WR: Mysteries of the Organism: The Cult Film That Argued With Politics

Some films are provocations you can summarise; WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is a provocation you can only gesture at. Dušan Makavejev’s Yugoslav landmark is a collage that welds a straight-faced documentary about the disgraced psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to a fictional sex comedy set in socialist Belgrade, then splices in Warhol Factory drag stars, a Fugs poet marching through New York with a toy rifle, archival Stalinist kitsch and a plaster cast of an erect penis. It should be incoherent. Instead it is one of the sharpest political films of its decade, a genuine argument conducted in the grammar of montage, and it got Makavejev effectively exiled from his own country for the trouble. More than fifty years on it remains a masterclass in how to think on film.

Two films spliced into one

The “WR” of the title is Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian analyst who broke from Freud to argue that sexual repression was the engine of authoritarianism and that a life-force he named orgone could be measured, accumulated in metal-lined boxes, and used to heal. Reich fled Europe for America, fell foul of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over his orgone accumulators, had his books literally burned by court order, and died in a federal prison in 1957. The first movement of Makavejev’s film is a sober, curious documentary about this man — interviews with his American neighbours and family, footage of Reichian therapists at work, a visit to the accumulator boxes. Makavejev takes Reich seriously as a thinker while keeping a raised eyebrow about the cult around him.

Then the film swerves into fiction. In Belgrade, Milena (Milena Dravić) is a fervent believer in Reichian free love who preaches sexual liberation to her tenement neighbours as the true fulfilment of the communist promise. She falls for Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović), a visiting Soviet ice-skating champion whose name is Lenin’s and whose rigid, chaste idealism is everything Reich diagnosed as the sickness of the authoritarian character. Their collision is the film’s thesis staged as farce: the woman who wants to fuse orgasm and revolution, and the frozen Soviet hero who cannot bear to be touched. Around them Makavejev laces the American footage — Jackie Curtis wandering New York, Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs stalking the streets in fatigues, a woman making a plaster mould of a real erection for an art magazine — until the two worlds start to comment on each other frame by frame.

Why the montage is the argument

The formal daring of WR is the whole point, and it is worth being precise about the craft, because the film is easy to file as chaos. Makavejev is a montage thinker in the Soviet tradition he is simultaneously mocking; he learned Eisenstein’s lesson that meaning is manufactured in the cut, and he turns that tool against the ideology that produced it. He will follow a clip of Stalin from a reverent 1946 Soviet biopic with an image of Reichian bodily release, and the collision produces a thought no single shot contains: that the worship of the strongman and the fear of the orgasm are the same repression wearing different clothes. The film argues by adjacency. Nothing is stated in a thesis sentence; everything is proposed by what is laid next to what.

That method is why the film survives its own dated moments. The sexual-revolution optimism of 1971 has aged, some of the Factory material now plays as period exotica, and the whole orgone premise is pseudoscience Makavejev half-knows is pseudoscience. What holds is the editing intelligence underneath — the sense of a genuinely free mind moving between registers, refusing the solemnity of both the capitalist and communist image-machines. Makavejev keeps the tone comic and buoyant even at its most transgressive, which is the tonal trick that lets him get away with an essay film that is also a bawdy farce. He was a leading figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave, the loose movement of filmmakers who used the relative openness of Tito’s Yugoslavia to needle official pieties, and WR is the movement’s most audacious single work. The state’s response was to shelve the film for sixteen years and to make Makavejev’s position at home untenable, which is its own grim confirmation of the thesis.

The cult of provocation, and where it sits

The performances hold the whole precarious structure together, and Milena Dravić is the reason. She was one of Yugoslav cinema’s genuine stars, and she plays the true-believer Milena with a wide-open, unembarrassed conviction that keeps the character from curdling into a joke about hippies. Her sincerity is what gives the film its stakes; she believes in the fusion of liberation and revolution so completely that her collision with the frozen Soviet skater reads as tragedy rather than sketch. The American footage supplies the film’s grubby energy — the Screw magazine editor Jim Buckley submitting to a plaster cast of his erection, the Fugs poet Tuli Kupferberg prowling Manhattan in fatigues, the Warhol satellite Jackie Curtis drifting through the streets — and Makavejev cuts between Belgrade and New York so that the socialist and capitalist bodies keep answering each other across the edit.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism belongs to a specific early-1970s moment when the boundary between the art film and the underground provocation dissolved, and the collector’s pleasure is in tracing that lineage. Its most productive companion is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, made two years later — another film obsessed with liberation and the body, equally willing to demolish its own form, but routed through mysticism where Makavejev routes everything through politics and the cut. Where Jodorowsky wants to dissolve the ego, Makavejev wants to diagnose the state. Program them together and you have the two poles of the era’s cinema of assault.

The film also rhymes with El Topo, Jodorowsky’s earlier acid Western, as another work that treated the feature film as a rite and a dare rather than a story-delivery machine, and that found its audience in the same midnight-and-arthouse ecosystem. WR played the festival and repertory circuit that these films built, and its reputation was forged in exactly that congregation-not-audience space. To watch the three is to understand how a certain kind of confrontational cinema circulated before the word “cult” had hardened into a marketing category.

The verdict

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is a demanding film that rewards the demand completely. It asks you to hold a documentary, a farce, an archival satire and an underground travelogue in your head at once and to build the argument yourself out of the collisions. That labour is the experience, and there is nothing else that performs the trick with quite this wit and nerve. It is funny, filthy, genuinely intelligent about power, and formally braver than almost anything made under freer conditions since. The sixteen-year ban it earned at home is the clearest measure of how directly it struck a nerve. The film thinks out loud in a way cinema rarely dares, and it pays for that daring with a coherence you have to assemble rather than receive.

Come to it for the montage, and stay for the argument it builds without ever quite stating. The Criterion edition is the version to seek, with the context it needs to land. Its natural double bill is The Holy Mountain for the same year’s opposite experiment, or any of Makavejev’s own subsequent films for the trajectory of a filmmaker who paid dearly for making it.

Spoilers below

The film’s closing movement is where its argument turns tragic. Milena’s pursuit of Vladimir Ilyich, the frozen Soviet skater, reaches its consummation, and the encounter proves the diagnosis exactly. The man who cannot tolerate being touched cannot tolerate having been moved, and in the aftermath of their union he kills her — decapitating Milena with his ice skate. Reich’s thesis is dramatised in a single act of violence: repression, confronted with genuine sexual liberation, responds by destroying it. The authoritarian character would rather kill than be undone by feeling.

Then Makavejev delivers his final formal shock. Milena’s severed head, laid out on a coroner’s table, opens its eyes and speaks — calmly, without rancour, forgiving her killer and affirming that her cause outlives her body. The dead woman keeps talking, and the film hands the last word to the very life-force the ice-skating Lenin tried to silence. It is a grotesque, absurd, oddly serene image, and it crystallises the whole picture: the body politic can behead its liberationists, and the idea goes on speaking anyway. Vladimir Ilyich, meanwhile, wanders off into the Belgrade night reciting poetry, a beautiful monster who has proven Reich right by murdering the one person who loved him without fear. Makavejev ends on the head, and lets its serenity indict everything that killed it.