Many Western European tourists take the motorway through Zagreb and Belgrade to Greece, Turkey or holiday in Dubrovnik, but not many can claim more than a superficial knowledge of the actual social reality and the human conflicts of the country called Yugoslavia. Although we are familiar with the figure of Tito, with his part in post-war history, and know about the economy's acute problems and shortcomings, the human reality in which this defective system operates probably escapes us as much as it is ignored by most of those who know the country merely as tourists.

Any opportunity to acquaint oneself with the representation of this society in the cinema deserves our special attention. It gains an importance, which goes beyond the specific aesthetic value of the individual film, or even the reputation of a director, whose work, given our general ignorance about Eastern Europe (to which our curiosity ought to be inversely proportional), acquires the status of documentary evidence and sociological essay. In Dusan Makavejev's THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR (1967), we are presented with the image of a society whose presence is both direct and critically reflected.

After an opening scene, in which a scholarly sexologist delivers a lecture on sexual liberation, illustrated by art works and cult objects that document phallic worship across the centuries, the title character and female protaginst Isabel (Eva Ras) talks to her girlfriend Ruza (Ruzica Sokic) about her erotic-romantic fantasies. She subsequently meets the municipal rat catcher, Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudic) and the two start an affair of sorts. Disorientingly, the film cuts to a murder scene with police discovering the body of a young woman. Another lecture follows, this time by a criminologist explaining the history of murder weapons for domestic crimes and crimes of passion. The viewer fears the worst for Isabel, whose romance with Ahmed is slow to blossom. Switching back and forth between the lovers becoming intimate with each other, and the history of Soviet Communism, from the fall of the Romanov tsars, via the abolition of the church, to the Yugoslav government's program to control rat infestation and agricultural reform, Makavejev contrasts the upbeat political narrative with the downbeat and eventually doomed love affair, condensed in the scenes of the mortuary and the autopsy of Isabel's body, while she and Ahmed are still trying to work things out.