The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang

The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang is a Marxist-Surrealist Yugoslav epic poem for children accompanied by wild photocollage illustrations. This extraordinary artistic achievement manages to dazzle simultaneously as a daringly experimental work and an exciting, action-packed adventure story.

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The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang is a Marxist-Surrealist Yugoslav epic poem for children, written by Aleksandar Vučo and accompanied by Dušan Matić’s photocollage illustrations and captions. The poem tracks the adventures of five scrappy, resourceful working-class boys who endeavor to free an equally plucky girl from the evil clutches of a convent school (and its fearsome nuns). While weighing in on various contemporary political issues, the story is unpredictable, action-packed and relayed in richly colloquial language. Matić’s photocollages show “what happened in the meantime” between the “songs” (episodes) of the poem, providing clever twists to the linear plot as well as an illustration of the surrealist concepts of time, space and the transformative capabilities of art.