Makavejev’s film gets both its name and much of its footage from a remarkable “lost” melodrama of which many had heard but which no one had seen in 1960s Belgrade. The original Innocence Unprotected was the first talkie made in Serbia, and it was written, directed, and produced by Dragoljub Aleksić, an irrepressibly self-assured and self-promoting acrobat, strongman, and escape artist. Having begun to film his feats of strength before World War II, he decided in 1942 to incorporate the footage into a feature film in which he would star as himself, showing off his prowess while rescuing a damsel in distress—an orphan named Nada. Hence, as Greenspun puts it, “Rather a lot of the old movie is given over to Nada’s reveries on the prowess of her hero, each reverie accompanied by appropriate footage showing Aleksić breaking chains, balancing on monuments or hauling hundreds of pounds in weights or people high above the city by means of his wonderful teeth.”

Remarkably, Aleksić and his collaborators decided to make their film amid the Nazi occupation of Belgrade, which lasted from 1941 until 1944. Against all odds, the actors and crew succeeded, only to see the film banned first by the Nazis soon after its premiere and then suppressed after the war by the Communist authorities, who suspected Aleksić of being a collaborator and war profiteer. He continued to be shunned from public life even after the charges against him were dropped in 1945. His film was not shown again for 26 years after its wartime premiere.[1]

Lorraine Mortimer, author of Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, describes in detail how for his film, Makavejev borrowed the older one almost in its entirety, intercutting fictional scenes with documentary footage made during the occupation by Stevan Misković, the cinematographer (and only professional crew member) of the original Innocence Unprotected. Makavejev also hand-tinted certain frames and added period newsreel and propaganda footage, portions of other fiction films (such as Grigory Alexandrov’s 1935 Soviet musical The Circus), and new footage of interviews with the actors from the original film, including, most prominently, Aleksić himself.[2] In 1968, the aging strongman still had all the bravado of his younger days; for the opening of Makavejev’s film, at 61, he performed anew an old stunt called the “Pillar of Death.”

The combination of the ridiculous and tragic that he saw in the older film resonated with Makavejev’s own childhood experience of World War II in Belgrade, where he witnessed German bombings and endured the privations of occupation.[4] He has said that his aesthetic sensibilities have their beginnings in that period. “He tells of himself as a boy, exploring Belgrade streets as the war’s end was announced, seeing stacked corpses of Hitler’s defeated infantrymen on the sidewalks, as joyous Yugoslavs danced victoriously in the streets beside the dead. Makavejev says he was strongly influenced by such ridiculous, blackly humorous juxtapositions that war produces abundantly."[5]

With Innocence Unprotected, Makavejev tries to change the world for the better by taking “an adventurous trip into publicly nonexisting parts of Serbian national history.”[8] In this history, he clearly admires the larger-than-life hero who lives by his own rules and resists political oppression through art (even if in Aleksić’s case, unlike Makavejev’s, the political effect of Innocence Unprotected was inadvertent). In Aleksić, Makavejev finds a liberated (if comically libido-driven) hero who defies restrictive social norms imposed by any system. Aleksić’s film, according to Makavejev, was “a rebellion of the illiterate, a kind of bravery. . . . He was working against all presuppositions: if you are not educated, you never make [a] movie; if you are under the Occupation, you do not do any cultural work; if you do something for profit, it cannot result in anything intellectual, especially if you are not an intellectual.”[9] Makavejev, one suspects, identifies with Aleksić personally, especially given that Makavejev’s path to cinema also started with making amateur films, which he created in the 1950s while studying for a psychology degree and for which he almost immediately got in trouble with the authorities. (Two of Makavejev’s early films are part of this film series.)

In addition to offering a different kind of historical hero in Innocence Unprotected, Makavejev also offers a dramatically new and distinctive cinematic take on history. The film sardonically questions the straightforwardly triumphalist historical tropes of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, whose powerful national mythology was born out of World War II.[10] As an alternative, Makavejev offers a history that is anything but straightforward.[11] It is nonlinear, messy, and based on resplicing and reediting of seemingly incongruous elements, much like the film in which it is being depicted. It is also full of unresolved trauma and bound up in the ambivalent emotions of the individuals who lived through it. Although the film does not “debunk” the basic facts of history—the Serbs are still the heroes, the Germans still the villains, and the “unprotected innocence” of the title can refer to Serbia as much as Nada—the film does show, as one scholar has put it, “a kind of ironic humility regarding historical ‘truth,’” thus escaping from “the straitjacket of narrative history.”[12]

After making Innocence Unprotected, Makavejev went on to create his most famous film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971),[13] and was afterward “encouraged” by the Yugoslav authorities to go into exile while making his next film, Sweet Movie (1974), which, like his earlier films, featured wild juxtapositions of “found” historic “fact” and scripted “fiction.”[14] Notably, Makavejev’s take on his exile (which lasted until 1988) was as irrepressible as Aleksić’s attitude was toward his historical vicissitudes. In a 1975 interview with Roger Ebert, Makavejev still insisted—having found little success with the capitalist way of financing films—that “the Yugoslavian system is good for filmmakers.” When asked, “What about Sweet Movie,” which was banned in Yugoslavia, he mused, “The system is good . . . but I am too much.”  — Ksenya Gurshtein