W.R. - Misterije organizma (1971)

User Rating:

7.0/10   

Director:

Dusan Makavejev

Writer:

Dusan Makavejev (writer)

Release Date:

13 October 1971 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Fantasy

Plot:

A dense film that cuts up footage of a primary plot of two young Yugoslavian girls, one a politico and the other a sexpot...

Plot Keywords:

Yugoslavia | Interview | Psychology | Gay Interest | Risque

Awards:

2 wins

Cast

Milena Dravic	...	Milena
Ivica Vidovic	...	Vladimir Ilyich
Jagoda Kaloper	...	Jagoda
Tuli Kupferberg	...	US Soldier
Zoran Radmilovic	...	Radmilovic
Jackie Curtis	...	Herself
Miodrag Andric	...	Soldier
Zivka Matic	...	Landlady
Dragoljub Ivkov
Nikola Milic
Milan Jelic
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Jim Buckley	...	Himself
Betty Dodson	...	Herself
Mikheil Gelovani	...	Joseph Stalin (archive footage)
Nancy Godfrey	...	Herself
Wilhelm Reich	...	Himself (archive footage)

Also Known As:

Mystery of Body
W.R. - Die Mysterien des Organismus (West Germany)
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
WR: Mysteries of the Organism (USA) (DVD box title)

Runtime:

84 min | Sweden:85 min

Country:

Yugoslavia | West Germany

Language:

English | Serbo-Croatian | Russian | German

Color:

Color | Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

New Zealand:R18 | Canada:18+ (Québec) | Finland:K-18 | Norway:18 | Sweden:15 | UK:18

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Neoplanta Film

Trivia:

Banned in Yugoslavia immediately after release.

Quotes:

Soldier: My Five takes a dive! My Six knows all the tricks!

Movie Connections:

Edited from Pitsi (1946)

ejaculate a piece of ART and be free

This is the first time that I ma actually making a work of Art critic, nevertheless the subject is quite peculiar. Dusan Makavejev's film "W.R. Mysteries of the Organism" is a pure masterpiece. It contains a very subtle message narrated in rather "violent" way and it was filmed as life cycle, so the title is a true one. It begins by an copulation n finishes, as every drama does, with a brutal murder/death/kill. The political weight of this film is enormous, because Makavejev is making a story line between sexual potential/frustration and communist dictatorship view through eyes of a politico/sexually engaged young women in the early seventies Yugoslavia. He used every Yugoslav cliché from that time to draw us a picture of it's conservatives and political Puritanism by just staging that young women as a sexual revolution symbol, fighting against the Yugoslav male dominance through desire of free and non-conditioned love and happiness. The aesthetic approach was the most interesting one. It is mixture of a documentary and played feature, the first half of the film is concentrated on the document footages of William Reich's philosophy concerning the sexual liberation, and personally I do not know much about it, but it seams quite obscure. The only thing that came clear to me, from his theory, is that we are so conditioned, by the SYSTEM, that we are afraid of letting go our feelings and desires and so w become frustrated and full of hate and extremely receptive to the political dictatorship dogmas. This film is a half staged homage to W.R. and his, I can say, ideology. Half of picture is taking place in the States, and the other half in Yugoslavia, constantly parachuted by the flicks of Stalin. Milena Dravic's acting is simply brilliant and extremely convincing, I am so use in seeing her playing some goodie goodies, but in this one she show us an another face of a determined women in an open combat for the equality of sexes and female liberation, but not just female she is taking a rather androgynous way of expressing the need for the sexual EVOLUTION, in that time it was considered as a revolution, but it lost it's pace, we did not evolve, but that sexual revolution is being explained through the utopian communist lens, which is interesting in it's own surreal way. This film in its time was more than Avant Garde, today it is Avant Garde because if we just simply change the political context to the contemporary one, we will get almost the same thing. The message is: FREE YOUR MYSTERIOUS BODY AND UNFOLD YOUR DREAMS, CONFRONT WITH YOURSELF.