StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

framptonhollis Despite its various flaws and drawbacks, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" manages to be a surprisingly powerful film worthy of analysis and admiration. Twisting cinematic convention, combining genres with ruthless insanity (one could classify this as an erotic documentary, a satirical black comedy, a dark and tragic drama, a Communist propaganda film, and the list goes on and on) and experimenting with Sergei Eisenstein's famous montage theory to a point of nearly incoherent madness. Opening as a semi straightforward historical documentary, it soon springs into manic, farcical action before, towards the end, unexpectedly becoming a poignant and saddening drama. This is avant garde at its most...avant garde! There is plenty of sense to be found within the movie's nonsense; this is a film with messages, some of them good, some of them bad (depending on your perspective). It treats the topic of sex with wisdom and frankness by shoving elements of humor, horror, and painful tragedy into a drug addicted blender and puking the final product all over the silver screen in a manner that is not random, but impressively mind boggling. Dusan Makavejev is considered a mastermind of experimental cinema for a good reason, and he has officially become one of my absolute favorite filmmakers of all time and, while it may not be my favorite of his works (I think "Love Affair" may beat it by a slight margin), it is no doubt his masterpiece.

chaos-rampant On one hand, I like a film like this. Wild, inventive, losing the mundane logical worries about plot and characterization, to be acute and penetrative critique—the critique doesn't interest me so much as the breaking of logic. Purer than most in the sense it wants to jolt us from even the commonplace—what in rhetoric of the time would be called bourgeois—viewing of this as art: to that effect we get frequent nudity, sex both simulated and real, gay kissing, and all sorts of strangeness like the creation of a dildo cast. I like that it introduces Wilhelm Reich and his views of a liberating orgasmic energy as launching pad of the critique. It's weird in a Herzogian way. I have only a superficial knowledge of the man, sure seemed kooky but then many brilliant people are. Many charlatans too like Hubbard and Blavatsky. Why Reich? Reich of course is a symbol of state oppression, there is that. But there is something else. Both had a vital point to make, against the stifling of the individual's living energy, with Makavejev locating this in politics.More to the point, the film is like what we see of Reich's physical exercises for his patients to release pent-up feelings—nonlinear narrative, irrationality, theatricality, that is all breaking the walls of routine thought so we can get a direct experience that invigorates, this being the vital release. Visual unblocking of the eye from the cinematic norm as a matter of narrative energy. It must have been a truly radical thing to watch at student campuses then, if even now it seems somewhat bold. But the subject is boring as hell, at least the political thrust: blunt and hamfisted ridicule of blunt and hamfisted communism.Here's the problem. Sex and film are largely a matter of consciousness, of course. It's tough to illustrate this in sex because it's tough to talk of a sexual consciousness without conjuring a simply animal act, not to mention that it weirds out some people. Anyway, a more rational thing to say is that an orgasm is this chemical process. But the rational thing to say can't even begin to account for the experience of doing, of course not. It'd be as divorced from it as explaining the molecular makeup of water when asked about the feel.No, we know the thing in living situations. Great films (also: great sex) are not strictly a matter of some alluring image but lies, at any rate, in the extraordinariness of how I am made conscious of the given interaction (by contrast to the slothful routine of bad sex, bad movies and bad conversation), a vitality which leads to all the other things: clarity, awareness, peace and so forth. It's this attribute that separates for me a nonliving imagination like Matthew Barney's from an alert mind like Pasolini.This is partly killed here because the world has shifted from what it was then. Of course the critique wasn't as obvious then as it is now. French students had just done rioting with Mao's book at hand against a police state, the irony. It really is the most searing attack of what in the filmmaker's eyes was a stale and pretentious system that dressed the murder of joy and creativity as the triumph of solidarity. But it is obvious and 'old' now, which is not really the intended effect.But really, turn to the film itself. In the first half, there are real people, real streets, and most important, real intense reactions as we see some version of Reich's exercise at work. Contrast that with the staginess and theatric feeling of actors at work in the satiric portion of the film, none of which comes across as a living situation. Maybe that is part of the point; life is not lived there.But all that plus the political message is simply put the same blunt sex as Godard.

catsoup The movie consists of seemingly unrelated footage of 1.Stalinist propaganda cinema 2.Interviews and documentary footage on Wilhelm Reich 3.Explicit performance art footage 4.An American rock star (Tuli Kupferberg) wandering around New York with an assault rifle with anti-war poetry being read off-screen5.Original footage containing -a uniform-clad women proclaiming pseudo-communist pamphlets (f.e."celibacy is counterrevolutionary!") inspired by Wilhelm Reich's ideas, -a Yugoslav steelworker in dire need of a sex condemning the "red bourgeoisie" -an uptight Russian sportsman named Vladimir Ilyich reciting V.I.Lenin's writings. They interact in quite delirious sketches which contain some violence and naked skin and some humping. The walls are decorated with Freud's and Hitler's portraits as well as with commie agitprop and Hollywood movie posters. Neither the plot nor the dialogs make sense. A huge part of the movie is not in English, but with white hardcoded subtitles. At times they blend with the background becoming unreadable, but as a fluent speaker of Croatian and Russian I can assure you that that too was just another of the quirks intended by the author.

Joseph Sylvers There's a documentary in this film about Wilhelm Riech that is fascinating, and a mini-film about the relationship between a Yugoslavian activist and a Russian Ice skater, lots of old propaganda films featuring Stalin, and man dressed as a soldier walking around New York and reciting poems in voice over.Willhelm Riech was a psychologist and communist studying Freud, who came to the conclusion that the orgasm was essential to health, life, and world socialism. From here became a celebrity, guru, anti-pornography activist, and a bit of a mad scientist, until his writings were seized and burned by the US. Food and Drug administration, and he was eventually incarcerated(though for what this film is unclear).The mini-film seems weird at first but makes sense if you think of the man as Russia and the Soviet System (which banned Riech's work and drove him out, as would the US later), and the woman as Yugoslavia (where the director is from). According to Riech there can be no true communism or true democracy until sexuality is made free, and the workers maintaining a healthy regiment of orgasms (the bodies self regulating life energy?).Like that crazy general in Dr. Strangelove, who became "enlightened" when he refused to give woman any more of his precious "life energy", Riech and director Makavejev and by extension Kubrik seem to think many of our political tensions have sexual relationships we ignore, until it manifests as it's inverse, violence. Which is what I gather the "talking head" at the end is supposed to signify, the horrors of the world, without Riech's orgasms, deep breathing and primal screaming (actually the part that made the most uncomfortable), and Orgone accumulator Boxes(which look a lot like small closets).Riech's free love world is very much one of the 70's, a time before venereal disease, a time before public and ritual rape in Congo became the military weapon of choice(as a horrific 60 minutes report last night discussed...yeesh), before internet porn, but only a year after the Stonewall Riots, a strange time for sex and the state.Anyway, it was very well made, the music by very early underground rock band "The Fugs" stands out a lot in particular. The editing though jarring at first, is also the great device of this film, alternating fact, fiction, and dramatization in ways which were revolutionary for its time and pretty fresh now. The real revolution of this movie is probably found in it's technical skill with the material, which veers from comic, to realistic, to pornographic without announcing itself.The scene with everyone passing the egg yoke, was the one I found most effective. Nothing is said in that scene, but there's a palpable sexual tension and repulsion in it, that sets the tone for the rest of the movie."Absurdistan" is a word I learned, for life under Soviet control, how many felt like the bureaucracies had reduced their lives to a kind of absurd theater of Kafka story(people forced to publicly ask to be executed, etc.), a lot of the films and art to come under this umbrella is similarly fragmented and anarchic, which may help to explain "W.R. Mysteries of The Organism", which is an interesting, and very stylized, if dated curiosity, and look at sex at communism.