Writer and director Dusan Makavejev is this year's Peter and Joan Avenali Visiting Professor of Humanities. The Avenali Professorship, attached to the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (founded in 1987), enables the Center to bring to Berkeley individuals whose work moves beyond traditional disciplinary definitions and is of interest to a broad range of the campus community. Makavejev is the sixth person and first filmmaker to hold the Avenali Professorship. He will be resident on campus from mid-February until March 25.
In Yugoslavia, Makavejev emerged as Eastern Europe's most original and provocative filmmaker of the sixties and seventies. His subject was the still-puritanical nature of relationships in postrevolutionary society, examined as a comitragic carnival where desire meets death. His style is a bold and witty collage of iconic imagery and ironic narrative, fictions viewed through the prism of the documentary “voice-of-authority.” Due to Soviet pressure, WR: Mysteries of the Organism was not released in Yugoslavia and Makavejev made Sweet Movie and succeeding films (including Montenegro and last year's Gorilla Bathes at Noon) in the West. He makes his home in Paris.
