Belgrade, Serbia

Innocence Unprotected

Published: February 12, 2010

Dusan Makavejev’s documentary Innocence Unprotected (Serbian: Nevinost bez zaštite) is a movie inside a movie – an interview made in 1968 with actors from the 1942 movie Innocence Unprotected, intertwined with footage from the actual movie and some news footage from that time. What is interesting about the original movie is the year and the place it was filmed – Belgrade, 1942, during the time the city was occupied by the Germans. Under that conditions the movie maker, Dragoljub Aleksic, had some difficulties making the movie about a man rescuing a young girl from an obtrusive suitor. After the war, he had problems with the Yugoslav communist authorities because they also wandered how he managed to make a movie during the occupation. Some years later, the charges against him were dropped, but the movie never played in theaters, not until Makavejev found it and made a documentary about it. Here are some scenes from the movie, for the first time on the net:

Now you must be wondering what those scenes have to do with the story of a young girl and her obtrusive suitor. The explanation is this: Dragoljub Aleksic’s primary occupation wasn’t acting, something that you could easily conclude yourself after watching the original movie. The real passion of this unusual character were acrobatic stunts – rope walking, being fired out of a cannon, bending metal with teeth, that sort of thing. And because he already had some material where he was filmed doing these stunts, he thought it would be cool to include them somehow in the movie. And I would have to agree – that’s pretty cool.

Including stunts that have nothing or little to do with the plot inspired Gidra to do the same thing in his “Rodjen kao ratnik” action flick (the gratuitous cock pushups scene).

Makavejev is one of the best and weirdest movie directors in the Balkans, so you’ll probably read more about his work on this blog in the future.

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