WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, released in the West in 1971, is a glorious hodgepodge, half counterculture celebration of sexuality, half cuckoo for cocoa puffs. This bifurcation is somewhat purposeful for Makavejev is fond of dialectical montage, in this case, from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The American sequences start out like a sober documentary, interviewing relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances of Wilhelm Reich, the iconoclastic and crazed doctor who spent his last decade or so in Maine. However, Makavejev's film is too much of a shaggy dog to stay the course. In some ways, Makavejev is a pioneer of the mockumentary. His footage in the US veers wildly from an editor of Screw magazine getting his member plaster casted to shots of Tuli Kupferberg stalking the streets of Manhattan as a "Communist soldier". 

The second half of the film archly portrays the impact of the sexual revolution in Communist Yugoslavia. Makavejev juxtaposes two liberated Yugoslav femmes spreading the gospel of sexual liberation from their Pop art adorned pad with visions of Soviet kitsch: a socialist figure skating show and numerous Stalin era Russian propaganda films. The film seems more like a period piece than a provocation now, but it was enough to land Makavejev in exile. 

Tuli Kupferberg