WR: Mysteries of the Organism is one of the greatest films ever made, but yet is largely forgotten and never makes Best Of lists. Even during its short, intense phase of art house popularity in 1971, it suffered mispronunciation, most people reading the title as “Mysteries of the Orgasm,” a not inappropriate confusion, as it turns out, given the film’s subject matter, which is in part psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s concern with freeing human energy through fruitful sexual climaxes. An image from the film even made it as the cover image for Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, but that was it (and even the book is out of print). Like his Hungarian counterpart, Miklós Jancsó, director of such now forgotten masterpieces as The Red and the White, Makavejev is a man without a country or a legacy. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, which has released Both WR and its companion feature Sweet Movie (CC Nos. 389 and 390, respectively), viewers can enjoy the continual relevance of the film to contemporary times and revel in director Dusan Makavejev’s knack for finding the most exotic Balkan women on the planet, already made evidence in his earlier features Love Affair; or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and Man is Not a Bird.

WR tells two stories in one film, or is two movies as one, a kind of intellectual Grindhouse. The first is a playful documentary of film essay on the life and thought of Reich, who was hounded by the U S government and died in prison in the mid 1950s. Scenes from this movie alternate with episodes from a fiction comedy about a Yugoslavian communist girl (Milena Dravic) having trouble reconciling her belief in the party with her sexuality. The documentary contrasts such things as fictional enactments of Stalin in Soviet cinema with Nancy Godfrey, the woman who made plaster casts of rock star penises.

It’s a very funny movie and also a time capsule of concerns raging at the height of the hippie and protest movements in the West. In the Reich part, Tuli Kupferberg, ex member of the Fugs, marches up the boulevard and in front of Lincoln Center as a demented soldier offering a form of street theater that is linked to Reich’s ideas that militarism and in turn fascism are the result of blocked sexual energy. Makavejev makes hay with the contrast between the European intellectuals who trucked into Reich’s campus in upstate Maine and the local yokels who comment on his odd behavior from the perspective of their bedrock simplicity, including the town sherif’s deputy who is also the town barber, who describes the odd manner in which Reich liked to have his hair styled (the strands rising up, toward heaven). Today’s sensibility might note that Reich, like all Freudians, was, consciously or not, a snake oil specialist with a bogus philosophy, but in the abstract his ideas are more congenial than Less a “talking cure,” Reich’s approach was more a screaming cure, finding its apotheosis years later in the practice of Arthur Janov.

Dravic’s story is ostensibly funny but has a tragic core. She is a well meaning sad sack, yearning for sex, but she is not as lucky as her apartment mate (the delightful non-pro Jagoda Kaloper, who has real sex on screen with kittenish abandon, perhaps the perfect living argument for Reich’s ideals). She ends up with a State hero, a blonde haired championship ice skater who, instead of having sex with her, cuts off her head with the blade of his skate in a fustian of repressed rage and sexuality, afterwards wandering a deranged landscape with bloody hands where he finds a lone horse, a symbol of the free spirit he just silenced. One could write a whole essay about stray horses in modern movies.

WR comes in a window boxed full frame (1.33) transfer wit two sound options, mono 1.0 in all Serbo-Croatian, or English with Serbo-Croatian, plus optional English subtitles. For supplementary material, there is a commentary track pieced together from Raymond Durgnat’s BFI monograph on the movie, the late critic’s words read by Daniel Stewart. Durgnat’s book may have single handedly revived interest in the film. There are also two interviews with Makavejev, the first a half hour interview for Danish television, the second one from 2006 and conducted by Peter Cowie for the disc. Also included is a short self portrait, Hole in the Soul (1994), made for Scottish BBC, which features such curious scenes as Makavejev, a director, disallowed from shooting footage in the lobby of the Director’s Guild. The is also a four minute feature concerning a revised version of WR that Makavejev made exclusively for the BBC, which gave the director a chance to rethink aspects of the film. Finally there is a 16-page booklet insert with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and a long essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, plus a booklet promoting Criterion’s noir films.

What egg yokes are to WR, chocolate is to Sweet Movie, which continues an exploration of the themes of sensuality and repression. This film, too, tells two heavily symbolic stories, one about Anna Prucnal as a prostitute living on a ship on which she cruises through Amsterdam, this tale blending themes of death and revolution. The second concerns the Candide-style (or Candy or Barbarella style) odyssey of a young woman, played by French Canadian actress Carole Laure, and ends up with the so called Actionist commune (to the real horror of Laure). It’s difficult to reconcile Makavejev’s concern with sexual freedom with the way Laure’s character is treated, little more than an impersonal piece of human debris carted from one extreme and unpleasant situation to another.

Aspects of Sweet Movie hark back to key films in cinema history, including Jean Vigo’s L’atalanta, and anticipates some aspects of Lars Von Trier. But in the end it is a much more chaotic film than WR, and its international cast and settings detach Makavejev from his roots, that is, Yugoslavia, where his anger and humor fueled his art. Sweet Movie is too often garish and adolescent, whereas his earlier films were sensual, keyed to textures and fabrics, and with a less oblique operating principle. The role of John Vernon, for example, as a millionaire industrialist, is only one in a succession of cartoon figures.

Sweet Movie comes in a widescreen transfer (1.66, enhanced), with a mono 1.0 – French – English track. For supplements, there is a short segment of Anna Prucnal singing a song used in the film on a French TV show, who reveals that one of the consequences of her appearance in the film was that she was banned from Poland for seven years. And there is another interview with Makavejev by Peter Cowie, plus one with Dina Iordanova, a film scholar who explains the background and meaning of the movie. Inside the box, there is a 16-page booklet insert with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and essays by Stanley Cavell and David Sterritt, plus the booklet promoting Criterion’s noir films. Both WR and Sweet Movie hit the street on June 19, and retail for $39.95 and $29.95.

Comments: None