Germany,
1993, 83 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Dusan Makavejev
- prod
-
Alfred Hürmer, Bojana Marijan, Joachim von Vietinghoff
- scr
-
Dusan Makavejev
- cam
-
Aleksander Petkovic, Miodrag Milosevic
- editor
-
Vuksan Lukovac
- cast
-
Svetozar Cvetkovic, Anita Mancic, Alexandra Rohmig, Petar Bozovic
- source
-
alert Film
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Dusan Makavejev in person.
OTHER
When the Wall comes down and a Soviet officer's unit "deserts" him in Berlin, he opts to stay on. Still in full uniform, riding a bicycle adorned with a red flag, Major Victor Borisovich (winningly played by Yugoslav stage actor Svetozar Cvetkovic) journeys through a city rebuilding itself. Looking for work, love and food—stealing from the animals at the zoo—he ends up in jail for loitering. Once out, he falls in with other characters caught in the flux of a changing world including a chummy Berlin police officer; a black marketeer who deals in anything, even babies; and a woman or two before meeting Miki (Anita Mancic). A refugee, she helps him shed the dated armor of his uniform and find himself. In his dreams, she appears as a bearded Lenin smothering him with comradely kisses. Seamlessly interspliced in vivid Sovcolor is the grandiose, soviet kitsch epic, The Fall of Berlin (1949), and a surprisingly poignant documentary sequence in contemporary Berlin of the decapitation of a tremendous statue of Lenin whose head is trucked off to an obscure destination. Director Dusan Makavejev (Innocence Unprotected, SFIFF 1968; WR: Mysteries of the Organism, SFIFF 1971) has called his officer hero a "noble idiot," inviting a comparison to Dostoevsky's Prince Mishkin who searches for purpose in a world pervaded by the absurd—a world undone by its "liberation."
FACTOID #219
Daniel Talbot, editor of Film: An Anthology , was the first recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award in 1988. Later he cofounded New Yorker Films, a distribution company that introduced many foreign language films to North American audiences. The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco exhibitor, is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.
