WR The Motion Picture

[Neil Calton <nbc@VAX-D.RUTHERFORD.AC.UK>]

As promised/threatened here is some more information about the film
"WR: Mysteries of the Organism" by Dusan Makavejev and starring Milena
Dravic, Jagoda Kaloper, Miodrag Andric and Vladimir Ilich.  (I guess a
*SPOILER* might be deemed necessary ...)

The film is constructed entirely as collage. Behind the titles a raw
egg is passed from hand to hand. Then follows a series of short nude
love-making sequences entitled 'Filme der Sexpol' and explained as
being 'put on videotape in Woodstock by the radical underground New
York TV group Global Village (Rudi Stern and others), transferred on
to film via the art machine called the Erotoscope in the Gallery of
the US of Erotica'.

After this the film launches into fairly straight documentary about
the life work and persecution of WR, with interviews with Reich's
children, disciples and former neighbours, and scenes, new and old,
shot at the Reich Museum at Organon.  From this point on the film is
a series of free collage variations on the Reich theme, associating a
variety of impressions in the cause of investigating the Communism and
the Fascism, the liberty and the enslavement, the anarchy and the
totalitarianism of the human body, always returning to the Reichian
practitioners and their patients in their search for individual
liberation.  Tuli Kupferberger, founder of the Revolting Theatre, is
filmed stalking through the streets of New York. Jackie Curtis
(transvestite) chats about the difficulty of erotic life when you are
fairly frequently changing sex. There are other interviews with Betty
Dodson, an erotic painter, and with Jim Buckley the editor of Screw,
who is later seen having his penis immortalised in a plaster cast by
Nancy Godrey, an expert in the technique.

Intercut are sequences from The Vow, the most alarmingly bombastic of
the series of films in which Mikhail Gelovani embodied the figure of
Joseph Stalin; a horrific record-film of mentally sick people, filmed
by the Nazis expressly to justify Hitler's policies of euthanasia;
scenes of a great Pekin rally; and a fictional story in which Milena
Dravic and friends advocate the merits and necessity of sexual
liberation. Dravic is the theorist, emotionally haranguing the crowds
and approvingly looking on while Kaloper and Andric copulate
acrobatically and pleasantly all over the place.

Sex-lib meets socialist realist culture when the friends go to a
Soviet ice-show. Dravic goes backstage afterwards and drags home the
star of the show (Ilich), a beautiful, plastic-doll ideal hero from a
socialist-realist poster. Drably and meaninglessly quoting Lenin and
patronising the Yugoslavs from his great-power superiority, he resists
the rather heavy seduction of the two girls.

Milena Dravic's seduction attempts become less subtle, to the point
where he indignantly strikes her, his image suddenly fusing with the
righteous face of Gelovani-Stalin. Finally, however, she is all too
succesful. His passion once aroused, he loses all control, and beheads
her with his ice-skates.  Her severed head is taken to a butcher's
shop where it suddenly comes to life to eulogise the splendours of
passion. Meanwhile, the distraught, now liberated Vladimir Ilich
wande, singing Bulat Okudjava's 'Ode to Francois Villon', an
exhortation to God to give mortals the things they most need.

The film is poetic, and moral and deeply philosophic. Comedy and joie
de vivre at the ready, Makavejev is at his barricades. But the novelty
of the film is that its intention is rathe therapeutic than
informative. Makavejev commented that the film was not intended to
give cut-and-dried solutions for anything, that above all it was meant
to be funny.

Excerpts from an article by David Robinson in Sight and Sound Autumn
1971 Volume 40 No. 4.


Hope all that was of some interest (Rambo it aint!). Be seeing you.