faces and splaying her fingers as the water cascades
across the windshield. Makavejev freezes the image of Rajka's hand on
the glass, a moment of sexual and sensual fulfillment that he treats
with as much import as the moments of desperation within the film. One
could argue that, while the men in the film remain trapped by work and
responsibility, the women achieve some measure of independence by
striving for sensual pleasure rather than romance or stability; just as
the pain of Rudinski's depression lingers in a frozen image, so too does
the freeze frame of Rajka's hand aginst a sheet of water allow this
ephemeral moment to linger, to endure beyond its brief duration.
This
is an early indication of Makavejev's later, more fully developed
dichotomy of sex as containing the potential for both destruction and
for radicalism and self-fulfillment. This film lacks the freewheeling
spirit and sense of play that runs through Makavejev's later works, but
its near-documentary commitment to prosaic reality, to the drab
exteriors of industrial communities, makes it a promising, satisfying
debut nonetheless.
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