During the ’50s Makavejev began making short films and documentaries in the Zagreb and Belgrade studios, as in Kino Klub Beograd, the center of avant-garde film and amateur activities during the ’60s in Serbia. The experimental and documentary impulse remains powerful in Makavejev’s work, as does the tendency to intercut undigested segments from other films into longer works. At the same time, those early works would be the first of many run-ins with the censors that would plague his career and, arguably, keep him from being recognized as a major postwar film artist.
Category: Short
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Taking the visual worlds of famous painter Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918) as his starting point, Parajanov evokes, reflects on and shows his great appreciation for the artistic universe of the Georgian artist, his still lives, portraits and genre scenes. A surrealistic and phantasmagorical essay.
Lexie lives with his lively daughter, Laura, who now wants to learn to dance. He has just about managed as a one-parent family so far. The story of one man’s lonely life is transformed by the simple wisdom of his daughter.
This black-and-white cartoon captures the last few moments of a prisoner arriving at the place of execution before the weapons roll. The darkness before death is preceded by the darkness of a blindfold that allows only two bands of light into the world. This is the last time the prisoner can see the nose of his shoes on the pavement.