W.R. – MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM

W.R. - MISTERIJE ORGANIZMA

Serbia, Germany | 1972 | 84 min

Four – or even more – films in one: a documentary on early seventies United States; an educational movie on Wilhelm Reich; a feature film on a Yugoslav Marxist woman who advocates free love in the spirit of Communism; and an essay on the relationship of sexuality and revolution. The many threads of the film converge in a deliberately bewildering collage-like editing strategy, between analysis and satire, even though “beneath the film’s light-hearted frivolity and marvellous humour lurks a more serious ideological intent: opposition to all oppressive social systems” (Amos Vogel). Banned in former Yugoslavia, acclaimed in international film festivals, W.R. - Mysteries Of The Organism is a hilarious political comedy, an outrageous and exuberant work that calls for a utopian new race of international revolutionaries as a spinoff of the crossbreeding between East European radical ideologies, North American counterculture, and the political-sexual radicalism of the early Wilhelm Reich. Cinema as subversive art at its peak. (a.s.)