WR ou les mystères de l'organisme

WR: Mysteries of the Organism, is one unique if not messed up viewing experience. Part documentary and part fictional surrealist philosophical sex comedy, Serbo-Croatian director Dusan Makavejev assaults the viewers senses with imagery, music, politics and satire. "Mysteries of the Organism" is on many top 1000 film lists, but for some odd reason it is nearly impossible to track down. Just like Makavejev's other film "Sweet Movie", I was put on a several month waiting list on Amazon. Thank god for ebay! This is a film that screams for a DVD release, but I don't think many distributors want to touch it due to it's explicit sexuality and subversive elements. The film starts off as a documentary on Wilhelm Reich, a scientist who studied the orgon and used the human orgasm as a method for healing. Of course, similar to the scientist Tesla; his books were seized and burned by the U.S. government and FDA. Then the second part of the film deals with Milena, a sexually liberated Yugoslavian girl who makes revolutionary speeches on her apartment balcony. She says "The October Revolution failed by not excepting free love". Later she falls in love with a Soviet figure skater who's afraid to express his sexual feelings. So this film is a comedy, based on the politics of human sexuality. It mocks capitalism and communism for suppressing people's sexual desires. Now if only I could find the soundtrack. My rating is 10/10, which means I'll watch it again!

WR is one of my two favorite films, and is widely considered by people knowledgable about the film and the era as "one of the most profound and humerous films of the decade". I call it the "Citizen Kane of the Sixties" because it did what the first "Citizen Kane" did earlier - it summarized the realities we all were living with in the Sixites in the Global Village - the reality of sexual repression in both the East and West, the horrors of the McCarthy Era in this country, the obsession with sports in Russia, etc., etc. It is no accident that a still from this film is on the cover of one of the greatest books on film, "Film As a Subversive Art" by film critic and founder of the NY Film Festival, Amos Vogel. I can understand why many Americans do NOT understand this film - the organization of the film, the two overlapping storylines, the music - all so different from the Hollywood material. However, it is considered by many including myself to be a masterpiece, as are all the films by its director, Dusan Makavejev. Together, he and Jean-Luc Godard are the two "Picassos" of film since WW II - and should both be held as two of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

I have been trying to see this for many years, particularly after I discovered Reich in my reading in the early 80's, read some of his writings as well as a great biography "Fury on Earth". Now our library has it on a new video release, and I have to say it was worth the wait. It is a masterpiece of documentary insight into its subject Wilhelm Reich, of subversive cinema in that it has a great power to undermine the beliefs of the viewers/participators, and of classical comedy and drama as embodied (literally) in the "fictional movie" within the documentary. Occasionally punctuated by the wild and crazy NY poet/musician Tuli Kupferberg roaming the streets of Manhattan in full battle array and carrying an M-16 (I don't think they could get away with that these days, unless they had a Mr. De Niro in the cast.) Yes, it is blatant hippie/yippie revolutionary zeitgeist of 1968-1971, which was very much fueled by the father of the sexual revolution, Dr. Reich, who had died in 1957 in jail for not answering a subpoena to defend his claims of cancer cures. He said he would be judged by scientists but not by lawyers. Inasmuch as he was the only individual to have his books burned by both Hitler and the US government (FDA), his story and his philosophy should be more widely known, but of course he is still suppressed by some of the powers that be. The erotic content of "WR" is tame in the face of today's hardcore but all the more effective for it, in that Reich condemned pornography but glorified healthy sexuality above all else. And for those "doves" that still populate the earth by the millions or billions, the words and deeds of the good Dr. Reich, who was exiled by Hitler and then Stalin (who is shown in this documentary in some amazing pseudo-heroic films he had made of himself,) still resonate. As do the words of Tuli Kupferberg and his band The Fugs, on the soundtrack: "Kill, kill, kill for peace...Near or far or very middle East..."

The film for which director Dusan Makavejev is best known. It's similar to his later Sweet Movie, which I watched last week, in that it's made up of a bunch of disparate parts edited together. The most prominent thread is a documentary about sexual psychiatrist and (pseudo-)scientist Wilhelm Reich, a refugee from Nazi Germany who fled to the United States, where he was ironically persecuted and imprisoned when the government became suspicious of his work. A second thread is fictional, set in Eastern Europe, and is about a sexually liberated woman (Milena Dravic) promoting sexual freedom in Communistic language. There are other smaller threads about Andy Warhol's transsexual protégé Jackie Curtis, a hippie with a gun who runs around New York City, a woman who makes dildos and probably a couple of other ones I'm not remembering. The film covers some interesting areas, but it's too loose and not interested enough in any of these things to engage in them. The separate bits began to fall apart, for me at least. Sweet Movie was kind of a mess, but it was a well-structured masterpiece in comparison to WR. I liked Sweet Movie a whole lot more.

The plot concentrates on Wilhelm Reich's controversial vital energy… Reich believes that unless a mysterious universal phenomenon called "orgone energy" is discharged naturally through sexual union, obsessions and compulsions will erupt...

The film is a collection of these sorts of neuroses, done with exceptional skill and comic action, set in modern-day Yugoslavia… The main character is Milena Dravic, who shouts from her heavily populated apartment: "Politics is for those whose orgasm is incomplete!" Complimenting the idealistic Milena are two female sexologists who are obsessed with the physical nature of human relations...

The film is a blast at repression of any kind—political or moral—and a poem to uninhibited sexual intercourse... Repression sickens and enslaves, whereas nature's physical pleasure sets the human spirit free…

There is an abundance of vivacious sexual encounters, much nudity, and constant immersing into other social taboos, but the film's coup de grâce is a natural mixing of erotica, humor, and politics...