Artist in Person (Covek Nije Tica). Makavejev's first film proves precocious if not prescient in questioning just what a man is, in the postrevolutionary age. It was shot cinema-verite style in a mining basin in Eastern Serbia, which does not preclude a circus-like eccentricity in the goings-on. Its pseudo-documentary subtheme is hypnosis, by which a man can be made to believe he is a bird-or a worker that he is not a machine. An engineer, sent to this factory town, has an affair with a young hairdresser (Milena Dravic), who in turn has a fling with a womanizing truck driver. "The natives are tough" in these parts, and a strain of violent sexual politics runs alongside a genuine love story. Few films today could equal this picture of modern man (and woman) as primitive, lonely, and futile, despite the mordant humor with which it is all presented. An unsung hero of the film is cinematographer Aleksandar Petkovic, whose extraordinary crane shots give the lie to the title.

• Dusan Makavejev (Yugoslavia, 1966). Written by Makavejev. Photographed by Aleksandar Petkovic. With Milena Dravic, Janez Vrhovec, Boris Dvornik, Stole Arandelavic. (80 mins, In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From New Yorker Films)