A Cinema of Revolt: Black Wave Revolution and Dušan Makavejev’s Politics of Disgust

Expanding discussions of negative feelings in black wave cinema beyond pessimism, disgust in Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974) intervenes in both the revolutionary philosophy of Yugoslavia’s second revolution and the problems of revolutionary representation in political modernist cinema. Disgust, a powerfully negative emotional response, disrupts the communication of politics to produce a profoundly ambivalent presentation of revolutionary action. Against a positive political cinema that affirms and thus reifies its revolutionary ideology, disgust operates as a means of “nonarticulation” that prevents Sweet Movie from clearly articulating a “correct” revolutionary politics. However, although disgust may work to liberate the film from orthodox revolutionary dogma, at the same time it undermines Sweet Movie’s ability to spur political action. As such, negative feelings like disgust produce a vexed aesthetic that at once expresses the possibilities and the limits of revolutionary cinema.