WR:Mysteries of the Organism is a kaleidoscope of images and sounds, one long montage of bizarreness that is very hard to pin down or come close to understanding.
The movie begins as a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the man whose theories about sex and the body landed him in jail and have been more or less forgotten, despite tapping into the counterculture of the time with figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs adherents of his theories about life energy.
The movie soon turns weirder, with sex artists making moulds of erect penises, a man running around with a toy rifle he masturbates for the camera, a random transvestite, and confronting footage of modern day psychotherapists who have co-opted aspects of Reich's teaching, ie. that the boundary of touch should be broken in therapy and that patients should undress down to their underwear. They are also shown screaming and shouting and at one point, taking hold of the therapist's hands and apparently sucking on them like a baby would their mother's nipple.
Perhaps weirdest of all - and this is how you know you're in a Dusan Makavejev movie - is the part of all this that is not documentary but was scripted and filmed for the movie. A tale of a female sexual revolutionary who lives with a mostly naked woman, the revolutionary dons a helmet and gives an address to the working classmen who live in her block of flats, a rousing ode to the power of sexuality. Later she meets a Soviet ice skater and things take a turn for the worse, as well as the bizarre, when she turns up dead and her decapitated head speaks on the coroner's metal dish.
It is not possible to make sense of a movie like "Mysteries of the Organism" while you watch it. It's like great poetry: you just let the images wash over you. Afterwards, writing a review like this, it seems pretty clear that the Reich part of the movie sets the stage for us to see sex as something precious and not the be interfered with by the tools of government. The latter part of the movie shows how this has gone wrong, with the movie-within-a-movie, and the frequent interjections of Stalin, shock therapy, and madhouses.
That the movie was banned in Communist Yugoslavia after it was made and its creator exiled is the real ending of this work.
The movie begins as a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the man whose theories about sex and the body landed him in jail and have been more or less forgotten, despite tapping into the counterculture of the time with figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs adherents of his theories about life energy.
The movie soon turns weirder, with sex artists making moulds of erect penises, a man running around with a toy rifle he masturbates for the camera, a random transvestite, and confronting footage of modern day psychotherapists who have co-opted aspects of Reich's teaching, ie. that the boundary of touch should be broken in therapy and that patients should undress down to their underwear. They are also shown screaming and shouting and at one point, taking hold of the therapist's hands and apparently sucking on them like a baby would their mother's nipple.
Perhaps weirdest of all - and this is how you know you're in a Dusan Makavejev movie - is the part of all this that is not documentary but was scripted and filmed for the movie. A tale of a female sexual revolutionary who lives with a mostly naked woman, the revolutionary dons a helmet and gives an address to the working classmen who live in her block of flats, a rousing ode to the power of sexuality. Later she meets a Soviet ice skater and things take a turn for the worse, as well as the bizarre, when she turns up dead and her decapitated head speaks on the coroner's metal dish.
It is not possible to make sense of a movie like "Mysteries of the Organism" while you watch it. It's like great poetry: you just let the images wash over you. Afterwards, writing a review like this, it seems pretty clear that the Reich part of the movie sets the stage for us to see sex as something precious and not the be interfered with by the tools of government. The latter part of the movie shows how this has gone wrong, with the movie-within-a-movie, and the frequent interjections of Stalin, shock therapy, and madhouses.
That the movie was banned in Communist Yugoslavia after it was made and its creator exiled is the real ending of this work.