WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)

Despite its various flaws and drawbacks, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" manages to be a surprisingly powerful film worthy of analysis and admiration. Twisting cinematic convention, combining genres with ruthless insanity (one could classify this as an erotic documentary, a satirical black comedy, a dark and tragic drama, a Communist propaganda film, and the list goes on and on) and experimenting with Sergei Eisenstein's famous montage theory to a point of nearly incoherent madness. Opening as a semi straightforward historical documentary, it soon springs into manic, farcical action before, towards the end, unexpectedly becoming a poignant and saddening drama. This is avant garde at its most...avant garde! There is plenty of sense to be found within the movie's nonsense; this is a film with messages, some of them good, some of them bad (depending on your perspective). It treats the topic of sex with wisdom and frankness by shoving elements of humor, horror, and painful tragedy into a drug addicted blender and puking the final product all over the silver screen in a manner that is not random, but impressively mind boggling. Dusan Makavejev is considered a mastermind of experimental cinema for a good reason, and he has officially become one of my absolute favorite filmmakers of all time and, while it may not be my favorite of his works (I think "Love Affair" may beat it by a slight margin), it is no doubt his masterpiece.

WR:Mysteries of the Organism is a kaleidoscope of images and sounds, one long montage of bizarreness that is very hard to pin down or come close to understanding.The movie begins as a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the man whose theories about sex and the body landed him in jail and have been more or less forgotten, despite tapping into the counterculture of the time with figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs adherents of his theories about life energy.The movie soon turns weirder, with sex artists making moulds of erect penises, a man running around with a toy rifle he masturbates for the camera, a random transvestite, and confronting footage of modern day psychotherapists who have co-opted aspects of Reich's teaching, ie. that the boundary of touch should be broken in therapy and that patients should undress down to their underwear. They are also shown screaming and shouting and at one point, taking hold of the therapist's hands and apparently sucking on them like a baby would their mother's nipple.Perhaps weirdest of all - and this is how you know you're in a Dusan Makavejev movie - is the part of all this that is not documentary but was scripted and filmed for the movie. A tale of a female sexual revolutionary who lives with a mostly naked woman, the revolutionary dons a helmet and gives an address to the working classmen who live in her block of flats, a rousing ode to the power of sexuality. Later she meets a Soviet ice skater and things take a turn for the worse, as well as the bizarre, when she turns up dead and her decapitated head speaks on the coroner's metal dish.It is not possible to make sense of a movie like "Mysteries of the Organism" while you watch it. It's like great poetry: you just let the images wash over you. Afterwards, writing a review like this, it seems pretty clear that the Reich part of the movie sets the stage for us to see sex as something precious and not the be interfered with by the tools of government. The latter part of the movie shows how this has gone wrong, with the movie-within-a-movie, and the frequent interjections of Stalin, shock therapy, and madhouses.That the movie was banned in Communist Yugoslavia after it was made and its creator exiled is the real ending of this work.

This takes the form of seemingly everything from 1965 to 1975. It's a hippy-dippy, uncritical, anti-establishment goof on the work of Wilhelm Reich, with agit-prop sub-plot for good measure. 'What's New Pussycat?' meets 'Theremin.'Wilhelm Reich's tenuously connected work and pseudo-scientific gadgets (WTF does the accumulator do? How do orgasms change cloudscapes?) are more like something a flakey "inventor" would make than a serious analyst. Just because a previously intelligent person suddenly declares a correspondence between any two things (war and chocolate cake, or... orgasms and Marxist Utopia) doesn't make it so. Just because a quack found some drama queens to indulge him doesn't mean the work was valid. His ideas are as odd and harmless as his punishment was draconian overkill. Another testament to the usual misuse of government to keep Joe Average feeling unthreatened, regardless of how oversensitive Joe's threat mechanism is. Reich (to me) had firmly lost the path of knowledge, but he didn't seem to be harming anyone. No one involved (Reich, his patients, the authorities) apparently knew much about moderation. Thank God that period is over and we've said goodbye to both Orgonon and the Police State.The movie is amateurishly edited together with a side-narrative; a frigid wretch intones about sexual freedom, but can't actually make her way to a sexual event (with an ice skater) to save her life. Much better to talk and talk and talk about the state and it's repression of the perfect workers collective via sexual shame. Good times! This movie left me thinking that rank-and-file demagoguery (the preference of the individual to address society than another person) and the national urge to ramble on ad nauseum about half-understood political ideas, would have to be defeated before the Soviet chokehold could successfully be removed from the population. This half offers a few laughs but it fails to build.It's not easy to watch due to weirdness and annoyance, but at least this movie engages provocative ideas, something most movies flee from. I left early, having got the (very repetitive) point.

This is too disjointed to be enjoyable - even if you know a bit about William Reich. One story is a fictional account about a Yugoslavian woman who falls in love with a Russian ice skater, and is at least well filmed and interesting, but you can easily get lost in the surrealism. The other "stories" are factual: interviews with people from Reich's hometown, Jackie Curtis talking about his first gay sexual encounters, the editor of Screw magazine getting his penis cast, Tuli Kupferberg prancing around with a machine gun, and the most interesting parts: various doctors talking about Reich's orgone therapies, and the effect of orgasms on various patients. Oh, and we get to see one of the few remaining orgone accumulator and we even get some short snippets of a cloudburster - unfortunately that is not explained to the audience so you either know it's a cloudburster or you don't. Three things inherently wrong with this film - the attempts to be clever with the juxtapositioning renders the film quite incomprehensible; the white subtitles over an often white background means much of the footage cannot be understood (unless you speak Russian or Serbian) and, quite importantly, one image is so graphically disturbing that I will have difficulty dealing with it: we see a poor prisoner being given electroshock treatment by the Nazis. It's horrible, absolutely horrible, and whilst it's important that we know of the atrocities that happened in WWII and before, I would rather have been mentally ready for it. The scene is thrust on you suddenly, and it is extremely disturbing. Beware before watching this film, and decide whether you are really ready for a completely incomprehensible mind***k... with some nasty nightmarish scenes thrown in for luck. This is certainly not family viewing. You have been warned.