Makavejev on Sweet Movie

8/2/2019 Makavejev on Sweet Movie

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Sweet Movie:

The Gentle Side of “Destructive Art”

by Dušan Makavejev

Dušan Makavejev is a Yugoslav born filmmaker who resides in Paris and Belgrade and

whose extensive and distinguished career includes such titles as Innocence

Unprotected , The Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator and Manifesto.

How did I get Otto Muehl (1) and the AA Kommune (Actions-Analytic Kommune) into

Sweet Movie? The shooting of Sweet Movie was planned for October 1974. In the

earlier version of the script, the leading female character ends up catatonic in a mental

hospital. She comes back to life by being treated with the highly perceptive non-actionof a nonverbal doctor whom I imagined as my variation of Ronnie Laing. (2) I had

never met Laing, but he fascinated me with his intelligence, risk-taking, playfulness,

radical insight and genuine respect for life. He was a healer by just being around.

Then, a batch of films from Vienna that screened in a tiny ‘underground’ cinema in

Munich moved me into an unexpected experience of a difficult–to-explain mix of

charm, disgust and fear. I oscillated between surprise, fascination and revulsion. The

films were baroque, even rococo – a cascade of prolonged “blood, shit and tears”

scenes, agony, dirt, “sadism” – as if someone was inviting my stupidity to step forward.

The authors of the films, obviously, wanted me scared or furious. The public was

leaving the cinema in a panic. I had never before faced the anarchy of life cleansed of

humour. However, the orchestrated chaos on the screen contained a lot of daring and a

genuine indefinable “something”. And, also, the blood was more often ketchup, and the

chaos was mostly an excess of flour being spilled around.

What I’d seen on the screen made me acutely aware that instead of staging some

clumsy half-fantasy of mine with hired actors I could, and should, place my leading

actress into a sort of living anti-psychiatry collective. I decided to get in touch with Otto

Muehl.

At the time, the Commune was rejecting visitors but I managed to find about two dozenof them living in a large apartment on the Praterstrasse in Vienna. They lived without

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reading newspapers or watching television, in a sort of very lively and communicative

family life. Only later, I realised that they were strongly connected also through a group

marriage. Luckily, the only film they had seen the year before was my WR: Mysteries

of the Organism [W.R. – Mistirije organizima, 1971], so they let me in for a short visit.

They were kind and nice to each other, and with me, but about being in my next filmthey said no. Their ‘no’ was not a refusal; they were simply not interested. However, I

managed to get their permission to visit them once again the following week on their

farm in Burgenland, a half-barren land near the border with Hungary. They were neither

interested in the glamour of being in a film and its connected publicity, nor in the

chance to earn some money. It was a collective of non-aggressive outsiders. (Moving

through their space, I was tested, watched by everyone, not knowing that my unstated

task was to seduce them.)

After protracted negotiations, we managed to get eight of them to join our cast and be

with us for a week in an abandoned old factory in a Paris suburb. (With the money

earned from the film, they bought a cow or two, to have milk for their kids.)

So, there I was the following week, at the end of the world, in sparsely populated

region. Otto Muehl, a little older than the others, was fun, easy, tolerant and exercised

no authority at all. I was told that, if I wanted eight of them to participate in the scene in

my film, the whole commune would have to hear my story and approve of it.

I was in a cold sweat. I sat with all of them ‘a la turca’ in a big circle. I started telling

my story to neutral faces that let me feel the stupidity of my film and the futility of my

endeavour. As I went on describing scene by scene the story of Sweet Movie, a baby girl

of about a year and half who was playing with a dog climbed into my lap. Busy with

my storytelling, I had no time to look for the child’s mother, so I accommodated the girl

in my lap and continued quite desperately with my story. The child fell asleep. It seems

this was a vote of approval.

The “Commune” in the film consisted of the eight members from Vienna and another

eight young actors from Paris selected through some interesting exercises. The

Commune scenes changed a lot from the original script. I kept only the idea that the

catatonic girl gets into the commune and, at a certain point, starts coming back to life.

We decided to shoot for several days, one ‘theme’ a day, whatever happens. First day

was the ‘Day of Nest and Milk’, next was ‘Day of Food’, next the ‘Day Re-birth’ and

the last one was to be the ‘Day of Blood’.

Day after day, we shot for just a few hours. Every single shot was good and usable. The

Commune members were collaborative and enthusiastic, and the Paris actors melted in.

Most of the creative crew was inspired and positive. Part of the professional crew

followed half-heartedly. It seems we were not “following the script”. I knew that some

people were afraid of the chaos. I tried to explain that we were getting much better film

images than planned. The real strain was on actress Carole Laure. She brilliantly and

bravely participated and inter-acted, especially in the wild lunch scene. The scene was

improvised and all shot in less then two hours. The actual ‘lunch’ was shot without

rehearsals, continuously with the hand-held camera circling around the table twice. At

the end, the whole table and the food were destroyed and we finished the shoot. WhenOtmar Bauer started pissing on Herbert Strumpfel, his partner, it was so joyous and



hilarious. (Otmar Bauer was introduced to me as the commune’s accountant, and

Herbert Strunmfel was just around. They both made a number of their own films as

Vienna Aktionists.)

I was sure that the ‘provocative content’ could overcome the censorial impulses waiting

at the end of our work if the excess normally considered dangerous is wrapped up ininfantility, happiness and pure ‘joy of life’. It ended, paradoxically, both ways. The film

played in many countries; however, it is still banned in Canada and the United

Kingdom.

I think I’ve interpreted correctly the Commune’s ‘destructivity’ as respect for life in all

its wilderness, unpredictability, freedom, pleasure. Celebration. It was clear to me that

all their actions, ugly or shocking, were pure play and performance, innocently offered

to both themselves and to the camera eye, and politically more than correct.

Carole Laure in Sweet Movie

I could not know then that I was experimenting, twenty years before the time, with what

was to be named ‘A Reality Show’. I just felt that I should not interfere. This Ali-

Baba’s Cave of Horrors that was offered to us, and brilliantly recorded by Jan

Lemasson’s perceptive hand-held lens, was a genuine gift of unpleasant poetry. I just

told Vincent Malle, the producer, that we were getting some incredible material, that I

could not censor. I asked him to let me make, without extra costs, an independent

documentary of twenty to forty minutes. In the feature film, I would use maybe seven to

ten minutes integrated in the rest of the film, stylistically interlaced with humour, colour

and the general spirit of the film. He said no way. I could not believe that he was notaware that we would get some sort of monstrous ‘blob’ of uneasy images towards the

end of the film.

In retrospect, I find curious that thinking of my own film, whose production was near

its start, I was not intimidated by the fact that the screening in Munich ended with an

empty cinema. At a screening in Taormina, within a minute or two of the Commune

scene a few dozen people stood up and ran out of the screening room. And minutes later

another three, five and a dozen people left. They were ugly moments. When I went out

to hear what they were saying, I found them all watching the film through the exit

doors. When the Commune scene ended, they all went back to their seats.



The last day with the Commune ended without any filming. A highly poetic and

frightening scene conceived only by the actresses for the ‘Day of Blood’ was not shot. I

owe readers an account of this scene scripted by Carole Laure and the other actresses,

as well as an account of the French crews rebellion, and Bojana’s (3) thoughts on the

matter. But I’ll leave that for another day ...

Editors’ Notes

1. Otto Muehl, Austrian analyst, painter, filmmaker and creator of ‘installations’

and ‘happenings’, and founder of the Friedrichshof commune. His films include

Mama and Papa (1963-1969) and Sodoma (1970).

2. R. D. Laing, born in 1927, trained as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and

subsequently a leading figure of the anti-psychiatry movement and author of

countless books, amongst which are The Divided Self , The Politics of

Experience, Reason and Violence (with David Cooper), Sanity, Madness and the Family (with Aaron Esterson).

3. Bojana Marijan worked as an AD on WR: Mysteries of the Organism and did

the music collage for the film, as well as an AD on Sweet Movie, Montenegro

(1981) and The Coca-Cola Kid (1985). She was Associate Producer of

Manifesto (1988) and produced Gorilla Baths at Noon (1993) and Rupa u dusi

( A Hole in the Soul , 1994). She is married to Dušan Makavejev.




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Makavejev on Sweet Movie