Dušan Makavejev

Sweet Movie

Sweet Movie

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.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1974
  • 98 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • Polish, English
  • Spine #390

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dušan Makavejev
  • New video interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova
  • Actress Anna Prucnal sings a song from the film
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Essays by critic David Sterritt and Harvard professor and philosopher Stanley Cavell

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dušan Makavejev
  • New video interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova
  • Actress Anna Prucnal sings a song from the film
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Essays by critic David Sterritt and Harvard professor and philosopher Stanley Cavell

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang
Sweet Movie
Cast
Carole Laure
Miss World 1984
Pierre Clémenti
A sailor from the Potemkin
Anna Prucnal
Capt. Anna Planeta
Sami Frey
El Macho
Jane Mallet
Director General of the Chastity Belt Foundation
Marpessa Dawn
Mama Communa
Otto Muehl
Themselves
the members of the Therapy Commune, Vienna
Roy Callender
Jeremiah Muscle
Credits
Director
Dušan Makavejev
Screenplay
Dušan Makavejev
Cinematography
Pierre Lhomme
Music
Manos Hadjidakis
Editing
Yann Dedet

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Dušan Makavejev

Writer, Director

Dušan Makavejev
Dušan Makavejev

“Narrative structure is prison; it is tradition; it is a lie; it is a formula that is imposed,” Dušan Makavejev once said. The Serbian filmmaker, who rose to cinematic fame or infamy (depending on who you ask) in Communist Yugoslavia in the sixties and early seventies, believed in breaking all the rules. Through collage and juxtaposition, Buñuelian absurdity and sexual confrontation, Makavejev freed narrative cinema from all oppressive norms. Influenced as much by Mickey Mouse cartoons and Laurel and Hardy two-reelers as he was by Russian silent films and 1930s British documentaries, Makavejev constructed unpredictable, genre-defying works that opposed the bureaucracy and dogmatic teachings of the socialist state. Man Is Not a Bird (1965), his startling debut, sets a fictional character drama in a real mining complex, and is filmed with gritty realism. His subsequent films are fiction-documentary hybrids as well, and include Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switch­board Operator (1967); the whimsical found-footage farce Innocence Unprotected (1968); and the astonishing WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), his international breakthrough, which ultimately resulted in his indictment for being a “dissident Marxist” and his 1973 exile from his home country. He continued provoking moviegoers the world over, however, making waves with the controversial Sweet Movie (1974) and the art-house hits Montenegro (1981) and The Coca-Cola Kid (1985).