Visual/Verbal Rhyme and Ideological Critique in Makavejev's Early Films

• In Event: Local and Global Tendencies in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema - Documentary, Genre and Modernist Fiction

Abstract

A film's paradigmatic structure (the internal correlations of its signs) can imply meanings in a more ambiguous and subtle way than can narrative events linked causally or explicit statements by characters (two kinds of meaning much more evident to censors). Among filmmakers working under Communist censorship, Makavejev was a pioneer in connecting the fictional and documentary strands of his early films through a dense network of visual rhymes and visual-verbal interplay, in a way which implicitly critiqued authoritarian patriarchal control, dogmatism, and the cult of personality. His early films championed individual freedom by rhyming visual material in what were ostensibly personal 'romantic' narratives with elements of the broader 'documentary' material contained within the films and intercut with the narratives.

Author

• Herbert J. Eagle, U of Michigan