Watch WR: Mysteries of the Organism For Free

Memorable, crazy movie

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The movie consists of seemingly unrelated footage of 1.Stalinist propaganda cinema 2.Interviews and documentary footage on Wilhelm Reich 3.Explicit performance art footage 4.An American rock star (Tuli Kupferberg) wandering around New York with an assault rifle with anti-war poetry being read off-screen5.Original footage containing -a uniform-clad women proclaiming pseudo-communist pamphlets (f.e."celibacy is counterrevolutionary!") inspired by Wilhelm Reich's ideas, -a Yugoslav steelworker in dire need of a sex condemning the "red bourgeoisie" -an uptight Russian sportsman named Vladimir Ilyich reciting V.I.Lenin's writings. They interact in quite delirious sketches which contain some violence and naked skin and some humping. The walls are decorated with Freud's and Hitler's portraits as well as with commie agitprop and Hollywood movie posters. Neither the plot nor the dialogs make sense. A huge part of the movie is not in English, but with white hardcoded subtitles. At times they blend with the background becoming unreadable, but as a fluent speaker of Croatian and Russian I can assure you that that too was just another of the quirks intended by the author.

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.

WR:Mysteries Of The Organism is a film that I first heard about some years ago, when I was perusing some foreign films in a college town video outlet in Northhampton,Mass. The description sounded interesting & weird enough to potentially warrant a rental. Unfortunately, as I lived more than an hour away from this video shop, a rental was out of the question, so I would have to contend with a hope that it would turn up as a revival in one of our local art houses (in a badly scratched & choppy print,which is sometime the norm for older films that have been out of circulation for years). Big surprise:a brand spanking new print of Dusan Makavejev's weirded out classic is now available for public (or would the word pubic be more apropos?)viewing. The film starts out as a (kind of)documentary of Wilhelm Reich's studies of orgones & the effects it has on humans. It also tackles the subject of repressed orgasms & just how dangerous they are. The film then kind of branches out to a series of unrelated episodes, including Eastern bloc Communism, interviews with Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis,some kind of psychological test subject film footage (presumably Reich's subjects,filmed in the 1940's or 1950's before his death in 1957),rare German porn films,and other weirdness. This film will not be everybody's cup of tea (or perhaps vodka), but is still worth a look to check out a period piece from 1971 (although some of it was filmed as early as 1968) that probably wouldn't get much exposure,otherwise. No MPAA rating here (as it's a re-release print), but bear in mind that originally received the dreaded "X" back in the day for rampant sexuality & nudity...in short,leave the kiddies home.

I loved the playfulness within the context of an enactment of a man's ideas. So to 'get' the film fully, perhaps one may want to read one or more of Reich's books. I have read (and enjoyed) Mass Psychology of Fascism. Good luck on your own interpretations and conclusions. The film really is brilliant in many ways. In the times in which we live it is interesting to look at a piece made decades ago that can and does speak to the possibility of a different way of life. In other words, this picture presents something bigger and more meaningful to those who care to interpret it. It is refreshing to see something that is not a documentary but not a typical narrative film. I hope more people find it as strange and fascinating as I did.