Between socialism and physical love there can be no conflict!

An experimental documentary even by the experimental-documentary standards of 1971 and also a parody of socialist-realist Eastern Bloc filmmaking, Makavejev’s WR uses the imprisoned psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s theory of orgasmic liberation to deconstruct both capitalist and communist militarism, which Makavejev exposes as sexual oppression.

In addition to extraordinary interviews with sex psychologists and residents of Rangeley, Maine, who recall Reich’s time at his Institute there, Makavejev, unseen and unheard, also interviews the Warhol transgender superstar Jackie Curtis and masturbation painter Betty Dodson. We learn how plaster-caster Nancy Godfrey made her penises and witness the Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg stalking Midtown Manhattan with a fake machine gun in a way that would probably get him killed today. It ends violently back in Yugoslavia, after Dravić, a Serbo-Croatian Goldie Hawn, is hijacked in her quest for sexual freedom by her attraction to Stalinist entertainment. – A.S. Hamrah