***** Dusan Makavejev: WR: Mysteries of the Organism
The People's Congress
By Derek Malcolm Thursday June 3, 1999 The Guardian
When Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries Of The Organism was presented in 1971 at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street - at that time the premier art house in London - it was only after some wranglings with the censor, who objected to the brief views of an erect penis, albeit one encased in plaster.
The Academy was allowed to get away with it, saying that it wouldn't screen the film at all unless it could show it complete. Later, the situation was compounded by the fact that a great many people referred mistakenly to the film as WR: Mysteries Of The Orgasm.
Makavejev's film - however controversial it was in the early 70s - is not a sex film. But it certainly is a film about sex, since WR stands for Wilhelm Reich, a close associate of Freud and a Marxist who believed, among other things, that sexual freedom was a true expression of communism.
This is the fourth film by this highly original Yugoslavian director, and it became easily his most audacious, a landmark in the film-making of the time, after which he never again had quite the same success.
The first Makavejev film I ever saw was Innocence Unprotected, the marvellously stitched together story of Dragoljub Aleksic, a Yugoslavian strongman who made the first Serbian talkie in 1942 and got into trouble with the occupying Germans when it became an outrageous success.
The film quotes liberally from the 1942 dream fantasy, interviews some of its veteran actors and then cuts in and out of newsreel footage of what was actually going on in Yugoslavia at the time. The result is a remarkably funny, moving and nostalgic collage. WR used the same methods. It begins as a documentary, shot in America where Reich had died in prison after he was expelled from both communist Russia and Nazi Germany. Friends and disciples and even his barber are interviewed before we move to Milena in Yugoslavia, and to a girl who, riotously, tries to prove Reich's theories in the context of being a party member.
This is a political and moral satire and a lot else besides, again manipulating various films and newsreels in and out of the proceedings. One of these films is Chiaureli's The Vow, a 1946 Soviet hagiography of Stalin of unbelievable banality. Another is a tinted German Sexpol movie from the early 30s showing lovemaking in a meadow. Added to that, there is a sequence with Jackie Curtis, the famous Warholian transvestite, with the editor of Screw magazine having the above-mentioned penis moulded in plaster, and with a woman painter who had depicted men and women masturbating (in Reichian terms, this is a way of releasing tension).
All this and much more is put together with what one can only call magisterial abandon, so that it not only makes sense, but also makes hay with our preconceptions. Makavejev always said that he wanted to put together two and two and make five - the original purpose of Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage. Unfortunately, he added cheekily, Eisenstein didn't have the humour to do it properly.
Makavejev certainly did, and created a unique film in so doing, highlighted by the fact that Yugoslavia was balanced precariously between the East and the West at the time. Alas, after WR came the grave disappointment of Sweet Movie and Makavejev's subsequent translation into a peripatetic international director who could never quite hit the same mark again. But since he's an old friend of mine, and a most stimulating companion, I always hope that he will. And for four of his earlier films alone (Man Is Not A Bird, The Switchboard Operator, Innocence Unprotected and WR) Makavejev deserves all the fame and fortune that has been latterly denied him.
<http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,4135,55070,00.html> *****
***** ... Makavejev's most famous film is _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ (1968-1971), and while some critics - notably Robin Wood - have argued that here the director's collage approach has finally gone out of control, the match of subject and director is ideal. The "WR" of the title refers to Wilhelm Reich, the controversial psychologist and philosopher whose "orgone box" alleged to cure cancer and other diseases landed him in a Pennsylvania prison, where he died in 1958. Reich was, like Makavejev, an unapologetic liberationist, disgusted by both communism's hatred of creativity and capitalism's idolatry of consumerism. For both men, to quote Reich as quoted in the film, "Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples." Makavejev's paean to Reich is a kaleidoscope of constructs and effects, a wild mélange that's variously a heartfelt tribute to a martyred pioneer, a screed against war and more personal brutalities, a satire of communism, and a plea for liberation on all levels. Shot in both Yugoslavia and the United States, WR includes a rich sampling of Reich quotes, a bit of footage of Reich and his wife, interviews with family members, devotees, and Maine locals who knew him as an okay guy who was slightly eccentric. His influence is indicated in voiceover quotes from both Reich and Makavejev ("Comrade-lovers, for your health's sake, fuck freely!"), scenes of a bioenergetic workshop in New York, a penis plaster cast being made, and a rare sighting of one of the (then) "ten or fifteen orgone boxes left in the country."
The film is a crazy quilt of visual quotes, ranging from the ironic hagiography of an old Russian melodrama about Stalin to the grisly horror of Nazi medical footage of electroshock therapy. WR's weapons against these atrocities are whimsy, satire, and sex. He skewers war in the person of poet Tuli Kupferberg, seen prancing through the streets of New York in a comic costume holding a fake gun and quietly rattling passersby. Most impressive in this regard is a recurring story of Party faithful Radmilovic (Zoran Radmilovic), Reich enthusiast Milena (Mileana Dravic), and her roommate Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper). Hilarious indeed are Milena's arguments with a canny old lady, who dishes the Reichian ideal as practiced by a couple nearby: "To me it's just a fuckfest!" When her boyfriend Radmilovic upbraids her thus, "Now that you've passed a Party course, you snub intimate proletarian friends!" she replies in perfect communist-speak: "That's a slanderous lie, you irresponsible element!" In a brilliant stroke, when a perfect orgasm leads to Milena's beheading, she continues to dispense Reichian homilies from the little white pan in which her head sits. Not surprisingly, WR had its share of censorship problems; in fact, Makavejev left the former Yugoslavia in 1971 when the film was banned there.
<http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/33/makavejev.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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