I'd never heard of Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev until I heard that Criterion is going to be releasing 2 of his films, "WC: Mysteries of the Organism" from 1971 and "Sweet Movie" from 1975. After reading the descriptions and reading a few mixed reviews, I have to say I was pretty curious so I thought I'd see if I could find any torrents of his stuff and luckily I found 3 of his films, the 2 mentioned above and another titled "Man is Not A Bird" from 1966. 
I'll start with MAN IS NOT A BIRD which is Makavejev's 1st feature film. The title refers to a hypnotist who makes people act like birds. The plot centers around an engineer named Jan (Janez Vrhovec), who travels to eastern Serbia to help out in a copper factory on some expert job. He falls in love with a young hairdresser in whose house he is boarding. As you will find out, the consequences of that relationship become very dire, especially after her parents catch them after being away from the house for a week. To make things even more complicated, Raika hooks up with a scummy truck driver dude while Jan is accepting an award for his stellar work ethic, angering Jan, her parents, and just about everyone. I've read that a lot of people find this "slow-going" or "boring" One of the reasons I love it is because of the dark and gloomy atmosphere it creates of the desolate Yugoslav world which is very, especially significant since the destruction of that world. In some ways this reminds me of Tarkovsky's "The steamroller and the violin" in atmosphere, I don't know why.
Next up is SWEET MOVIE, definitely my favorite film of the 3. It's kind of an inter-cut story of two women: a nearly-mute beauty queen who descends into withdrawal and madness, and another who captains a ship laden with candy and sugar, luring men and boys aboard for sex, death, and revolutionary talk. The beauty queen passes from a wealthy (and crazy) husband whose honeymoon delight is to urinate on her, to a muscular keeper who punches her, stows her in a suitcase, and ships her to Paris, to a lip-synching rock idol with whom she has a love spasm, to an Austrian commune complete with a banquet of vomit, urine, feces, chopped dildos, and wet nurses. Some of the antics are just retarded and you can't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. By the end of the movie, the girl who almost has a nervous breakdown does a fucked-up ad for a chocolate company (????) which is one of the sexiest scenes in the film, she's basically swimming in the shit. If you like "GREASER'S PALACE" by Robert Downey Senior, you should watch this. I gotta comment on the music. Some of it's quite strange, some indeed interesting, but all of it very pleasant. Without it the film wouldn't work half as well. I'd like to seek out the soundtrack for this actually.
My least favorite of the 3 films is MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM. Like SWEET MOVIE, this is indeed also a very dense film that cuts up footage of a primary plot of two young Yugoslavian girls, one a politico and the other a sexpot, and an affair with a visiting Russian skater. Mixing metaphors of Russia's relationship with Yugoslavia, intercut with footage and interviews with Wilhelm Reich and Al Goldstein of Screw magazine. The film applies Reich's theories of Orgone energy and analogies of Stalinism as a form of Freudian sexual repression. This was banned in Yugoslavia shortly after it was made. I don't know much about Dr. Wilhelm Reich or the subject of "Orgone Energy" or am I very interested in the theories to begin with and maybe that's why I didn't enjoy this film as much as the others. Reich was regarded by many as a "mad scientist" who died in prison for what he believed in. His ideas are too heavy on the psycho-sociological aspects and way too scientific at times so they are pretty hard for a dumb NB white boy like me to grasp. Regardless, this is still a very visually interesting film and I recommend giving it a view.I look forward to seeing more...
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