More than thirty years ago the 2nd International Forum of New Cinema presented an outstanding film that elsewhere prompted action by censors: W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism by Dušan Makavejev. More than a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the controversial psychoanalyst and sex researcher who had been chosen as adoptive father by the sexual revolution, it is a brilliant, entertaining, associative montage of documentary material, narrative sequences, and quotations from other films that contemplates on the idea that a free (communist) society and free love are inseparably intertwined. In retrospect it is the ironic critique of the system that catches the viewer's eye more than the explicit presentation of genitals and sex. Though at the time either must have caused irritation in the East and the West alike. Today the utopia of a sexual revolution is history, the healing effect of liberating sexual energy has found its niche in tantric circles, and more recent cultural theories have long doubted that liberated sex consequently causes the crash of authoritarian institutions, but the film has lost none of its sparkling energy. And the slogan "Comrade lovers, for your health's sake, fuck freely!" has lost none of its charm.
Anna Hoffmann
Production: Neoplanta, Novi Sad; Telepool, Munich
Screenplay: Dušan Makavejev
Camera: Aleksandar Petković, Predrag Popović
Cast: Milena Dravić, Jagoda Kaloper, Ivica Vidović, Tuli Kupferberg, Zoran Radmilović, Miodrag Andrić, Zivka Matić, Dragoljub Ivkov, Nikola Milić, Milan Jelić, Betty Dodson, Jim Buckley, Nancy Godrey, Jackie Curtis
Format: 35mm, Color, Black-and-white
Running time: 84 min.
Languages: English, Serbian
We would like to thank the George Eastman House, Rochester, for making it possible to show a new print.
