There’s never been another filmmaker quite like Dušan Makavejev. Even in the 1960s, when all of cinema’s rules seemed to be breaking down and artists such as Godard, Cassavetes, and Marker were dissolving the boundary between fiction and documentary, Yugoslavia’s Makavejev stood alone. His films about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, raucous, and ribald. Across these, his wild, collagelike first three films, Makavejev investigates—with a tonic mix of earnestness and whimsy—love, death, and work; the legacy of war and the absurdity of daily life in a Communist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen. Man Is Not A Bird (1965) Man Is Not a Bird is an antic, free-form portrait of the love lives of two less-than-heroic men who labor in a copper factory. This is one of cinema’s most assured and daring debuts. Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) This story of the tragic romance between a young telephonist (Eva Ras) and a middle-aged rodent sanitation specialist (Slobodan Aligrudic) in Belgrade is an endlessly surprising, time-shifting exploration of love and freedom. Innocence Unprotected (1968) This utterly unclassifiable film—assembled from the "lost" footage of the first Serbian talkie made during the Nazi occupation—is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces.