(Warning: The following link is NSFW and meant to be viewed only by my adult readers. Viewer discretion advised.)
W.R. Mysteries of the Organism is a 1971 film (trying to describe this film in terms of genre would be impossible) written and directed by Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev. To begin to piece W.R. together, a little background of the film’s writer/director is necessary. Dusan Makavejev is the best known of the filmmakers responsible for the Black Wave, a Yugoslavian film movement lasting from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s that was known for its experimental and avant-garde techniques, dark humor, and sharply critical examination of then-contemporary SFR Yugoslavian society. Makavejev was always something of an auteur and a rebel. He has said that D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance was what inspired to become a filmmaker. The film starts when Makavejev meets with that other experimental filmmaker…
D.W. Griffith’s elaborate 1916 apology letter for his previous film Birth of A Nation was a commercial flop at the time of its release and is lesser known than Birth. Although the film was a critical success at the time, it failed at the box office due to it’s gargantuan budget and the fact that people were more willing to sit through Birth‘s three hours of exciting hatred than Intolerance‘s nearly four hours of boring kindness. And while it’s easy for film historians to get caught up in the ugliness and racism of Griffith’s work, they also forget just how groundbreaking and experimental that it was, and sometimes still is even by today’s standards. Just one year after both revolutionizing and perfecting the three-act story structure and ending climax that are so common in film today that we no longer notice them in Birth, Griffith would top this with the innovations that he made in his next film. Intolerance is the first film that told several stories sequently. The film cut back and forth between four distinct stories that were united by a common theme, humankind’s intolerance towards one another over the ages. This film led to the so-common-that-no-one-notices-it cinematic practice of setting one image against another to create a third independent image. A less specific example of this practice could be a shot of man followed by a shot of a bowl of soup, implying that the man is hungry. A more specific example of this practice would be the sequence in The Godfather where a baptism is the backdrop to the assassinations of the heads of The Five Families, which represents Michael Corleone’s symbolic baptism into a world of crime.
What does anything of this have to do with anything? Well, Makavejev intently studied this theory and took it a couple of steps further. He believed in the idea of setting whole plot threads against one another to illustrate his points. Like Intolerance or the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, W.R sets multiple disparate elements against each other to illuminate a central idea, the idea being that sex is good, and that the suppression and repression of sex are bad. The film has one fictional element, the narrative about the Yugoslavian sex-positive communists. One of them, a woman named Milena, pursues an Stalinesque ice skater against her proletariat convictions. The skater is a representation of class oppression as well as the corrosive influences of Western corruption on communist ideals. This is interspersed with a documentary about psychoanalyst and sexologist Wilhelm Reich. Reich was born in Austria, and later fled Hitler’s Germany for Eisenhower’s America. He was not treated very well in any of these nations. He was a man who held many unconventional beliefs and ideas, one of which was that he believed in a cosmic life force called ”orgone energy” or ”orgone radiation.” He believed that this force could do anything from relieving anxiety to curing cancer, and was the most powerful in the human body during orgasm. In 1956, Reich was convicted of shipping obscene material across state lines, his retreat in Maine was forcibly shuttered by the FBI, he was tried and convicted, sentenced to three years in federal prison, and finally died in prison in 1957. You see how dangerous sex can be.
We then cut to a man who is dressed as a soldier and parading down the streets of Manhattan masturbating a toy rifle. He tells the confused New Yorkers that encounter him that he is making fun of war and the sexual nature of man’s fascination with guns. Although not mentioned in the film, this man is Tuli Kupferberg, a poet, performance artist, and co-founder of The Fugs. This is followed up with sex educator Betty Dodson being interviewed about masturbation and the sexual experience from the female perspective, and then we meet with artist Nancy Godfrey who is in the process making a plaster cast from an erect penis. We then encounter Jackie Curtis, an occasional actor and member of Andy Warhol’s entourage, who is enjoying an ice cream cone with his date. We then encounter a group of nude magazine editors toiling in the headquarters of the now-defunct pornographic magazine Screw. By the way, none of these people are mentioned by name in the film. I had to look all of that information on Wikipedia. One can only imagine how bewildered the NYU students who saw the film in the arthouse theaters of Hell’s Kitchen in the early 70s must have been.
Dusan Makavejev has been a divisive figure in world cinema. He was in exile from his native Serbia from 1972 to 1988, his films (particularly W.R. and Sweet Movie) have been banned in many countries, he was booed when the latter film concluded at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He and his work has been labeled anti-Soviet, anti-American, anti-society, anti-cinema, anti-art. I do not believe that any of these describe or apply to Makavejev. However, I think that what he actually is offends people more than any of that. Above all else, Makavejev is anti-authority. About his work, he has said, ”My films are like a mirror, people hold it up to themselves and see reflected only what they are most offended by.”
Following a seven-year hiatus after the release of Sweet Movie, Makavejev made some films that were a little more mainstream and conventional, as well as more accessible to a mainstream audience. 1981’s Montenegro was about a bored, depressed, and mentally unstable American woman living in Stockholm, Sweden who abandons her businessman husband at the airport to join a group of partying Serbs and later have a fling with a Slavic zookeeper. 1985’s The Coca-Cola Kid featured Eric Roberts as a hotshot executive of The Coca-Cola Company who travels from headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia to a small town in Western Australia to find out why people there have resisted all Coke products. These are good films and I’m glad that I viewed them, but they lacked the comic anarchy and balls-to-the-wall insanity of Makavejev’s early work.
Does the illusion succeed?: Yes. Although not for most tastes and definitely for adults only, W.R. seems experimental, edgy, and transgressive in a way that 21st century arthouse films can only dream of.
the golden briefcase 