Films

Directed and written by Dusan Makavejev, Winner of Luis Bunuel Prize, Cannes, 1971. English and Serbian with English subtitles.

"Cosmic rays streamed through our coupled bodies. We pulsated to the vibrations of the universe. But he couldn't bear it. He had to go one step further. Vladimir is a man of noble impetuousness, a man of high ambition, of immense energy... He's romantic, ascetic, a genuine Red Fascist!" -- Milena's character

"No excitment can ever equal the elemental force of the orgasm! That's why politics attracts those of us whose orgasm is sub-standard, defective, disturbed, or premature. Real men know how to live their lives without asking anyone's permission! Sweet oblivion is the masses' demand! Deprive them of free love and they'll seize everything else! That led to revolution. It led to fascism and Doomsday! 'How Man Became a Giant' - Deuthschland uber Alles! The goose-stepping, mass-marching orgasm! The blood stream orgasm of the alcoholic or the junkie! The cerebral orgasm of dogmatic ore religious mystics! The muscular orgasm of compulsive workers, athletes, or artists!" -- Milena's character

That is the totality of sexism - an acceptance of the generalized sexual ghetto. Constricting sex to the crotch constricts life to the imaginary and the imaginationless. More sex, less sects.

Makavejev deftly juxtaposes the story of a sexual tryst between a liberated woman and a repressed Soviet figure skater with a politicized exploration of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's controversial theories. "WR" can be taken to stand for either the analyst's initials or for World Revolution.

It shifts from a documentary on the work of Reich and the "orgys" in Maine to the NY counter-culture (Tuli Kupferberg) to the beautiful Milena Dravic as she advocates sexual freedom. She spends a night with a Russian "people's artist" (a Communist "model citizen" ice-skater) who decapitates her with an ice skate rather than subject his "red fascism" to his terror of orgasm without the pornography of a platform or uniform.

Makavejev describes it as "a black comedy, political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others...If you watch for more than five minutes, you become my accomplice."

It is a "fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of the genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others...."

"Closely following Marx, Reich declares, 'every social order creates those character forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling class secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of the society.' To this Reich adds the following: 'it is not merely a matter of imposing ideologies, attitudes and concepts.... Rather it is a matter of a deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic structure which corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the population.'"

from Wilhelm Reich's Character Analysis, translated by T.P. Wolfe (NY, 1970), XXLL. Found in Bertell Ollman's Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (page 165)

"'The ideology of every social formation has the function not only of reflecting the economic processes of this society, but also and more significantly of embedding this economic process into the psychic structures of the people who make up the society. Man is subject to the conditions of his existence in a twofold way: directly through the immediate influence of his economic and social position, and indirectly by means of the ideological structure of the society. His psychic structure, in other words, is forced to develop a contradiction corresponding the contradiction between the influence exercised by his material position and the influence exercised by the ideological structure of society.... his thinking and acting must be just as contradictory as the society from which they derive.'"

from Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1970, p.18)

Film links:

http://info.pue.udlap.mx/congress/5/papers_pdf/lm.pdf
Ohio University Library - search1
Ohio University Library - search2

See also:

Authoritarian Conditioning, Sexual Repression, and The Irrational in Politics - by Maurice Brinton

"Brinton argues that our political perceptions have been conditioned by social and sexual patterns to reinforce the dominant ideology, which results in both a need for authority and an inhibition of autonomous thought."

(Wilhelm) Reich and Sex-Pol

So - the film? Well worth the time! Shows the fear of Reich's analysis by Left, Center, and Right politics (power's hierarchy), of the Nazi eviction from his home country, the expulsion by the communsit parties, his essential murder (with book-burnings) in the U.S., and the "black satire" of those elements that pervade everywhere today.

Availability: Facets Video, 1517 W. Fullerton Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614 USA. VHS around $20.