alr

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
(W.R.: Misterije Organizma)

Screening on Film
Vintage Print
Directed by Dusan Makavejev.
With Milena Dravic, Jagoda Kaloper, Zoran Radmilovic.
Yugoslavia/West Germany, 1971, 35mm, color, 86 min.
Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA

One of the most controversial films of its era, Makavejev’s provocative meditation on the relationship between sexual energy and political force revolves around a portrait of the iconoclastic psychologist Wilhelm Reich and his disciples, potently intercut with imagery of Soviet leader Josef Stalin (mostly culled from social realist fiction films) and juxtaposed with the purely fictional tale of a young Yugoslavian woman’s fatal passion for a frigid Soviet skating star. Attacked by feminists, banned by bureaucrats, and beloved by art film audiences, W.R. remains a valuable summation of the formal inventiveness and anarchic social vision that emerged from the new waves of the 1960s.

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