THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR Tribute to Dusan Makavejev: Genuine Revolutionary

“Makavejev has gone further than Godard,” claimed one critic of The Switchboard Operator, which was also called by Tony Rayns “Makavejev’s most interesting and concentrated treatment of his recurrent themes. A tragicomic love affair between a switchboard operator and a corporation rat-catcher starts out idyllic but turns sour under external pressures; Makavejev breaks up the time sequence of his story with constant flashes forward, and brings in a lot of apparently extraneous material, from lectures on sex in art to a poem about rats. The disjunctions and contradictions yield a lot of ideas about personal freedom an! oppression (especially within a socialist state), and the profusion of images is well enough organized to make the movie continuously provocative and suggestive.”