WR — Mysteries of the Organism 9780851707204, 9781838712488, 9781839021299

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BFI Modern Classics Rob White

Series Editor Advancing into its second century the cinema is now a mature art form with an established list of classics. But contemporary cinema is so subject to every shift in fashion regarding aesthetics, morals and ideas that judgments on the true worth of recent films are liable to be risky and controversial; yet they are essential if we want to know where the cinema is going and what it can achieve. As part of the British Film Institute's commitment to the promotion and evaluation of contemporary cinema, and in conjunction with the influential BFI Film Classics series, BFI Modern Classics is a series of books devoted to individual films of recent years. Distinguished film critics, scholars and novelists explore the production and reception of their chosen films in the context of an argument about the film's importance. Insightful, considered, often impassioned, these elegant, beautifully illustrated books will set the agenda for debates about what matters in modern cinema.

WR - Mysteries of the Organism g (WR Misterije Or^anizma) Raymond Durgnat

Publishing

First published in 1999 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1P 2LN Copyright © Raymond Durgnat 1999 The British Film Institute is the UK national agency with responsibility for encouraging the arts of film and television and conserving them in the national interest. Series design by Andrew Barron & Collis Clements Associates Typeset in Italian Garamond and Swiss 721 BT by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 85170 720 4 eISBN 978 1 83902 128 2 ePDF 978 1 83902 129 9

Contents 1 Introduction 6 2 Chronicle of an Exiled Socialist 7 3 Production History 10 4 Overture 13 5 The Orgone Trail 15 6 Back in the USA, or, Communismus Interruptus 25 7 Yugoslavia: For and Against Fanaticism 29 8 Appreciations 55 9 Citizen Reich 69 10 Understanding Undergrounds 77 11 The Short Unhappy Life of Ex-Yugoslavia 82 Credits 91 Notes 92 Bibliography 95

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1 Introduction WR - Mysteries of the Organism tackles crucial, and perennial, problems, in culture, sexuality and politics. It honours, critically yet nostalgically, a pioneer attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud. It's the first, and, along with Wajda's Danton (1982) and Kusturica's Underground (1995), the boldest, exploration of social breakdown in Eastern European Communisms. It's vivid testimony to the US 'counter-cultures' of the 60s and 70s. Provoking wider reflections, it's a flagship of that stilldeveloping genre, 'philosophical cinema'. Taking up 'intellectual montage' where Eisenstein left off, it pursues an altogether more complex, more critical, discourse. Its mixture of genres, styles, 'languages' and moods (burlesque, tragedy ...) makes it a pioneer of 'post-modernisms' (whatever they may be). As a 'mainstream avantgarde' movie, it merits its place in the pantheon, and, last but not least, yields great pleasure, emotional and aesthetic. I haven't shared its Yugoslav experience, its regional 'roots', or its quasi-Marxist point of view. Mine is an outsider's view - as so much art appreciation is, for we often value art as honest witness by other minds to experiences we can't have had. Whenever some 'clash of heads' between critic and artist loomed, I tried to suppress neither attitude, but keep both in play. Luckily for critics, our principal job is not so much to tell readers what they ought to think, about art, or what they really thought about it but didn't know they did, as to offer interesting ideas about it, and 'matters arising'. Readers surely won't expect to agree with everything a critic says; they may well agree with nothing he says, yet still like having a sparring partner.

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2 Chronicle of an Exiled Socialist Dusan Makavejev was born in Belgrade, into a Serbian family, in October 1932. 'My whole generation - children during the national revolution of the war years - was caught up in a great social movement.' After the war, he studied psychology at Belgrade University, graduating in 1955, before entering the Belgrade Academy of Theatre, Radio and Television. After the war, we liked Russian films of the Communist Romantic movement ... (including) that appalling film of Chiaureli's The Vow, with Stalin swearing a solemn oath on Lenin's Tomb, and Raizmann's The Communist. But also trick films mixing puppets with live action and the Alexandrov musicals like Volga-Volga, with their great respect for their Hollywood models, and films like Ziegfield Follies.' Citizen Kane was a disappointment, but 'since then I've seen it 20 or 30 times over'. The break with Russia brought such new influences as the regime allowed, or could afford: 'the Esther Williams musicals, French B thrillers'. The real eye-opener was Henri Langlois' visit in 1952, with fifty-two films from the Cinematheque; Makavejev names Entr'acte, the Buiiuel-Dari films, Jean Vigo's ('by far the most important'), and the Soviet silent classics, Vertov's being especially exciting. Makavejev's amateur films, from 1953, troubled the censors, but were shown at Cannes. His first professional assignments, from 1958, were documentaries about folk-arts. But his second contemporary subject, Parade (1962), about preparations for May Day celebrations, was applauded for ten minutes solid at a documentary festival, promptly banned, and then unbanned, with cuts. New Man at the Flower Market (1962), a political satire, about a young couple caught love-making in a park, near a statue to New Socialist Man, adumbrated a theme of WR: real, unofficial life versus social ideology. By 1965 Makavejev's articles and essays, which had affinities with the Praxis group, marked him as a fighter for a quality cinema, prominent in a socially critical 'New Yugoslavian Cinema' which old-line Communists called 'the black generation'. They sought, not to bury, but to revitalise Socialism, to restore its humanism, in the course of Tito's

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'middle way' between Leninism pur et dur and 'market Socialism'. Makavejev's first features, A Man is Not a Bird and Switchboard Operator (1967), exposed gaps and contradictions between Marxist ideology, older cultures and real lives. They combine traditional richnesses - social criticism, richly detailed realism and dramatic lyricism (a starker kind of 'Poetic Realism') - with modernist constructions - notably narrative discontinuities, genre-switches and a montage approach. One thinks back to Vigo (rebellion, populism, lyricism, montage), but many other influences have been absorbed, and reinvented. Bird enjoyed critical success at international Festivals; Switchboard capped it, thanks to its sexual sensuality and youth interest. It won English and American release for Bird, a grimmer, less cosmopolitan film, and for Makavejev's next feature, Innocence Unprotected (1968), which intercuts three main elements: 1. scenes from the first Serbian talkie, made and shown in 1942, under Serbia's puppet regime, and subsequently forgotten; 2. interviews with surviving actors and crew; and 3. newsreel footage of the time. The montage generates a stream of moral ironies, personal and/or political, towards which Makavejev's attitude is neither Brechtian nor camp, but rather, a generous ambivalence about human purpose, whose happily egoistic enthusiasms are blandly oblivious of other things. Makavejev's subsequent film, Sweet Movie (1973), was never shown publicly in Great Britain, for censorship reasons. It's something of a companion piece to WR, mixing dramatic fiction, evident allegory, dense montage and genres. A Canadian girl (Carole Laure), ditched by a mother-dominated millionaire, explores various European countercultures, finds no spiritual satisfaction, and resigns herself to wallowing in liquid chocolate for a TV commercial. Meanwhile, a young matelot from the Battleship Potemkin hitches a ride on the good ship Survival, captained by Anna Planeta, a Third World' peasant-pirate sailing her rough-and-ready barge into Amsterdam. Uneven, brilliant, sometimes amusing, deeply disturbing, it's a cross, in spirit, between Gulliver's Travels, a revolutionary Pilgrims' Progress (where nobody finds salvation), and a Rabelaisian tragedy.

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With renewed repression across Eastern Europe, Makavejev's type of film largely depended on an international 'art' film market, which also became less congenial. As Vietnam protest ended, political debate declined; the new, university, film culture, has been heavily influenced by 'cultural struggle' against 'bourgeois ideology' and averse to Socialist selfcriticism; and 1960s anarcho-libertarianism ebbed before the routinisation of sexual permissiveness and the neo-puritanism of 'Political Correctness'. From 1977, Makavejev, like otherfilm-makers(Forman, Gorin, Schrader, Losey), alternatedfilm-teaching(at Harvard) with film-making. Montenegro (Sweden 1981) and The Coca-Cola Kid (Australia 1985) earned their keep commercially, yet smacked of nomadic exile. His cunning integration of 'arthouse favourite' themes with serious and unusual ones had its price tag: critics upfronted the former, but overlooked the latter. The coolly uptight Swedish housewife's sexual adventures with Yugoslav immigrants have as many twists as David Mamet's House of Games. The Australian film was seen as a Local Herotype comedy, but it's as saturnine as its original story, by Frank Moorehouse, a robust Australian libertarian. Both films have yet to be critically understood. Manifesto (1988), like Godard's King Lear and Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance, involved a partnership between Tom Luddy of American Zoetrope and Cannon. Genre-wise it's a 'fantasy farce' a la Dick Lester, but solidly based in Yugoslavian history and ideas. In The Gorilla bathes at Noon (West Germany 1993), a Red Army soldier gets left behind during the Red Army's chaotic withdrawal from Berlin, and mounts guard on a Lenin statue due for demolition. High among several elegies to Lenin statues (The Last Bolshevik, Disgraced Monuments, Ulysses'

Gaze), it avoids too obvious comedy ('Lenin in Consumerland', etc.). If it seems a bit uncertain where to go, so was the Soviet Empire, which, hitherto so brutal, now seemed half-ready to roll over and die. Russia and China both set out to repeat Tito's 'Middle Way' - as tragedy, again? Or this time as farce? Or successfully at last?

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3 Production History Around 1950 Makarejev came across Wilhelm Reich's Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (1929) which strengthened his impression that orthodox Marxist approaches to human life were radically deficient. A Ford Foundation Grant for Communication Studies took him to the USA where he pursued the trail of Reich's last years, 'rather in the spirit of a pilgrimage', starting at the Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine, and then following up his subsequent influence, through the Human Potential Movement, the Reich revival in psychotherapeutic circles, and the radical young counter-cultures of the 60s and 70s. Telepool, a Bavarian TV company, appreciated the possibilities of a television programme, and contributed some finance, together with a small TV unit, equipped for 16mm film. With the resultant footage, Makavejev persuaded a small Yugoslavian company, Neoplanta, to expand the original project. A five-page outline, then a forty-page treatment, proposed further documentary material, archive footage, and four short fictions. All this required a third US visit, still with 16mm (eventually blown up to 35mm). The mental hospital material comes from German footage shown in government circles to encourage the passing of the 1940 euthanasia laws. In this quite new context, and in default of Russian footage, it serves to represent, fairly enough, the Soviet misuse of 'psychiatric' treatments, especially electroshock, to punish or destroy its critics. The Sexpol film is actually goings-on at Woodstock 1969 - another 'honest cheat'. The hymn overlaid is a SerboCroatian folksong, given Communist words soon after World War II. Refused permission to shoot inside the Federal Penitentiary within whose walls Reich died, Makavejev devised the camera's memorable 'tour' around it. Among likely interviewees, radical leader Abby Hoffman asked higher fees than Makavejev could afford, but rock performer Tuli Kupferberg, an adept of various Reichian ideas, became his guide through the hippie underground. Makavejev's decisions of exactly what to film were often intuitive, as to what further reflection might crystallise, and editing either draw forth, or introduce.

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As an assemblage of heterogeneous material, with an abstract theme, the film imposed its own method of working. 'I viewed hundreds of thousands of feet of film.' Several months at the editing table generated new ideas, which, together with loose ends in the documentary material, prompted a new storyline. One long story replaced the four short ones, of which only fragments remain (among them, the garbage man breaking into Milena's room and shoving his rival into her wardrobe). The new script was kept open to new ideas, especially from the actors, while shooting (35mm in Yugoslavia). Extensive editing ensued (the plaster-cast sequence found its place only in the last days of editing). The script as published is a post-production script, Makavejev's 'retrospective' description of the final continuity, not some verbal 'pretext' 'translated' into images. The ice-skater's 'confession', about music vs. violence, is Lenin's words to Ines Armand, as reported by Maxim Gorki. The graffiti prominent in the opening scenes, in New ^fork's Lower East Side, were discovered at the location; Makavejev later learned their source was Trotsky. According to the script, Milena's voice speaks the commentary over the Reich material. US and UK copies substitute an American voice, and, perhaps, different moral connotations. Nationality-wise, WR qualifies as a Yugoslavian-West German coproduction. Its American footage, being vivid and substantial, might, for some, e.g. sociological, purposes, qualify as American cinema', like some other films of largely foreign provenance (for instance, the Godard-Pennebaker One A.M. (1968), The Deer Hunter (funded by E.M.I.), and films by Varda, Wenders, Herzog, etc.). As radically unconventional as WR was, its potential market was substantial. The 'international arthouse market', steadily expanding since 1945, could now hope for returns comparable with much Hollywood 'mass entertainment' product. Until the mid-60s, most arthouse tastes rather inclined to the traditional, high culture-ish, humanist, seriousness satisfied by auteurs like Renoir, Bergman, Resnais, early Fellini and Antonioni. By the mid-60s this older audience was vastly amplified by a

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younger, wider, audience, for films which combined a certain 'educational IQ' with exuberant scandal, such as Ken Russell's The Devils and Nic Roeg's and Donald Cammell's Performance (both 1970), and Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972). The Allen film, as a burlesque inspired by deeply serious sexual theory, has enough affinities with WR and its follow-up, Sweet Movie, to make a splendid 'triple-bill' for all-night shows. WR also appealed to 'radical-political' interests which, although too small to make a 'specialised' market, added useful 'headline appeal', in a time of riots, demonstrations and experimental life-styles. These interests attracted 'bankable' artists (Jane Fonda, Haskell Wexler, Peter Watkins, Godard), made new reputations (Robert Kramer), inspired theatrical hits (Hair, 1967), and, of course, Woody Allen's Bananas (1971), his ironic play on 'radical chic'. WR was first shown at the 1971 Cannes Festival, where the New York Times reported a standing ovation lasting 13 minutes, so that press and public interest compelled six additional screenings. It won the Prix Luis Bunuel, and the LAge d'Or award of the Paris Cinematheque. The 1971 Chicago Festival awarded Makavejev its Silver Hugo for Best Director. WR was a hot property, but also a hot potato, sexually and politically, especially in Eastern Europe. Telepool and Neoplanta both disassociated themselves from it. In Yugoslavia it was banned until 1986, after fierce cultural debate, with Makavejev facing jail. No Eastern bloc country acquired it for distribution. However, French producer Vincent Malle invited Makavejev to Paris, where their discussions led to Sweet Movie (Makavejev passing up Coppola's invitation to direct Apocalypse Now). The French censors excised about forty seconds, the English censor passed it without cuts, rather to his own surprise, though that's another story. Channel 4 bought, and even renewed the rights, while not daring to show it for five or six years until, envisaging a late-night season of 'Banned!' films, they asked Makavejev if he himself could adapt it. Instead of cutting, he covered problem details (mainly male erections)

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with computer-graphics - pulsating mosaics, golden glows and wriggly rainbow fish - which adequately obscured, and also illuminated them. A credit was added to authenticate the new version as, not 'censored', but 'improved'. All in all, its 'director's cut' was nearly forty years (1950-90) in gestation - and its computer 'graffiti', done in England, added a fourth country of origin.

4 Overture Shot 1 is, not a picture, but page-design: typography, white, impersonal, on serene sky-blue (colour of orgone-energy). The text gives Reich's dates, but, declares the film a 'personal response'. 'Within' the abstract words and forms, a human heartbeat is heard - a sound-'image', introducing physical life, and a pulse. The unseen self .... Shot 2a. In rough funky 16mm, leashed dogs look longingly into a backstreet diner. An uncouth male voice (Kupferberg) chants doggerel verse, including the lines: 'Who will police our judges? And who will will our will?' A paraphrase, in beatnikese, of a perennial problem: 'Who will guard the guardians?' Might these leashed, excluded, wistful dogs, metaphor ... obedient citizens? Shot 2b. In a mean street, no doubt nearby, white proletarians, assorted, stand idly around. But, a beatnik-cum-hippie trio strolls by: two girls, one pregnant, and a tall, shaggy, man, very likely the verse-writer, stop Sequence 1, Tuli (Kupferberg and allies).

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by a crumbling building, and unpack their baggage. The verse-over, having attacked authority, concludes with a meditation on soiled socks, which seems to imply that we all blame our negligence on some higher power. But, the unpacked items have critical intent. US flag + steel helmet + surplus-store quasi-uniform + machine-carbine + dolls, are typical props of Street Theatre protests, and demos against the Vietnam War. (Protestors burned dolls as symbols of napalmed children.) Background graffiti complement this 'humanitarian' angle. 'Only Revolution Ends War', Till', a row of hammer-and-sickles. The scene has assembled some main ingredients of 'the CounterCulture': the beatnik/hippie life, Vietnam protest, a sexual revolution, especially for women, inner city decay, and, via the gun, ghetto and Civil Rights tensions, civil war, and 'urban guerrilla' strategies, as per Street Fighting Man (The Rolling Stones, 1968). The demo trio are well apart from the uncommitted proletarians, but ... even giants start small ... Shot 3. An eggyolk slips and slides as it's deftly juggled around six arms and hands. An agile zoom-lens, while keeping track of it, reveals another hippie trio, a little 'commune' of gentle 'flower people'. Zoomcalligraphy counterpoints their deftly co-operative game. When finally the shell collapses, they rub its sticky liquid over one another's hands and arms, as if anointing one another with the sensuousness of Life. Radical gentleness was a key aspiration of the 60s. Was it contrary to 'World Revolution'? Or complementary? Or what it's for? Sequence 2, The Yolk (Milena, Jagoda, Ljuba).

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A peasant jig, with East European feeling, accompanies the 'yolkdance'. The man looks less American than gypsy. These 'un-American' touches could fit hippie America, which explored world folk-musics, upfronted unWASP-ish white ethnicities, and had ruralist leanings (cf. Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant, both 1969). But we'll meet these three again, as our Yugoslavian friends. That too is appropriate, since hippie aspirations, in their short and sometimes silly life, spread worldwide, slipping under the Iron Curtain (like some other American cultures: jazz, blues, folk-songs, rock and roll). This music has a joyous wildness .... Over this sequence the film's credits roll, almost as if to sign it, as the film's own point of view. From one angle, these opening themes are sharply 'disconnected' (a dead psychologist, Street Revolution, egg-centricity). They're very disparate, stylistically, semiotically (a 'blue headstone', funky 16mm stuff, and a 'cat's cradle' game of arms and zooms). This 'three-theme' Overture awaits development, whence quiet suspense. Its internal structure is a quickening of rhythm: static design, with only a heartbeat, then a quiet stroll and humble movements, and then the egg-dance sequence-shot, which is 'pure cinema', like Chaplin's 'Dance of the Rolls' in The Gold Rush.

5 The Orgone Trail After the 'Overture', a first Act', about WR himself. Overlaid, a serious, correct, female voice, outlines Reich's life and ideas. Images from what seems to be an old Sexpol film, circa 1930, show a copulating couple. It's quite a shock, even in 1971, let alone for 1930. But, here is love in a meadow, and the bodies ripple gently, in a bluish light, suffused with the lively calm which Reich thought deep sexual fulfilment would generate. We may think of love in a D.H. Lawrence spirit. A prism effect, like a mosaic, shows multiple views of the lovers, from seven different angles, at different moments. The overall pattern evokes a blossom, or a stained-glass window. The array softens, distances,

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the sexuality, which becomes, not 'fleshless', 'abstract', but emblematic ... philosophical. A sense of 'sweet pastorale' is enriched by the nostalgia, in 1971, of old film stock, and by a technique, which seems 'primitive' (like a Lumiere film) yet 'elaborated' (a la Melies). But very simple, homely, images ensue: a motionless snapshot, of Reich with baby son, and home-movie footage, of Reich and his first wife, Annie, beside a camp-fire. He plays an accordion, which, for us, is silent, under other music: a mixed folk-choir singing a kind of hymn: 'My beloved, my fragrant flower, my Communist Party'. We may also recall the 'open-air' youth movements, so strong in Austria and Germany, where camping, hiking, etc., formed a veritable 'counter-culture'. Nazis and Communists exploited it against the 'the father' and 'the family', as we might expect Reich to have done. But here is a little family, whose 'father-figure', in open-neck shirt, seems less the 'heavy father' than 'the encouraging Dad', so conspicuous in the 1930s. His accordion is traditional, informal, classless. The anthem blends scented nature, community-feeling, politics as love, like religion. An unexpected, and poignant, harmony. But soon test-tubes in racks suggest Reich's affinities with 1930stype materialism. Fearsome tubes and funnels imply crudely intrusive body treaments. Tension increases, with Reich's successive expulsions: from the Communist Party, from Freudian circles, and his exile from enlightened Scandinavia. A US headline, 'The Strange Case of Dr Reich', presages disaster. Instead, direct-cinema circa 1971 introduces us to Dr Sharaf, a practising Reichian, a bright, solid, sensitive, personality His garden-shed houses an orgone-accumulator (Reich's best-known device). It's not unlike a sauna-cabin, is of simple, organic material, mostly wood, and stands just behind a large wooden kennel. Meanwhile, a fatherly voice reads the story of Pinocchio, who, we very likely remember, was a wooden puppet, but eager to become fully human. But then again - Pinocchio, too impatient, lied a lot. Is Makavejev tactfully dissenting from certain excesses of Orgone Theory? With sympathy and respect, no doubt.

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Sequence 3, Sexpol Film (unidentified couple).

Sharaf's little boy emerges from the accumulator, wearing a bright mask, of a cat or lion. Another 'half-human' fairytale? - but this time, half-human, half-animal? At first viewing, the mask reminded me of Tom and Jerry cartoons, and I thought about media images coarsening the imaginations of children - even children of 'the orgone people', with their sensitive, serious, 'counter-culture', like 'the book people' in Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 1951; Truffaut, 1966). But, on second viewing, the mask's design seemed very cheerful. And maybe the art of Tex Avery has a point. His cat and mouse games metaphor a child's Unconscious, for which family-life has spasms, of fear, glee, pain and cunning fury - though nobody's really hurt, and robustness triumphs over destruction. 'He died, a free man to the end, in the Federal Penitentiary' This voice-over paradox inspires a wonderful celebration of freedom, in cinematic form. Outside the prison, Makavejev's camera tracks, zooms, races around the towers and walls, while accordion and zither duet in a silvery-sounding peasant waltz. (Incidentally, this chimed in with a new interest, in certain circles, in the long unfashionable European peasant ethnicities still surviving in the American 'long-grass'. Documentarist Les Blank, having explored black music and festivities, was just rediscovering the 'waltz and polka' cultures, as in In Heaven There is No Beer?(1980).) After this burst of freedom, an oppressive enclosure. Under an incinerator's roof, a clawed grab creeps along a gantry. Here Reich's

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Sequence 3. Wilhelm Reich, Peter Reich.

Sequence 5, The Prison (Wilhelm Reich, Federal Marshal).

books were burned, by legal order, explains the voice-over with deadpan indignation. It recites some prophetic titles - grandiose, yet forlorn. The commentary links Reich's prosecution to McCarthyite witchhunts, and their 'moral panic' to rumours that Reich sexually brainwashed his patients.1 But then, Reich's daughter, Eva Reich-Moise, denounces the Communist bloc. Makavejev's voice, from behind the camera, gruffly counter-queries 'the American dream'. But, she's ready for that one. 'Oh, The American Dream is dead.' But, her feisty independence shows that dissent is still alive, and kicking. 'The American dream', vague phrase, cues a visit to Rangeley Maine, home of Reich's Institute. We sweep along a highway, as if out of

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a forest, and over a bridge, whose webwork girders flicker past us, and the soundtrack hits us with a Coca-Cola jingle. Three Ages of America: forest, Steel, Admass. This rustic community turns out to be an audio-visual Babel, like everywhere else. Its tourist-nudging signs impart vain kitsch to this nowhere town. An inert shot of a 'dead' cinema suggests decay. (That's a deft progression: from 'too rowdy' to 'too quiet'.) Here is the USA of the 'Blue Highways', the main roads of before 1940, half-abandoned for the interstate highways. Over this somnolence, a masculine voice recalls a town mob, marching on 'the Commies, the Orgies!' But, decent neighbours had forewarned the victims. But, Reich Sequence 6, The American Dream (Eva Reich-Moise).

issued forth, with heavy-calibre revolver, and routed the mob by threatening to shoot its leader. The speaker turns out to be his son, Peter, talking to camera. (Was he, once, that snapshot baby, now grown up? The film leaves us to wonder, though the script confirms.) After this lynch-mob tale, we meet the Oakes Brothers, who talk about Reich with cheerful affection. They're a couple of 'originals', wonderful 'direct-cinema': not 'typed', and yet, representative. As oldtimey storekeepers, they recall Capra's 'little man' - grassrootsy, lowermiddle class.2 Their affability might well be linked to the 'free trade' spirit of America's growth, and to a 'conservative liberalism' like John Ford's, which stopped a Hollywood witch-hunt in its tracks.3

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Still, the lynch-mob leader was another storekeeper. And another tradesman, the barber-cum-deputy-sheriff, suspiciously recalls Reich's insistence on brushing his hair straight upwards, unlike normal people. Voice, uniform, burly body and military-skinhead crop, evoke 'police America', and its fears that foreign accents and strange cults augur an Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Don Siegel's film of 1956, however revered by enlightened film-lovers, was for most Americans an anti-Socialist film.) Are the bourgeois brothers and the heavy cop political opposites, or just 'heads and tails' of the same system? It's not only Marxists who wonder. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) addressed the fears of many conservatives, that 'small town' decency was doomed. Sequence 8, Rangeley: 'Halfway between the North Pole and the Equator' (Karl and Vance Oakes).

Sequence 8, Rangeley, Pete Durrell, Deputy Sheriff.

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Conversely, not a few radicals feared that 'police Fascisms' were taking over, as per Ice (Robert Kramer, 1969) and Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971). However, the cheery brothers' ridicule of 'Commie-spy-phobia' seems to abash the cop, thanks to a cut, presumably editorial comment, to the effect that amiable Americanism still carries weight, and that even within one tiny community, no single-minded ideology is dominant. It could also remind us of the counter-culture's living roots in 'middle America' and its optimism. Young spectators usually laugh at the sheriff before he's even said anything, for his slow heavy gaze, stubble head and simple barbering trade. Is their prejudice entirely different from his, against Reich's haircut? (Wasn't its upswept hair meant to work like lightning conductors, and pluck orgones from the sky? Is that 'normal', or like something out of Twin Peaks?) Ironically, Reich repelling a lynch-mob fits a traditional Hollywood genre: the liberal melodrama. 'High-minded outsider faces down populist lynch-mob' - by singling out its leader. But this example has two neat twists: 1. The McCarthyites' victim is also anti-Communist - for rational reasons, based on first-hand experience. 2. His gunplay makes an excellent argument for the individual's right to bear arms. Moreover, Reich shoots at FDA agents, when they trespass on his property. All this may well be left-wing 'direct action' against incipient Fascism, but it's also right-wing anarcho-autonomy, against democratic State tyranny. Leaving Rangeley, we drive through beautiful green forest, and hear Reich's words. Am I really a spaceman, sired by beings from Outer Space who had intercourse with Earthwomen?' By osmosis with this thought, the drive through 'virgin forest' becomes a state of mind, a 'free-fall' of fantasy. 'Space-child' fantasies are quite widespread: in science fiction (The Man Who Fell to Earth, 2001, Solaris, Village of the Damned [= The Midwich Cuckoos']); their fantasy 'relatives' include 'robohybrids' like Robocop and Blade Runner (electronic variations on Pinocchio) and changelings (The Omen, Waterworld); and 'lost in familiar space' sensations loom in Antonioni's lyrical dramas. Do all these stories

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explore, in different ways, different aspects of modern 'alienation' (as per Alien Nationl) - from society, or self, or bodily feelings, or the world around, or one's basic instinct - or a bit of everything - schizoid conditions, perhaps endemic, in a society of abstract signs? Was something similar, in Reich, aggravated, by ostracism and worse, into, not madness, but - serious eccentricity? Was this 'space-forest' his last frontier' - a wilderness of wandering/wondering? The voice-over answers us, quoting Reich on the right to speculation. Is this forest road, leading beyond the logical; a 'witch-wood way', a 'road less taken'? It's beautiful, in its way. These 'Martian' thoughts are quotations from Reich, but spoken in the first person by a female voice - another 'dimension' of alienation, perhaps? 4 The Orgonon's 'golden hour' returns to mind, in 1950s Kodacolor. A private flying-boat disembarks visitors from all the world over: halcyon days. We might recognise A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill, the English progressive school, in its fiftieth year in 1991, and still, in 1998, true to its basic rule, 'No rules except by Children's Parliament'. Back to the present. The Institute is now - a Museum. But, over the proud black bust on Reich's tomb, we hear his recorded voice, defiantly retelling his defiance of the mob. The camera nudges towards plastic shrouding a black couch, like a ghost half-risen from a tomb. Mysterious breathing is heard. We discover a Reichian analysis in progress ... now ... Reich's ideas live ... in direct-cinema. Dr Alexander Lowen works with a patient on her breathing and posture. Unlike Freud's 'talking cure', the treatment involves much firm warm physical touching. We may wonder whether sexual overtones arise, and if they're unhealthy. Or is that our moral panic? But Lowen's style is reassuring. (He was well respected by psychotherapists of all schools, having concentrated on Reich's 'character-armour' theory, which Freudian theory accepted, and of which he was generally acknowledged as the expert.) Further reassurance comes from Dr Sharaf, in a healthy, open-air, setting; he frankly describes his own physio-emotional therapy, mentioning sexual quickening as incidental to emotional reinvigoration.

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Thus two lively, sensible, sensitive 'father-figures' give us their moral guarantee, and Reich's life-work has a fairly happy 'end'. But, a trio of scenes, disrupting this 'rehabilitation', generate a new anxiety .... Our first look at a Bioenergetic Workshop, while raising questions, was hopeful, by and large. Our second induces more anxiety. A recumbent patient, purple with rage, muscles clenched, screams 'Give it to me!', 'It's mine! Give it to me!', as she wrestles with her male therapist, for a rolled-up towel. On one hand: 'How deep psychotherapy can go!' On the other: 'How deep it has to go!' This tussle for a towel, like a Svankmeyer quarrel, suggests some mad, yet deep, fusion of body, desire and property, in a word, 'possessive individualism'. Is it a basic drive, or 'just' a deviation? A psychoanalyst might diagnose penis envy, or phallus envy, or breast envy, or an umbilical cord fetish, or some enormous lack', depending on his school, but, whatever the cause, the results - infantile fury, greed and grasp - are clear to all. Is this just one patient's complex? Or widely representative of human nature? Or especially developed under capitalism? Or, if we're sceptical about Freudian theories (as it's entirely reasonable to be), might therapy have brainwashed this poor woman into working up a hysteric rage? Every possibility is worrying. Suspense resumes. It's calmed by Dr Lowen's chat on posture and breathing. It's informative, civilised, sensitive, confident and it fits our common-sense. Sequence 15, Give It To Me! Patient #2.

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Sequence 38, 'You Are Your Body' (Dr Lowen, left, BioEnergetic Workshop, NYC).

His deft imitations of chronic body-languages - the stiffly military, the slack-chinned, the droopy-drawers, the tightly intucked bum - deploy an empathy more usual in artists than doctors. Such 'therapy' scenes link the 'Reich revival' with a wider range of permissive-cum-cathartic psychotherapies, so conspicuous since the 1960s: 'Primal Screaming', 're-birthing', R.D. Laing's 'anti-psychiatry', and, in Leo the Last (John Boorman, 1969), a 'water-relaxation' guru gesturing a swimming-pool full of naked flesh to 'Undulate! Undulate!' Gradually, the film's scope widens. In an art gallery called The United States of Erotica, Betty Dodson, artist, feminist and lesbian, chats to camera about how she persuaded friends to pose for her paintings of them masturbating. Her models, initially embarrassed, finished 'very liberated. It was a joyful thing to them'. A female friend felt freed at last from being 'totally dependent on ... a man, a partner, to make orgasm, which is a lousy posture to be in'. Shockable spectators should have left by now; the rest will appreciate Ms Dodson's 'daring to be free'. Some will think, 'Right on, Sister!'; others, 'Hmmmm ... well, chacun a son gout'; and some, like me, will think, 'We-ell, you know ... ', very doubtfully, like the Beatles demurring from calls for Revolution.5 Reich did think self-pleasuring should be a happy and normal part of growing up, towards 'genital maturity'; but Dodson's blithe dismissal of shame, modesty and her preference for auto-erotism, would be a regression from 'genital maturity',

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which drives towards solid partnership, and even having children. Her remarks smack of a manifesto, a 'feminist separatism', which may, who knows, be less liberation than alienation, less revolution than surrender to capitalist individualism, with its 'Culture of Narcissism': 'oneself alone'.6 Now we meet Dr Ollendorff, slightly reminiscent of Dr Sharaf, and presumably a Reichian, but maybe of a sterner disposition. 'A wonderful man', says the script, 'Makavejev is sorry there is not more of him in the picture.' He declares: 'If any sane man would be produced by a doctor suddenly, what would be the consequence? Well, this is very simple; he, very likely, would commit suicide.' This dark remark starts a new suspense. It's just about here that the Yugoslavian story begins, and the film alternates between the Yugoslavian and the American scene, pursuing each in its own terms, as befitting 'opposite' societies. The USA has more freedom than Socialism, Yugoslavia has more Socialism than freedom. Let's pursue the Stateside story, before turning to the Socialist tragedy, which is closest to the film's heart.

6 Back in the USA, or, Communismus Interruptus Dr Lowen gave us the good news, and Dr Ollendorff, the bad news. Tuli, swaggering provocatively, in sham uniform, on a New York street, opens hostilities. Then, past the trash-movie houses on 42nd St., Jackie Curtis, transvestite 'Superstar' of Warhol's Women in Revolt (1972) and Flesh (1968), and moving spirit of Charles Ludlum's Theatre of the Ridiculous,7 strolls, splendidly nonchalant, glitter-dust around one eye, sharing an ice-cream with a quieter friend. Overlaid, a radio commercial proclaims, 'You own the sun, with Coppertone'. The 'TV 'n' Trash' culture (Jack Smith, John Waters, Divine) subverts good taste, high art, gender norms and anatomy, shame, guilt, self-consciousness, homophobia. Does the ice-cream parody 'all-American' innocence? Or assert a gay transvestite's equal claim on it?

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WIMPIM •y v y j

Sequence 21, An Elegant Jump across the Ocean (Jackie Curtis, Rita).

'^bu own the sun' is how Jackie feels, out of the closet. But it's also a slogan to sell product - and a tacky promise, geared to possessive individualism? That one eye is glittered up seems a witty touch, though the script thinks he forgot the other one. Has he bought into a new American dream, whereby 'Anyone can be whatever s/he wants to be' and make-up lifts one out of the body ... which has no meaning ... only signs label you ... identity is image-deep. Later, Jackie tells the camera how a Real Male, who, when she was a man, desired her dearly, proved impotent with her once she'd turned TV 'though I was the same person really'. Her way of telling evokes True Confessions. Unaffected innocence? Acculturation to kitsch? Deadpan parody? Old-school Freudians would see a moral there: sexual deviation, born of inhibition, elects a substitute, makes confusion worse confounded; enters the labyrinth of irony. But then again, straight lovers get star-crossed too, so is this but a new twist on an old tale of Heloise and Abelard ... ? Finally Jackie prays to a shrine, of the Madonna. It's so Kitsch that it's Camp - both serious and ironic, parodic and nostalgic, tasteless and exquisite. Has she surrendered to religion, or asserted TVs' Equal Rights to it? She turns and blows a kiss to camera - or to us? Or to the man behind it? Affectionately? Mockingly? Blowing the gaff on fake religiosity? Or defiantly asserting her baroque combination of nostalgias? Or 'illusions' - the Madonna done up like a Christmas Tree, Jackie in drag, this film?

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Sequence 47. Still life with frame- I.

Silently, as if to impress us with something so powerful it should be true, s/he silently shows us a studio portrait, of young Gary Cooper, posed a la von Sternberg, like some hommefatale. As if he's another divinity - or possibility^ Because the still portrait, in old-style monochrome, reminds us he's dead and gone. Is 'Coop' an ideal erotic - not just sexual - object? A lack' in Jackie's own character-structure? Is male glamour, Hollywood-style, bourgeois mystification? From one angle, her Camp is her 'authenticity', her straightforward integrity to what she considers she really is, or chooses to be; whereas traditional morality (bourgeois or Socialist) entails living up to others' ideas, or needs, and frustrating/falsifying oneself. Or does Camp, when it devalues traditional probity, and Sartre an authenticity, instal a new kind of 'bad faith'?8 Psychoanalytically, is Camp a Quixotic enterprise - and, like Quixote, a compilation from ancient texts - Marilyn Monroe, Maria Montez? For Freud, and Reich, is 'the right true end of love',9 for all its fun and fantasy, also that of sexuality, i.e. to change the world, not dream-parody it away? Screw newspaper set out to change the world, and explore the thousand flowers of sexuality. Its Editorial Board seem young, fresh, cheerful. Publisher Al Goldstein explains its political credo. The Sexual Revolution is 'patriotic in the very essence of what America was supposed to be in 1776, and is not'. Its anarcho-libertarianism is

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super-conservative. That's smart rhetoric, enlisting the American Revolution, US reverence for freedom, and the Constitution, as support for radicalism. We naturally suspect it's a ploy, but then again .... Finally, Goldstein, grinning, shows us a sex-aid-type object which I couldn't make out, but looked as sleazy as his smirk. The script states it's a plaster-cast vagina in which 'are embedded the pubic hairs from all the girls from the Screw office'. Yuck. Editor-in-Chief Jim Buckley calls on sculptress Nancy Godfrey, a slim, casually graceful, girl, for another tabu-busting session. She'll take a plaster-cast of his phallus,10 for her collection of celebrities' hard-ons. She requests him to help along by fantasising: 'just relax and use your imagination, anything that turns you on', while she works away at him. (I thought of the ancient joke whose punch-line goes, 'Faster, faster, master plaster-caster'.) The plaster pyramid is imposing, but not unlike a burial mound. All the same, Makavejev, like Buriuel, acknowleges the spiritual quiverings that unilateral sexual pleasure can start. As girl gets boy going, the sound-track juggles: Kupferberg chanting 'Kill for Peace!'; a peasant dance from Merry Youth, a Stalinist musical by Alexandrov;11 and Smetana's Moldau (musical nationalism?). A socio-psychoanalyst might diagnose some 'castrating female' syndrome, often thought chronic in American culture.12 But then again, given male trophy-hounds like Goldstein, isn't Nancy's cock-fetish fair tit for tat? It evokes the famous last words of David Holzman's Diary (Jim MacBride, 1973): Ah well, back to the real thing, back to masturbation.' Meanwhile, Kupferberg looks like getting somewhere. He had been a moving spirit of The Fugs, the first and most subversive rock group, using lyrics from Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary (Harvard Professor and apostle of chemical religiosity) and Father Daniel Berrigan, the civilly disobedient Jesuit priest. Now, bravely solo, Tuli struts the streets in raggedy uniform, guying a Vietnam Marine, spouting redneck fury at Commies, blacks, students, dissidents, and performing, in sprachsung, the Fugs' protest hit, 'Kill for Peace'. He represents the scratch army of 'guerrilla artists' and those demonstrators against the

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Vietnam War who linked its atrocities to something rotten in the body politic. Alas: shoppers take scant notice, 'suits' grin derisively, cops look on complacently. His act abounds in ironies, inspired by official doubletalk ('We had to destroy the town in order to save it'). He raps the radical slogan, 'Bring the war home!', which meant, 'Forcibly divide the USA itself!', but he gives it a hawkish meaning: 'Shoot protestors, students, blacks.' Finally he presents arms, direct to camera, and holding his gun-barrel vertically, strokes it excitedly. Under his oversize steel helmet, his shadowed eyes and gritted teeth resemble a skull. All bone, steel and killer-tension, he 'becomes' mere character-armour, sex without sex, a lust to kill. He's remarkably like that carnival, and archetypal, image, the grinning skeleton with phallus (a jokey one appears in Scorpio Rising). 'Killer weapon as monster cock': it's nifty rhetoric, a smart jeer at 'macho', and possibly part of the truth. But is war 'phallic', as much as political, economic, rational? 'Burlesque is ... pleasure and attack, play and criticism.... But an excess of burlesque and absurdism is dangerous ... incessant clowning cannot degrade its target without degrading itself.'13 All the same, Tuli's satire, even if it boomerangs, hits its target: the American effort reached this Expressionist frenzy. And Makavejev paid tribute to Kupferberg, for giving him something more 'doubleedged' than he anticipated. These sexual goings-on are daring enough to have even permissive spectators holding their breath. And, they're frank, like Jackie, about counter-cultures being snafu-ridden, half-assed, sometimes ignominious. Thus WR subverts 1970s braggadocio, as if just defying tabu could liberate sexual energies, as if rebellion were Revolution. At least these artists are trying, but, their Sexual Revolution goes off at half-cock, in pleasures more solitary than Socialist.

7 Yugoslavia: For and Against Fanaticism Our Yugoslavian heroine is Milena, declared Communist, feminist and Reichian. She's attracted, politically and romantically, to a visiting

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Russian ice-skater, Vladimir Ilyich; but he mistrusts the merely personal passions of which he seems incapable. When, at last, she seduces him, he decapitates her with an ice-skate. Their story starts as Milena, cooking, breaks four eggs in brisk succession, as if making an omelette. Maybe implying, 'YDU can't make a sexual revolution without breaking eggs'. Or heads? VI. s forenames are Lenin's, and he makes his own Lenin's confession to his mistress. Nothing is lovelier than the Appassionata! I could listen to it all day! Marvellous, superhuman music! With perhaps naive pride I think: What wonders man can create! But I can't listen to music! It gets on my nerves! It arouses a yearning in me to babble about nothing, to caress people living in a hell who can still create such beauty! But nowadays if you stroke anybody's head, he'll bite off your hand! Now you have to hit them on the head, hit them on the head mercilessly ... though in principle one opposes all violence.

Milena also cites Lenin, but usually reading from a book. Dramatis Personae: A Character Spectrum. WR's historical figures can be ranged along Eysenck's character-scale,14 of tender- or tough-mindedness. Reich is near one end, Stalin the other. But Reich packs a mean .45, and Stalin's vow by Lenin's tomb is his 'tender' moment. Lenin encompasses both extremes. But his choice is clear: his is a time of hitting heads.15 In Milena's story, these historical figures are somewhat 'mythic', representing fairly consistent, 'logical' principles. The fictional protagonists are more torn, between different feelings, some tough, some tender, some political, some personal - more like 'real people', or 'ordinary people'. They don't make history, they're trapped in it. WR is an allegory, of sorts, but it's a dramatic allegory. Its characters represent, not 'pure' positions, or tendencies, as in philosophy, but human responses to specific situations. It's history as drama, not as philosophy. It's history like Ibsen, not like Hegel. Each character, each

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'position', is torn between opposites, and the infinity of 'syntheses' which exist between them. As befits the film's intention, which is not to close debate, by demonstration, but to open it out. On one level, of course, VI. is Russian Leninism after Stalin, in the age of Brezhnev, under whose polite, tolerant inertia the dangerous spirit of Stalin sleeps, one drowsy eye half-open: Brezhnev's tanks had just crushed the 1968 'Prague Spring' as Makavejev began preparing his film. Milena is from a younger, livelier generation of Yugoslavian Communists, who felt their country's 'middle way' between the Communist and capitalist blocs, between equality and mass affluence, with its drive to 'autogestion' (self-management by Party-manager-worker 'co-ops'), must generate, not just the stale compromises which were all the older Communists, of Tito's generation, seemed able to conceive, but a radically new spirit, a new synthesis of Marxism and humanism. From 1968-71, they seemed on the verge of triumph, if Leninism Russian-style didn't intervene. Of the liberal humanisms on offer, many Marxists found Freud's especially congenial. It's thoroughly materialistic, and conflict-based, in effect - dialectical. The two spheres (socio-political, bio-personal) are promisingly complementary. The younger Reich was 'already' Marxistutopian, more 'physiological' than Freud (i.e. more obviously biomaterialist), and all his life Reich advocated 'work-democracy', the clearest possible alternative to 'democratic centralism'. In the latter, a Party-machine dictated the People's 'real' needs and wishes to them; 'work-democracy' was an autogestionist extreme, whereby society spontaneously organised itself around the work required to fill people's needs and wishes. Utopian it may have been, but it fleshed out Marx's total blank about what true Socialism might be, or how it might come about. Thus VI. and Milena typify their respective Communisms, by resembling, not their general forms, but extreme forms of their contrasting tendencies. Exposition: Ideology as Spectacle. VI. (quite unlike Lenin), is an earnest artist. But his ice-ballet is a frozen fairytale, in Czarist costumes

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Sequence 39, Bolshoi Ice Follies, Moscow.

and style. (It's actually an Austrian show, but fits Russian aesthetics enduring long after Stalin.) Its movements and poses, beautiful in themselves, are ritualised and stiff. A romantic pas de deux resembles the sex act on skates, but the dancers are living statues, like the aerial contortionists of A Man is Not a Bird. It's the art of a Court, or a bureaucratic state apparatus, though VI. believes he's a People's Artist. He's sincerely modest about his achievements and art as Social Duty (State-defined). He's diplomatic about Yugoslavia's independence, and the superiority of the Russian way. His manly complacency goes with docile acceptance of official ideology, and he's nowise hypocritical; ideology saturates his consciousness. Onstage, his virtuosity asserts perfect control over the body, with purely formal acknowledgment of bodily passions; even offstage, his body-language is a touch stiff, blank, floating, maybe schizo? Milena too has a 'show', with ideology: her agitprop from a tenement landing to the crowd below. Her art-profession, beautician, is more ordinary, personal, democratic, than VI.'s Czarist pageant (but also more individualist, maybe consumerist). She's of an elite, having dumped her proletarian lover after going on a Party training-course, but her agitprop harangue strives to enlist popular spontaneity. She's no dull apparatchik, but an Angry Young Woman, a rebel with a twofold cause, feminism against male dominance and irresponsibility, and Reich's insistence that social revolution requires sexual revolution. It's less

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self-indulgence than self-reconstruction, a sort of 'autogestion of Id Unbound'. It's 'spiritual Bolshevism', and Milena is a New Socialist Superwoman, like Germaine Greer and Mrs Thatcher rolled into one. She offers both political steeliness and rampant sexuality, the smack of firm leadership and and popular spontaneity. She wants it all, including a Sexual Bolshevik Man; and when does she want it, she wants it now. Hers is a maximum programme; everything and quick. VI.'s political programme is schizo-puritanical, but his show of perfection spooks her, like the sudden answer to the contradictions which 'maximum sincerity' upfronts. She falls for VI. after her agitprop spiel has been subverted by the unruly coarseness of a working man. VI. and Milena are opposite, but kindred, spirits, who might prove happily complementary; their eventual partnership is high on the film's agenda. But Milena also belongs with her friends, and acquaintances, and, as so often in dramas, a group of people - flatmates, neighbours schematise the alternatives whose coexistence and conflict are what a culture is. Milena's flatmate, Jagoda, is a joyous sexual animal, but, cannily cynical about her drop-in, though assiduous lover, 'Ljuba the cock', a soldier in the People's Army. When he promises to protect her, she replies, 'But who will protect me from you?' A good question, considering the army's role in the Civil War to come. As pleasure-giving, and receiving, animals, they're Reichian, or 'tender-minded', but her cynicism, and his military role, are tough-minded. A People's Army is a Sequence 25. The man in the street (Zoran Radmilovic).

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pillar of society, but, his quick, dark-eyed, gypsy look suggests social irresponsibility. He's played by Miodrag Andric, the philandering postman in Switchboard, and Milena's tirade against the Yugoslavian (or Universal) Male describes them perfectly. They're fuck-it-and-run males - an 'opposite' of 'patriarchy'. Jagoda knows how to keep him coming, but in Switchboard he triggers tragedy. Both men are state functionaries, but wait around with nothing to do - a comment on national efficiency? Ljuba, we remember, was one of the hippie, gently together, egg-jugglers. Is gypsy-hippie statelessness his natural style? Jagoda and he make the two-backed beast, whose marathon romp all over the apartment looks like one of those moments intended to sort out the film's spectators. Actually, its long continuation rather vexed me, as confusible with failed pornography, which it's not, I think, meant to be. Their gambols are strenuous and jolly, more brazen energy than vicarious pleasure (notwithstanding some sharp reactions from Jagoda). I'd gloss it as a visual extravaganza, a show-like form for the sexuality 'in the air' between, and around, orgonic couples, like the 'invisible fluid' of happy domesticity. Like a four-footed animal, they butt their way under a folkloric rug, relic of peasant customs. Townsfolk cite 'the birds and the bees'; farmers think about bulls and horses. This human couple, or pushmipullyu, parallels the bull-cow wedding in The General Line (Eisenstein, 1929), whose peasant 'coarseness' shocks modern audiences. Sequence 28, 'Onward People's Soldiers!'

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In the street outside, Radmilovic the drunken working man sexually harasses Milena, and when she rejects him, disturbs public order and property. He's your earthy, funky working man: what Brechtian street theatre called 'blue blouses'. His dark, nutlike physique rather suggests some 'ethnic' origin, a Montenegrin mountain people, perhaps. On Marxism's evolutionary scale, he's halfway between 'mountainpeasant', whose culture blends warrior-individualism with rough solidarity, and factory-worker, with his 'work-discipline', class-conscious, solidarity. His dustbin barricade is a spontaneous class action, like a wildcat strike; the bastards of the Company-party unions (like, in Bird, the Works Morals Committee) will never grind him down. His 'street theatre' is a drunken harangue, plus dustbin barricade against the municipal workers who bundle him off, despite solidarity. He's the lover Milena dumped once Socialist education raised her consciousness. Which points to the problem theorised so clearly by Comrade Djilas that half the rest of his life was spent in house arrest or Tito's jails.16 In Communist regimes, he reasoned, leaders, cadres, managers and the Party apparatus, swiftly constitute a 'new class', and oppress the proletariat, much like the old bourgeoisie from which many of them sprang (as Lenin's vanguard theory requires, conveniently for idealistic, disaffected, or opportunistic bourgeois, who are not few). WR must be tactful about this. So Radmilovic the worker and Milena the cadre are hardly Romeo and Juliet, tragically divided by an Sequence 33, On the Balcony. 'Listen Little Man!'

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Sequence 33. Vox pop meets agit prop: dialogue of the deaf?

educational divide, tantamount to class. They're too ill-matched ever to have stayed together, and he's quite a rascal, as well as a loveable clown. As for Milena, her idealism rules out any question of her raised consciousness also being social climbing. Still, he gets to crack some political jokes, yelling 'Marx Factor' at Milena, yelling 'Red bourgeoisie!' at a passing Mercedes (the Party bosses' car), likening Socialism to a doughnut - the workers get the hole. We may even ask ourselves: does the difference between his dustbin desperation and her tasteful apartment, with its 'simple' mental luxuries, like the orgone cabin, imply a superior, privileged, education, evidence of class inequality? Or perhaps she's an inherently superior person, deserving all her privileges? Milena lacks a lover currently, and we naturally wonder, as we did about the Reichians, if her Sexpol crusade stems from purely personal frustrations, or even fantasies about the benefits of sex. But she doesn't seem morbid. As Jagoda and Ljuba bonk around the clock, and the flat, to a merry folk-tune, she tactfully leaves them to it, and shuts herself in the kitchen, reading. They're flatmates, after all (thanks less, perhaps, to communal ideals than to the chronic housing shortage), and maybe Jagoda and Ljuba as two-backed beast, or pushmipullyu, emblematises Milena's Unconscious desire. Resisting any voyeuristic interests, such as preoccupies too much film theory (somewhat ironically), she buries herself in her Communist Party newspaper. Though it sports a feature on Karl Marx's love-life (like awkward Communist appeals to 'popular

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sentimentality'?).17 She also gets a touch butch: savouring a cigar, swigging from a beer bottle, as if identifying with the masses (or even a rough-cut male, a touch of the Radmilovic. So she's not entirely snobbish). Or is she miming masculine coarseness, to resist the sex, or to swagger off some female emptiness (or lack)? She prepares for bed, her petticoat like a short-nightie, but abruptly changes her mind, and, indeed, half her gender: she dons Ljuba's army-jacket and forage-cap, and marches out to address a neighbourhood meeting. Without the trousers. A Freudian slip, or knowing just how good she looks, in military tunic, 'mini' and kinky boots. It's the Swinging London look. Plus Primitive Bolshevism, for her agitprop spiel is seriously heavy stuff. If her body-language hints at a certain stiffness, like 'characterarmour' stiffness, it's neither 'emptied', like VI.'s, nor clumsily awkward, as demonstrated by Dr Lowen, but tense with energy, of an active, outgoing, kind. Frustrated she may be, but her orgone energy flows, and how. Carried away, she commands instant silence, with a dictator's gesture (uplifted chin, forearm pushed out, palm out). Zooming back, the camera reveals tier on tier of concrete tenement landings, like some kolossal auditorium, as favoured by Great Dictators for their rants. It's hard to say how far the gesture comes from her, or how far she caught it from Radmilovic, heckling from the back, verging, perhaps, on a certain Populism. Either way, does she cross the thin grey lines between agitprop, demagoguery and pseudo-populist Fascism? Is her orgoneenergy frustrated by her educated superiority to the horny-handed sons of toil, misguiding her enthusiasm, as per Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)?18 If her style is a touch Fascist, her message is largely anarchopopulist-Socialist. She urges, not passive obedience to Party cogitations, but its opposite, or complementary: Socialism from below. All the same, her message ('be assertive and free'), and her style ('I, Sexy Soldier and Sister Superior, tell you to'), have a comic incongruity, which, more seriously, exemplifies the 'double bind' (an imperative whose selfcontradictory elements mean the subject can't obey it without disobeying it, and, if under pressure, become neurotic).19

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But Radmilovic, heckling from the back, also knows a trick or two. He subverts her agitprop, by noisily agreeing with it, but in actual praxis, by him and her. To work his way nearer, he initiates a traditional peasant dance, the kozara, which often closes political meetings. Its participants hold hands criss-cross, in a line or round a circle. Now its snaky line, winding around the tenement stairwell, edges up on Milena, obliging her to fall into place near the head of it, ending the meeting in cheerful disorder. She won't be the last Yugoslav politician to whip up popular pressures, which immediately get out of hand. Radmilovic's abuse of political discourse baffles brains. Half-wily, half-ignorant, it's largely opportunistic, aimed at sexual, i.e. class, equality Sequence 35, The Kozara Snake-Dance.

with Milena. He's stuck on her, and her only, which is idealism, of a libidinal kind. He'll never let the bastards grind him down, but I doubt if he's averse to that other 'Internationale': 'The working-class/ Can kiss my arse/ I've got the foreman's/Job at last.' His low-minded populism is entirely relativist, to his own interests, and those of people like him. It's rough and uninhibited, but not malicious. When he actually gets to Milena, he'll be gentle, even chivalrous, with her, and violent, but not hurtful, to his ruling-class rival. His clumsy indignation suggests some quasi-ethical nostalgia - class solidarity? herd instinct? His political position, were it coherent, might involve some kind of anarchosyndicalism, whose proletarian populisms, of grassrootsy, therefore local,

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kinds, make a sort of missing link between direct-action Socialisms and lower-class Fascisms. He says it for all those mad mixtures, of selfinterest and natural justice, which make politics crazy. As if to soften his political sting, he's the film's 'clown', asserting the lower truths' about man, like the clown in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Though furiously frustrated, he's not repressed: he knows what he wants, and can't get at her. VI. however is repressed; his sexual desires hardly enter consciousness, until Milena wraps them up in ideals like his. Which, Reichian theory apart, may well be perfectly normal, for idealistic, civilised, men. Also outside Milena's flat, with its rather special culture, an indignant old woman denounces its sexual goings-on. Flaming ^buth versus Crabbed Age? Old versus New Morality? Being too obstreperous to be some Party snooper on deviant behaviour, she's probably just a benightedly 'respectable' matriarch, working or lower-middle class, for whom not sex fun, but children and grandchildren, are the meaning of life. Is there some 'class' aggro, between her lowly, hardpressed, oldfashioned, culture, and the 'new class', fixated on pleasure, political crusades, and lecturing everybody, while void of family responsibility? Does Milena strike her as a yuppie? Milena's virago spiel may owe something to 'negative' motivations - sexual frustration, and indignation against men, and the patriarchal ideology which still dominates the Party. But she's not a 'negative girl' aggrieved, sulking and otherwise passive. On the contrary. Her spiel displays a fine elan vital, and elitist Socialists like Shaw might think she's a Superwoman whose problems include her natural superiority to everybody else, like Epifania in The Millionairess (Sophia Loren in Anthony Asquith's film of 1960). She may have worn Ljuba's uniform as a comforting male 'aura', a sort of security blanket, but she's naturally active in quiet female mode; she actively responds to VI.'s show, and then makes all the advances. If people ever thought that 'males' were always active and female always 'passive', then Milena and VI. would have reversed sexual polarity.20 Her quietly modest manner, and body language, if slightly 'humble' before his splendour, is diplomatic, and

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better geared to a thoughtful love such as an aggressive presentation of self and sexuality might confuse.21 Indeed, near VI.'s dressing-room, she encounters a very tall, very glamorous, showgirl, whose 'flesh impact' would daunt a woman less confident in the quiet, deep realities. Complications: The Plot Thickens. Milena takes VI. home. Jagoda checks that he's a real Russian, not a Lithuanian or a Jew. Racism? Political romanticism, about 'our heroic Russian allies'? Popular mythology of 'virile' versus 'victim' peoples? Or all of the above, right and wrong entangled? Here Jagoda, who also fancies VI., puts on her 'show', of real, informal, intimate carnality. She flaunts her bosoms in his face, though he doesn't notice, being deeply engrossed in polite political conversation with Milena, who counters Jagoda's breasts with a glass of milk. Breasts, milk (and rusks), evoke old folk-nana wisdom whereby pompous males are big babies really, and, unknown to themselves, want mothering. (The script does call VI. babyish.) Milena's milk-in-a-glass is a touch more adult, and abstract. If it's a bit like bottle-feeding, that's rather ideological, for Behaviourism, long the official psychology of Russian Communism, deplored the maternal softness towards infants, towards which Freudianism, which was bourgeois decadence, inclined. Russia favoured production-line child-rearing: hence all those shots, in Vertov for example, of long ranks and files of babies, stranded in iron-barred cots, supervised from afar by one or two nurses in stiff uniforms. Jagoda remains conspicuous in the background, especially when lying flat on her back, her long legs, laid vertically up the wall, scissoring open and closed, like a semaphore signal, signifying their point of intersection. Is her base-over-apex body-language degrading to women, or sexual subversion of a hypocritical conversation? Is she posing as a passive, amenable sex-object, when she's really a sexual subject, egging him on, to do his stuff as her sexual object? Is she aggressively competing with Milena, or is this fair competition between Socialist sisters, the dialectical antithesis of fraternal co-operation? But then again, mightn't freethinking Socialist women think a threesome quite permissible, much as Reich thought it more natural than 'bourgeois' exclusivity and jealousy.

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Sequence 42, A Third Way: the Dialectics of Liberation.

Sequence 44. Milena, Vladimir llyich.

Are these two kinds of women also two faces of Eve ('everywoman')? Psychoanalysis, which context invites, could think to another composite mother-figure, Leonardo's The Virgin and St Ann (circa 1510). To be sure, the painted pair are (or is) so powerful, even ominous, that Freud thought he saw a vulture in there also, whereas Milena and Jagoda are a loose and cheerful duo. The glass of milk is decorated with playing cards, suggesting fun, luck, social irresponsibility, everything which rational work-ethics, Protestant, bourgeois or Socialist, are not. Cards, like dice, are a 'capitalism of the lumpen'. Coming from Milena, it's unexpected: is she more tolerant, less puritanical, than we fear?

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But tolerance implies complications. The pictures on Milena's wall include Reich (of course), Freud (with a target drawn on him - for being bourgeois-patriarchal?), and, disconcertingly, Adolf Hitler, among adoring German women; her voice betrays a nostalgia, for their female unity of personal and political, of sexual and social, before she denounces 'those stupid cows'. Strange combination of nostalgia (for bonding to a socially strong man - unlike irresponsible Yugoslavian males?) and contempt (for the 'diverted' sexuality of docile women?). We're not shown the picture clearly, but Milena's fascination with Hitler-loving females might well remind us of Leni Riefenstahl, who, a Strong Woman herself, adored her nation-state's Strong Man. Triumph of the Will (1938) is an epic paean to Der Fiihrer, and her Olympics film lyrically asserts The Will To Triumph, 'muscular paganism', in individual, team-, or national, spirit. They're both military films. Not, of course, militarism Rambo-style, which is nervous kitsch, but mobilised, trained energy, impassive and relentless. O Bliss Supreme; Alienation ends here. As Makavejev said, Fascism invigorated a part of man, and woman, which other Socialisms could not. Of which more anon. By now VI. seems soft and apathetic, like Brezhnevism. But Milena wants him relentless. 'The eye and mind of every Communist must be keen as a scalpel. And every word sharp as a sabre or ice-skate. And his every action precise as a razor-cut.' The slide from scalpel (surgical) to sabre (brutal) is ominous, like 'razor', even before Bunuel, Sequence 46, 'What Are the Tasks of Youth Leagues?'

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for razors, before safety-razors, were easily dangerous (whence their very designation, 'cut-throat razor'). Ice-skate' may be a compliment to VI.'s art, but it prompts the printed script to directly address its reader: 'Did you notice the word "ice-skate"? She is going to pay dearly for her blind faith. Lose your head and you'll - lose your head.' 'Blind faith' may contrast with these super-sharp instruments. But didn't all those Communists who thought The Party's Rigorous Logic Was Always Right, suffer from blind faith - in The Party, or History, or their own Correct Views About Everything? Subtle chaos supervenes, as the Comrades spoon romantically, exchanging polite bromides, yet all at sixes and sevens, so that sly oddities creep in, as in late-Bunuel comedy: this might be 'The Discreet Charms of the New Class', or, 'The Liquidating Angels'. Jagoda and VI. seem to agree that men need certainty, while Milena prefers ecstatic instability (Permanent Revolution, Permanent Orgasm). Radmilovic crashes in through the wall, with his manual worker's pickaxe, which is sexual harassment of a grievous kind, shoves VI. into Milena's wardrobe, and nails its door shut with a long plank (which the script explains is a quote from Innocence). He tackles Milena with surprising gentleness, even chivalry, and though vexed she and VI. both respect his enthusiastic attachment to one woman, as idealism of a romantic (but scarcely bourgeois) kind. If Radmilovic brings 'Permanent Revolution' (the excluded muscle) in, he also brings disorder (Harpo-Marxism, with a pickaxe instead of a Sequence 46, Invasion of the Blue Blouses.

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hooter). About here, therefore, the Yugoslavian story breaks up. Radmilovic parodies a shockworkers' song to Tito, thus recalling the hypocrisy and brutalisation of the Stakhanovite in Bird, and the film cuts away to Tuli's brutish Marine. (Montage contrast? Montage comparison?) In a shot whose stylisation half-lifts it out of the story, Milena proclaims 'Death to Male Fascism! Freedom for Female People!' Sentiments plausible enough, once one accepts their paradigm, of opposed extremes with no mainstream centre; but they sound like overkill to me. Would Lowen think her posture firm, or overly statuesque, as, framed by right angles, she gives the Communist variant of the old Roman salute. (Arm half-raised with fist clenched is Communist; arm straight, palm open, to stretch fingers, is Fascist; arm vertical with torch, is the Statue of Liberty.) On the other hand (and in WR there's always an 'other hand'), who doesn't envisage an ideal human, passionately orgasmic and surgically intelligent, hotly libidinal and icily realistic, a man for all seasons? But can even true Socialism, which comes after the end of the State, i.e. of Civilisation and History, as we know it, mass-produce him? Milena, in another stylised scene, another 'show', reads from a radical Bible, a bit like the Maoist swots in Godard's La Chinoise (1967), though her little red book is Lenin: 'For a time, the proletariat needs the State, not in the interests of freedom, but in order to subdue its enemies. And when it has become possible to really speak of freedom, the State as such will have ceased to exist!' In other words; 'Don't ask the State to wither away. If it's still there, it's because your enemies are everywhere!' Its logic is like the policeman's in Drole de drame who, noting crates of milk in a kitchen, observes: Aha!! Milk is an antidote! And wherever there's an antidote, there's always a poison!'22 As Milena becomes, or shows herself, harder-line than we expected, so VI. becomes, or seems, more human (a well-constructed 'crossover'). Emerging from Milena's wardrobe, his chest swells, as if drawing a deep breath at last, as if total immersion in her garments has massively boosted his orgone-count. He's delighted, too, by Radmilovic's cheeky energy, after his own inert pieties. Is some femininity here, a touch of drag, like his stage

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J? """

Sequence 53. Two girls and a wardrobe.

make-up, corresponding to Milena in soldier's uniform, rather as each sex has a streak of the other? Or is this the robustly masculine response to masculine energy - and human conviviality at last? He's enlivened by Radmilovic's vigorous blasphemies, after his own passive pieties. Which is quite magnanimous. When Milena slaps him around for trying to be an ideal ego, with no gut-feelings, no Unconscious, he takes it well. She's got through to the Sleeping Prince, and he responds. Another complication: the dramatic psychology of WR isn't based on rational consistency. Like Freudian theory, it's based on perpetual conflict, within minds. It's more than dialectical, for on any given issue, any number of forces may collide. As their story resumes, VI. and Milena stroll by a river, rather relaxed and congenial. VI. now oscillates between his hard-line (single-minded purpose) and something softer (he returns Milena's kiss). When he denounces the Appassionato,, in speechifying style, Milena, as if to bring him back to earth, appropriates his cock. He hits her, as Stalin, by montage, looks sadly on. (Is that tear, from The Vow, a crocodile one, or sincere?) VI. hits her, then apologises, but she slaps him around, not just symbolic taps, but wholehearted biff bang, upbraiding him as dead to mere real people. This awakes the Sleeping Prince, and Reich's old Party hymn swells up behind. A cross-fade ends with a scream, and, horrified, he reappears, with bloody hands.

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Sequence 48. Still life with frame-II.

Resolution: Danton's Death. 23 An autopsy (evoking Switchboard) reveals 'a huge amount of semen' in Milena's vagina. Group sex, or a sex-starved escapee from a mental hospital? But then Milena's severed head declares, to camera, and us: '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 further ... a man of high ambition, of immense energy ... romantic, ascetic, a genuine Red Fascist!' His rage, her joy: two mysteries of the orgasm. Riddles replacing 'closure' by debate, between and within, spectators. For some, the condemnation of Stalinist Man, is enough. Others, more curious, will engage their favourite theories and/or Unconscious fantasies, mixed with responsive open-mindedness. No one critic can conceive every possibility, Sequence 64, Autopsy Room. Biological Woman: Unrepentant.

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nor verbalise many without over-defining them. But half a loaf may start us off ... 1. As Makavejev's early satires reminded us, Communism envisaged a 'New Socialist Man'. Its dominant ideology, rational, altruistic, Behaviourist, would construct his mind, his sense of self, in toto. VI.'s dismissal of 'dying for love' as 'brutishly zoological' evokes Marxist dismissals of Darwinism, psychoanalysis, biology (and ecology). Not Leninists only: for Fabians also, sex, a mere instinct, was easily conditioned by socio-utopian planning. Most Marxist traditions were saturated in 'mega-industrial' ideology (as in constructivism, biomechanics, kino-eye-ism, the 'robotic' avant-garde). Even its libertarian phase ('free love', Instant Divorce) was geared to theories of sex as stimulus-response. As for 'Socialist Realism', it was 'Muscular Altruism', a neo-Victorianism, and like Victorian materialism, it despised Nature - in psychology (Pavlov), in genetics (Lysenko), in ecology. In WR's very title, mind-body is a system, not a structure, an organism, not a machine. Mysterious, not in some mystical way, but because unpredictable, semi-autonomous, individualising. Sexuality is no 'ghost in the machine', nor yet a spanner in the works. It's one of its main drives. Repress it, and you may overload another ... and vice versa. Not only 'Stalinist' authoritarianism, well developed under Lenin, but 'democratic centralism' generally, is the psychological equivalent of patriarchy. Real patriarchy has as many patriarchs as families; Party patriarchy has only One. Centralism swallows democracy. Communism being phallico-patriarchal, it represses most male sexuality, so that sexually VI. is the film's least phallic character passive, platonic, blind to Jagoda's charms. When Milena praises his eroticism, he nervously asks if she's making fun of him. His body-language isn't hard and stiff, as 'phallico-patriarchal' might suggest; it's softer than Milena's when she's speechifying. It's pliable, obedient, acrobatically so, to very set, ritualised,

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choreography His in-depth discipline is the product of, and for, a totalitarian ethos. He's an ice-maiden, or Ice-Prince. His desires have shifted from the personal to the political - from his phallus to Stalin's chandelier (which gets the TV version's golden glow, otherwise awarded to censorable details). In WK, one might say, Stalin is the Big Daddy of all the Phalluses. He's the State Father, heavy, remote, icy, consistent, as few real Fathers would be. VI. is the 'neutered' Son, with no sex at all. He's earnestly athletic, artistic, altruistic, but, his ice-skates are 'nickel-plated Champions', for People's Artists, and Athletes, are as competitive as they're disciplined. VI. evokes the gymnasts in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whom Monroe and Jane Russell serenade in vain, with 'Is There Anyone Here for Love?' Like VI., they're prisoners of self-perfection. Milena gets his mojo working, but it's overwhelmed by 'ambition', which is also self-assertion. It's not just 'masculine narcissism', it's the 'Triumph of the Will.' It's Fascist mega-efficiency. It's a hypertrophy of the 'performance principle' — which Marcuse thought made modern man 'one-dimensional'. Old Puritanism repressed sexual love by forbidding it; modern life represses it by making trivial goals obsessive (including trivialised sexuality, with neither love nor libido). It can split the human psyche veryrigidly,and what should be VI.'s sexual liberation' turns barbaric (akin to the Russian army's prowess at mass rape), and his love for his soul-mate turns mutually destructive. That's how I'd construe the film (without, of course, subscribing to all its ideas). It might well call up other ideas also, like these, all 'in the air', and worth consideration, whether or not one settles for them. Possibility 2. VI. is the strong man of Innocence + Bolshevik fanaticism. Milena, 'brutishly zoological', subverts his ideological narcissism, and his killing her is moral panic, like schizo-paranoia. Possibility 3. Is glorious screwing, spunk galore and killing, what male libido is mostly about? However the autopsy doctor suspects, a 'sexstarved' loony, not 'male sexuality'. Never mind coital frenzy, the use of an ice-skate is very recherche, compared with normal sex manias, like say, throttling, in La Bete humaine.

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Possibility 4. Might VI.'s ferocity stem from 'post coitum homo tristis est1 - 'ejaculation leaves man melancholy'? The diminution of desire generates sometimes, contented satisfaction, but sometimes depression, and, as defence against it, an irrational fury, as in The 120 Days of Sodom (Sade, 1785), where a vile orgiast warns his partner to get away the moment he's come, or he'll tear her apart. Possibility 5. Is VI.'s brutality typical of 'Men', whose phalliconarcissistic pride savages Women? Possibility 6. Is the film itself sado-sexist, as yet another lively woman is 'punished' by Men? Though feminist 'punishment' theory, whose psychocultural structure is beyond our scope, is very popular,24 I'd counter-propose Milena as tragic hero. 'Blind faith', her tragic flaw, or just error, goes with being 'only human'; her lesser responsibility for her fate means it's entirely unjust. Real tragedy, like raw reality, is morally problematic, never an ideological Q.E.D. Possibility 7. Might Milena's point-of-death ecstasy evoke the proverbial similarity of climaxing to dying (as consciousness quits its usual egofixations?). Sixties permissiveness re-explored such parallels, in films like Hiroshima mon amour (Duras and Resnais, 1959) and In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1976), and in theoretical tomes like Life Against Death (Norman O. Brown, 1959) and LErotisme (Georges Bataille, 1957; US title, Death and Sensuality). Possibility 8. If 7, have sexual pleasures, being ego-dissolving, some masochistic, even morbid, streak? Possibility 9. If 8, is Reichian theory itself decadent - fetishising sexual pleasure, and underestimating violence? Possibility 10. Is Milena soul-sister to Wedekind's Lulu (c, 1895)? Their sexual demands denounce Established Morality and they're murdered by sexual maniacs. It's all the fault of Society, one bourgeois, one Communist. Possibility 11. Is human Nature lust and death, as per German Expressionist pessimism? I prefer Bataille's definition of Eroticism, as 'the approbation of life even to the point of losing it'. Milena's head speaks for a Socialist ethic, whereas Lulu is soulless, an electric eel. Bataille's phrase has morbid possibilities, but also tonic ones: 'Love of

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life may accept, even enjoy, a risk of death. At any rate, it's better to risk everything, and lose, than live in fear.' Epilogue: Heaven Strikes Back. Back in his right mind, VI. is as horrified as we are. Not fugitive, but self-outcast, still at the scene of the crime, yet like Cain in the wilderness, he asks God, in song, for the 'gift of remorse' which God gave Cain. The Christian reference seems both ironic (the script remarks that God doesn't exist) and nostalgic (especially compared with Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, who prayed for the will to be as hard as Stalin). He addresses other wanderers on the face of the earth - gypsies, tramps, lumpen? - around a fire - and a white horse (often, in Eastern European iconography, 'man's best, noble, friend'). Is he addressing God through them, or just drifting vaguely about? VI.'s God is a jealous God: 'O my Lord, my God, thou green-eyed One.' He's not the sloppily permissive God of the Liberals, He's a God for fear and trembling ... like Ivan's ... Tarkovsky's. Maybe true remorse, just like punishment, is pain, to be taken like a man. Or is remorse just inner tyranny? Or is it complacency 'degree zero', like an understanding at last - perhaps too late - that guilt belongs to being human?25 Or is all that me, not Makavejev? Other Comrades. 'Uncle Joe' Stalin makes a personal appearance, via his screen impersonator, in clips from the Chiaureli film, of which Stalin was almost co-auteur, since he created, and always controlled, his own 'image', and checked these very scenes. An optical from The Vow shows Stalin walking on Nazi flags as they fall beneath his feet; here, Makavejev says, it shows Nazism stir anew wherever Stalin walks. Stalin's stately walk, and palatial settings, have an icy, floating air, akin to VI.'s graceful skating. By Lenin's tomb, a distant crowd raises a huge banner depicting Lenin. In Chiaureli, it's the People's Will that Lenin represent them. In this new context, Lenin's image replaces the masses. Delegation is relegation. A gaunt old woman shows Comrade Stalin a letter inscribed TO LENIN: her gaze half-pleads, half-warns him to be faithful to The

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Master. She might be Pudovkin's (and Gorki's) Mother, or 'Mother Russia', or suffering Russian womanhood (or maybe even Lenin's widow, though in Chiaureli she's a Red Army soldier's widow). Is this Stalin's 'sexual' moment - hardly joyful, yet soulful? Makavejev said that he had known the sacred feelings depicted here. After this moment, he points out, the film has no more jokes, only pain and sadness. Milena accuses, not VI. himself, but ideas like his, of Trotsky's murder (by an ice-pick in the brain - a variation on ice-skate in the neck?). Like many 60s radicals, her ideas resembled Trotsky's programme, World Revolution, plus his latter-day interest in psychoanalysis ('WR' is 'World Sequence 65, The Prayer. Constructivist Man: Repentant.

Revolution' and 'Wilhelm Reich'), plus denunciation of Stalin, who made Leninism despotic. However, YI.'s forenames, and his Lenin quotes, make WR the first Communist film to query the notion that Lenin wielded the scalpel ('minimal effective terror') but not the sabre (State Terror). Not that revolution can be 'pacifist'; it shares every justification, and moral problem, of what constitutes a 'just war'. If all answers leave us uneasy, some leave us uneasier than others. All Rise for Chairman Mao. In Peking's Red Square, a hundred thousand Chinese wave their Little Red Books at their leader. It's montaged between Radmilovic's kozara and heckling, and Stalin walking stiffly through his ice-white Palace.

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Sequence 37, Biological Energy of the Masses, Frozen.

Sequence 37. Enthusiasm.

For Makavejev, its surging, fluttering masses, amplifying the kozara, were the restless fertility of China's teeming millions. Distinct, perhaps, from Maoist politics. But it chimes in with widespread radical notions that Chairman Mao had found the secret of 'permanent revolution', emanating from The People, of whom young Red Guards were the joyous avant-garde, the affable rebels with a cause. Not only Parisian Maoists and supporters, like Godard, Sollers and Kristeva, but nice liberal feminists like Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine, were enthusiasts for the Cultural Revolution (1965-8). Is WR a Maoist film, albeit its vivacity contrasts with La Chinoise (Godard, 1967), whose flaming youth studies its Little Red

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Books like earnest Christians some Guide to The Inner Light? Or like docile VI. s? Out of step as usual, I'd just seen A New Song For an Old Soldier (Shen Fu, 1959), where a jovial Commissar forbids dancing, courting and marriage, 'because I haven't got the men to build a creche'. The girls laughed cheerfully at this, but their tinkling acquiescence had the Socialist Realist ring of happiness, and I feared this Song was to China's anti-birth campaign, what Stalin's favourite musical, Volga-Volga (Alexandrov, 1938) was to collectivisation.26 Having such dark thoughts in mind, I read this Peking clip, not as a parallel with the kozara, and a contrast with Stalinist glaciation, but as a transition from popular spontaneity to regimentational bureaucracy. If Makavejev saw the surging crowd, I saw the rigid frame, Red Square. A New Song for an Old Stalinist. Tito gets a two-fingered salute from the shockworkers' hymn, sarcastically sung by Radmilovic. A French interviewer asked Makavejev if VI. was a devious symbol for Tito (who might after all be seen as a servant of Stalin who saw the error of his hardline ways). The idea took Makavejev aback, if only because he couldn't agree without getting his film into trouble at home. It's an idea worth playing with, even if one rejects it in the end. Devious coding was integral to Communist language; Maoists denounced Tito when they meant the Russian leaders who strayed from Stalin's road. Eastern European regimes kept a constant look-out for subversive overtones in discourse of all kinds. Czechoslovak film-makers had tragi-comic tales of state hypersensitivity to indefinable implication.27 In Yugoslavia, Plastic Jesus (Stovanovic, 1972), with some affinities to WRj was banned immediately, and remained so for 20 years, finally emerging without key scenes, which vanished during its arrest. And Hitler? Milena is fooled by the Kremlin's Czarist ice-show, as so many idealists chose to be. But also, her feminine intuition responds to the noble virility, which single-minded males may exude, if they sincerely believe their cause is just, and that their might is right. I think of Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur, of Don Murray's cowboy in Bus Stop, of Leni's wilful brutes. And a Polish lady who watched Nazi soldiers march

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into Warsaw in September 1939 told me she'd never before or since seen such beauty, such radiance, on men. Is Makavejev's conjecture right, that Fascism has some kind of gut-instinct appeal which Socialism lacks? Might Fascism, being not world-idealistic, but world-antagonistic, be closer to some fusion, of the will to power, ego-dissolving tribalism, and solidarity against a hostile universe - and so lift some pressures of 'civilization and its discontents'? Or its 'castrations', as Freud implied. Leni's epic poems to the Fascist spirit feature no 'patriarchal' males. In Nazism, there's no 'father', in the Freudian sense, only 'elder brothers', who give one permission to attack. The marching squads are, not so much 'children', as 'solid bands of brothers'. In Freudian terms, they're the brothers who, having killed the father, become the primal horde, harshly disciplined, but from within, by their 'shared nature', as a 'wolf-pack', of individuals attacking together. Their leaders - not fathers - demand obedience, but only to unleash their energy on their quarry. Their selflessness springs from, and indulges, their aggressivity, instead of neutering it, as Socialist, and bourgeois, idealisms may. 'You are Your Body'. Milena speaks, posthumously, for all the Communists who, murdered by other Comrades, were 'faithful unto death'. She failed, but is unrepentant, as if her effort, not her 'unhappy end', were the truth. Her resurrection, and non-recantation, might seem religious, outside an autopsy room. Hope springs eternal even on the dissection table. Moral. WR makes perfect sense as a Marxist criticism of Marxist ideologies. But much of it has the ring of the devil quoting scripture for his own purposes and Makavejev was quite clear that much of WR's Marxism was camouflage for what he was after: a de-politicised appreciation of man. Its thrust is radical, that is to say subversive. In many ways the American magma of fantasy, invention, and uninhibited change, has more anarchism, therefore socialism, than Old World Marxisms, with their long history of 'blind faith' in 'rigorous logic' and state centralisms.

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8 Appreciations Author's Intentions. Makavejev called WR 'a satirical paraphrase' and 'a black comedy in the form of a pop art collage, of documentary, "political circus", philosophical essay, and science-fiction.' 'From the start I had the idea of using cinema as a zone of liberation, as an ensemble of explosive ideas, images, relations, associations. Then it struck me that we could trigger a chain reaction in the spectator, so that the film could be, not just a film, but a sort of action, in his private life, perhaps with his spouse, by trying something new, in a more relaxed, less anxious, way, or initiating some social action, in the family, the group, whatever. That's why the film has an open ending; it's up to the audience to deduce an ending, or to imagine one. T deliberately inserted some moments which, if the spectator remains in the cinema to see, he agrees to let the film make him its accomplice.' This interactivity draws on autobiography: 'Here is a series of sexual and political traumas recovered from the collection of the author and belonging to his infancy' 'I intended to create debate, but not ambiguity. 'There is a very strong classical structure .... If you draw a graph of the film, you have: Reels One, Two, Three: documentary of a man and his ideas. Reels Four, Five: the meeting, Stalin, shock-therapy, bioenergetic therapy - a level of documentary understanding that is higher than the initial level. Then the story, Reels Six and Seven. Reel Eight: Jim Buckley's cock - now we're very high. And I was surprised at how I was able, now, to make the film go up - three jumps. Then the quarrel, the Lenin quotation, Milena's Woman's Lib statement to Ilyich. From now on all political ideas are expressed in dramatic form of people's personal lives. It's much more integrated. Reel Nine goes even more into personal dramatic statement. And Reel Ten is a complete fantasy, with the talking head, and Ilyich's prayer to a god who doesn't exist, then the resolution and a kind of forgiveness.

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'As for the extracts from Chiaureli's The Vow ... they're samples of a political poetry with religious accents. After which ... there's no more caricature, satire, or humour, and the tone is often much closer to realism.' This 'classical' structure carries another, more open, one. 'I made the whole film ... like a big switchboard. Like a network of ideas ... [each] scene is connected not only with the preceding one and the following one, but with a dozen others, [by] all kinds of side ideas.' Media, Genres, Idioms. WR is a flagship of 'Intellectual Cinema', Eisenstein's term for films which handle, not just 'actuality', 'fact' and 'reality', all provinces of 'documentary', but more abstract and general ideas. Many films build a story to convey ideas, whence a popular notion that 'narrative conventions' shaped the dominant forms of cinema. But not a few films have preferred 'straight' exposition, of one kind or another: explanation, description, poetic reflection, essay forms, in fact, non-fiction of any genre at all. Though a full discussion of 'Intellectual Cinema' is beyond our scope here, we might mention Haxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages (Christensten, 1922), Einstein's Theory of Relativity (Max Fleischer, 1923), the 'Gods' sequence in Octoher (Eisenstein, 1929), The Man with a Movie-Camera (Dziga-Vertov, 1929), Aero Engine (Elton, 1934), the March of Time series (1935-51), Night Mail (Watt, 1936), Victory Through Air Power (Disney, 1943), Hell Bent for Election (Chuck Jones, 1944), Nuit et hrouillard (Resnais, 1956), Eettre de Siherie (Chris Marker, 1959), Time is (Don Levy, 1962), Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1965), Relativity (Ed Emshwiller, 1966 - an important film for Makavejev), Weekend (Godard, 1967), Loin de Vietnam (Chris Marker, 1967), Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1968), Mon oncle d'amerique (Resnais, 1978), The Sensory World (Paul Lazarus III, 1975), and countless television programmes, many stylistically imaginative, like the 'Relativity' sequence in Bronowski's history of scientific ideas, The Ascent of Man (Dick Gilling, 1973-4). 'Intellectual Cinema' and 'Documentary' often overlap with 'Narrative', freely and easily incorporating anecdotes or longer stories to

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illustrate a thesis. A didactic context makes sure that the spectator thinks each storypoint and twist as an illustration of more general ideas. Or the story is clearly just a framework, a 'pre-text\ for other functions, modes and idiom. The story is largely a 'fable', to point a moral, more than a tale which the moral merely adorns. Whereas documentary actuality has a certain affinity with 'photorealism', abstract and general ideas do not; they're more easily handled in words, hence the richness, and prominence, of voice-overs, in many of the films above. But they also lend themselves to nonphotographic images, and several films in the list switch joyously between visual media - maps, charts, diagrams, cartoons. Though photography is often convenient, its realism is not 'of the essence', and in WR, as in, say, Weekend, photography serves 'anti-realistic', symbolic, expository images. Similarly, styles, idioms and, indeed, genres, are freely interwoven, as suits different aspects of a subject. WR combines disparate styles, idioms and genres. Reich's life and ideas are non-fiction, described in documentation of several kinds: non-cinematic material (stills, old newspapers), direct cinema (Lowen's work with patients), interviews to camera (Lowen explains that work), 'voice of God' voice-over, documentary material transformed by context (German mental patients 'stand in' for Russian dissidents). This 'new' meaning arises even when the 'source' meaning is known (as by Makavejev himself), and the two co-exist, without contradiction or 'opposition'; indeed the 'German' (i.e. Nazi) reference improves the Russian one. Poetico-symbolic meanings also arise, as when a Kremlin chandelier 'becomes' a sort of petrified phallus. The fictional narrative (Milena's story) is particularly genre-defying: its always consistent style carries, simultaneously, tragedy, drama, comedy, melodrama (in the sense of 'woman's film'), satire, burlesque, and eventually Melies fantasy (a severed head speaks). Inevitably, fiction and fact mix. Milena and VI., who are fiction, quarrel over Trotsky's murder (which is fact), and a real photograph (by Jaeger) of Hitler's womanly fans. The Chiaureli footage is differently

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anomalous, being 'docudrama' already: too openly rhetorical to be 'reconstructed documentary', yet, perhaps, too 'factuality-conscious' to be 'pure' fiction. Stalin exists outside the three main 'storylines' - Reich, Milena, the USA - yet his shots comment on shots in all three, for as theses, they're incomplete, without this commentary. The 'Counter-Culture' theme is non-narrative, being a succession of vignettes, each more description than narrative, since its sequence of events scarcely implies alternatives. It's the genre of, say, American Notes by Dickens, or Lettre de Siberie by Marker. Non-narrative development is implicit however - from 'hope' (Lowen) to 'shortfall' (Tuli), with Buckley/Godfrey as the 'moment of defeat'. It's a 'story' in the newspaper sense, of a sequence of reports, adding up to a sort of 'general picture' of a broad canvas, though without continuous characters, connected events, or consequentiality of any kind. Other differences appear. The Milena narrative is personal, structured in scenes; it's performed, not narrated. The Reich story is synoptic (heavily dependent on summaries and evocations of scenes and actions). Its voice-over, binding the 'fragments' together, is more narration than performance, and even inserts 'third person' presences. And more than one. For as well as the female voice, Makavejev's question to Eva Reich, from behind the camera, brings the narrator into his own narration. Reich's life and ideas are recalled by several interviewees, whence a multi-perspective effect, as in Citizen Kane. Chronology, too, is pixilated, in deference to other considerations. Reich's death is known from the opening title, but 'lyricised' by the prison-zither 'dance' (Scene 5); this precedes his defying the mob (Scene 7), which is described again in Scene 10. The descriptions don't conflict, but, the descriptions in themselves change everything. The son's description is quiet, and scrupulously hesitant, introducing the filial dimension. The second description comes from Reich's recorded voice, which is quite harsh and rough, over shots of the bust on his tomb - a quite different 'dimension'. A sense of 'the past' there is, but none of 'violating chronology', largely because we expect exposition to be nonchronological, but also because we're thinking two tenses at once (the

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narration and what it narrates). Later, Lowen describes his ideas, but they 'attach to' Reich, so we 'think two men at once'. Though Milena's and Reich's stories are quite separate, their protagonists 'meet', since Milena, though fictional, is the Voice of God' narrating Reichian fact. His picture turns up in her room, a nice 'crossecho', andfinallyher talking head cross-fades into a monochrome still of his, as if they did meet, after all, in Heaven, or perhaps she was his female reincarnation. Milena and America also intersect, in the opening 'Egg Game'. A third 'structure' is more 'intermittent' and purely formal. Makavejev said he followed a sort of Reich 'trail' or 'pilgrimage', and the camera sometimes hints at such a thing. It speeds along Rangeley Main Street, it plunges into the forest, it lunges at prison watch-towers, it nudges into a ghost-haunted room, until off-screen breathing lures it around a corner. Such movements enliven otherwise static scenes, and smooth some, potentially awkward transitions. The interviews are filmed in a variety of styles: Sharaf's garage is a 'recession of wooden boxes', Eva Reich prowls restlessly in the open air, the Oakes Brothers and the sheriff are framed against flat-on fagades, but at different distances, as befits their body-stances, Lowen 'acts people out', and so on. The variety of spatial relations, their textures, rhythms, and so on, make WR a constant pleasure for connoisseurs of style and sense. Classical Structure as High Efficiency Form. Though the Milena story rather dominates the film, it developed after the other two themes. None the less, the 'classical structure' which Makavejev describes corresponds to the 'Three Act' strategy so common in traditional narrative, and for sound functional reasons. The life of Reich, which opens thefilm,constitutes a sort of Act I. It's the 'first version' of the basic conflict, which is 'Sexual Liberation' versus a wide range of governments. Reich dies, but his ideas are resurrected by Lowen, so that Act I ends, as so often, with the 'crystallisation' of the subsequent main conflict, Reich's ideas in the present. Act II starts hopefully, with Lowen and Jackie on one side of the Atlantic, and Milena on the other. But on both sides, complications

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develop. The American Revolution dwindles into sexual Objects (Jackie's icon, Godfrey's wax prick, Tuli's gun). Stalin rules OK. Act III - on the American side, there isn't one. Milena is made of sterner stuff, and in Yugoslavia, things turn serious. She attacks VI. Crisis. Catastrophe. Triumph (dead, she speaks). Apotheosis: Milena and VI. are One. Closure it's not; as Makavejev says, the end is Open (for debate). Milena lives, therefore Reich lives. It's Game and Set to Stalinism, but not Match. The 'sectional' structure interweaves with others. The four stories are Variations on a theme', but each has its own internal conflicts, which are full of twists and surprises. The character-psychology, though 'typological', is rich in contradictions. Milena the rabble-rouser almost yearns for Hitler's charisma and is spooked by Czarist ice-ballet. A Lowen patient is pretty scary In the US, rebel radicals stalemate themselves. The Reich story roughly parallels Citizen Kane: successive interviews with a great man's friends recount his rise and fall. Kane lost his rosebud, Reich's insights became a rose-garden. The interweaving of three (or with Stalin four) 'stories' evokes 'polyphonic' form, as the stories bounce echoes into and off from one another. This 'polyphony' depends on: Montage. Eisenstein thought montage was the royal road to 'Intellectual Cinema'. But as Karel Reisz noted, in The Technique of Film Editing, Intellectual Montage alone seemed more tour de force than general method. And Intellectual Cinema uses all forms of exposition, many quite straightforward, for the same reason that books combine idioms, genres and media as required (words, photos, diagrams, cartoons, typography, etc.). Makavejev's 1965 essays show a profound grasp of Eisenstein's montage theory, which forty years of confused film theory had restricted to (a) film editing and (b) the juxtaposition of shots. Eisenstein meant much more than this, as when he spoke of 'montage within the shot', and Makavejev's remarks about relations between non-adjacent shots develop montage theory towards a general semantics of sign/context relations, whereby signs modify one another in infinitely variable, off-

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text, ways. As it is, Makavejev calls WR a 'collage', a term so close to 'montage' they're sometimes synonymous (as in 'photomontage'). Eisenstein began his montage theory from the contrasts between the music-hall 'turns', and structurally the US vignettes in WR are 'separate turns' juxtaposed. As Eisenstein's analyses of his own work show, montage semantics entail long, delicate, intricate analysis, and montage in WR merits a book of its own. Lowen, discussing character and posture, comments on how 'a person ... stands on the ground'; cut, to VI. ice-skating. The richness of which lies, not so much in the new meaning, as in the mental process, of two scenes colliding, like two worlds, to emit a strange semantic Sequence 61, M. Chaiureli, 7/7eVbw(1946).

Sequence 62, On All Fours.

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'construction'. Later, Stalin speaks of 'an arrow sped by the sure hand of Comrade Lenin toward the camp of the enemy!'; cut, to a miserable madman on all fours, crawling downstairs, towards the camera. The 'link' is surprisingly 'abstruse'; it's movement towards - and conveyed in different media (verbally vs. visually), yet the 'colliding' ideas are richly heterogeneous. 55. Godfrey opens the cast to extract Buckley's dick in red plastic; 56. Stalin, in red-tinted footage, announces the completion of the first stage of Communism; 57. An old peasant-type man pinned in a straitjacket bangs his head against a doorjamb, while a Communist Party anthem overlaid celebrates 'happiness in every home'; 58. Tuli en Mad Marine, face like a malignant skull, accentuates the rhythm, as he strokes his erect carbine, his hands, face, hips, helmet, 'choreographed' like a sort of hand-jive, into an Expressionistic 'dance'; 59. At the Reich Museum a cloudbuster points upwards to the sky, to the sound of old machinery clanking and squeaking; but the earlier rhythm resumes, with Jagoda's and Ljuba's bonking music. Highly 'disparate' images integrate the poetic, the moral, the political, the historical and, not logic, but sense, through several types of montage (sound-image montage [57], an edit on in-shot rhythms [57/58], 'overtone' meanings like 'grandiose achievement' [55, 56]). The text itself, tel quel, seems mere pre-text, a bare foundation for a quite complex integration by the spectator's mind. The Mysteries of Scene 59. Its Cloudbuster looks like a gunbattery on a mobile mounting. I assumed this association was 'merely subjective', but turning to the script, I read: 'Like anti-aircraft guns, cloudbusters point their barrels at the sky'. My second association was 'skeletal rigidity'. Both ideas, I think, were 'montaged in' from the preceding shot - Tuli's vertical gun and skull-face, plus his vigorous movement, which these thin stiff tubes had 'lost'. The script remarks: 'Mystery. Strange sounds .... An inexplicable insert'. Does 59 hint, tactfully, that Reich had a streak, or a phase, of

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aggressive megalomania (like many a tragic hero: Lear, Hamlet, Oedipus). I'd parse that meaning like this: the larger context has established pathetic madness (57), megalomania (56), and, from Act I, Reich's fate. So, these rusty 'guns', trained on Heaven, rigid, skeletal, imply, 'I will destroy bad weather, shoot at the Gods.' But then again, did Makavejev mean: 'Forlorn defiance, to the last'? Either way, such 'enigmatic suggestion' anticipates much in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986). Only this is 'Blue Orgones'. Ambiguity versus Complexity. Makavejev's 'shifting gestalt', as he called it, pursues 'debate but not ambiguity', meaning, I think, debate within a politically unambiguous position. But he prizes ambiguity in another sense: (a) allowing different meanings for different spectators, and (b) encouraging different meanings, at successive viewings, for the same spectator. (Two types of 'ambiguity'.) This ambiguity (or diversity, for more than two alternatives exist) makes up the Socialist position, which is not, after all, any one man's vision, but a range of positions, and not a single statement, 'once and for all', but a progression of reflections, a network of changing ideas. Many of which non-Socialists can share. Patterns of Power. Just as shot-juxtapositions can generate associations, so, conversely, associations can generate mental juxtapositions. An idea in Shot p can remind us of an idea in Shot c, which is now in a different context, or a different form. And so on, Sequence 51. Still life with cast (Jim Buckley, Nancy Godfrey).

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* •

I •*•

Sequence 56, A Significant Statement, Tinted Red.

Sequence 58, The Joy of Soldiering.

Sequence 59, WR's Cloudbusters.

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gradually weaving patterns, which are not 'repetitions of a theme', but Variations on a theme' - with differences, dissonances, surprises. Of the ideas in WR one could say, as Hitchcock said of Strangers on a Train: Tsn't it a beautiful pattern? Yo\x could analyse it forever.' 1. The four 'stories (Milena, Reich, Stalin, Radical USA) are Variations on the theme'. 2. Good (and Bad) Vibrations. Rippling bodies in the Sexpol film; the bioenergetic strainings; electro-shock tremors; Little Red Books fluttering. 3. Peasant (and Unpeasant) Dances. The snake-dance catches up Milena; VI.'s ice-ballet, Jagoda's and Ljuba's pushmipullyu bonking, Tuli's Mad Marine hand-jig, the madman on all fours, bioenergetic patients being sat, stood, and trodden on, Radmilovic drunkenly moving dustbins to make a barricade, the zither-and-zoom-lens dance around Reich's prison, LiHi Marlene on a zither for electro-shock (but the shaking continues over silence). 4. Songs. Sexpol days make a Communist Party anthem poignant; Stalin-and-victim make a similar one seem Big Brotherish. Radmilovic mocks a Tito's Shockworkers' song. We bridle at 'Y^u own the Sun' and 'It's the Real Thing'. Tuli's 'Guardians' doggerel verse is a political 'message' of the film. VI.'s song of repentance, being diegetic, gives WR its musical number. 5. Fine Feathers Make Fine Radicals. Milena's rabble-rousing outfit, with military jacket, long legs and boots, echoes Swinging London's soldier-guerrilla chic. Jackie Curtis has Tinsel Queen drag, VI. femme eyelashes and furs. Milena isn't daunted by the Folies-Bergere look, VI. gets an orgone buzz from Milena's closet. (Milena and VI. 'exchange sex', without losing their predominant sexuality.) 6. 'We Are All Animals, Tamed By The System': leashed dogs outside a restaurant, a cat on a dustbin, Sharaf's garage kennel with cartoon animal, VI. repentant passes a white horse, Lowen's lecturette, 'YDU Are ^four Body', makes us physical animals, Pinocchio is a 'wooden animal', Jagoda and Ljuba make a quadruped.

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7. Wooden Boxes. Sharaf and Milena emerge from orgone boxes. A madman is placed in a high-sided wooden crib, another slams his head against a wooden door-frame. Sharaf's garage with kennel. 8. Electricity. Sharaf explains Orgone Box theory, whereby layers of wood (organic) and metal (inorganic) generate static electricity, which Reich insists is orgone energy (organic). 9. Inorganic Materials. Reich's prison. Stalin's Palace. Its crystal chandelier is 'colorised'. 10. Looks into Camera, by: the hungry cat, a brain-zonked mental patient, Jackie giving us the wink, Milena's talking head, various interviewees (though they usually talk to Makavejev, not his camera). 11. Colour Coding. Milena stands 'In front of black-and-red-striped wall, in green underwear, with blue [picture] frame in the left hand'. Black for anarchism, red for Socialism, green for ecology, and blue-(wood) for orgone energy? Makavejev wanted two scenes (56, 57) tinted violet, but the laboratory could only do red. The face of a raging patient of Lowen goes purple in Scene 17, eventually omitted as too frightening. 12. Posturings. Holding an empty picture-frame in her left hand, Milena gives the clenched fist salute with her head and right hand poked through it. Jackie and friend lie back in a pick-up truck, legs pointing skywards, implying laid-back happiness (and interesting following drivers?). Jagoda, flat on her back, spreads and closes her vertically pointed legs. VI. and Milena kiss and quarrel near a tree whose forked trunk VI., grieving later, will caress. (Aren't the last two female-crutch symbols?) 13. 'Give It To Me1/ The script explains it's a line from Mayakovski. Radmilovic, frustrated, says it to Milena. A female patient of Lowen's keeps screaming it. Her cry follows a quick flash of sturdy cock in Betty Dodson's life-size painting of a nude male. 14. Pricking Against the Kicks. The black man's organ in Dodson's painting, Buckley's replica in red wax. Stalin's chandelier (not, for once, nuclear-tipped rocket missiles parading in Red Square), Tuli's gun, Reich's Cloudbuster, Pinocchio's nose (which by the way is a

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quite Lacanian phallus - it erects whenever he speaks untruths, thus metaphoring his lack of reality-anatomy. Also, it's sited where all can see it, like the Purloined Letter which Lacanians think so significant). 15. Phallic Symbols. The Freudian interest in 'Phallic Symbolism' easily becomes delirious, while Lacanian-era revisionisms repress female sexual symbols altogether, by supposing that only the phallus can 'speak' desire, or that all sexual desire, including female, is essentially phallic. But in Reich and WR, 'stiffness' and 'erectness' often stand, not just for 'desire/power', but for blockage, repression, and therefore for sexual lack (as in VI). And Milena's vigorous postures may express 'blockage', or social militancy, or moral energy, or, indeed, a clitoral tumescence - (most of the clitoris is hidden within the body). If Stalin's glowing chandelier is 'phallic', then so are those erected arms waggling Little Red Books. Normally, however, vertical salutes symbolise just what they show: muscles, energy, effort, enthusiasm, readiness. As for Tuli's gun, and Milena's call for scalpels, sabres and razors, even if they're 'phallic' symbols, they're a strange and particular aspect of that organ's meaning, suggesting, not erection, sex, love, desire, fertility, or even pleasure, but mainly wounds and death, especially to other men.28 16. heft-wing Fascism. Milena, dead, calls VI. a 'Red Fascist'. He and Hitler have strong erotic charisma (but little sex?). Milena, a feminist Superwoman, and Radmilovic, a jovial gorilla, have little Hitler gestures, during bursts of enthusiasm, whereas Stalin's Fascism is sexuality, blocked, turned to steel. 17. Interzone People. VI.'s repentance is a musical number, sung in a sort of 'recapitulatory landscape'. Here is the tree in whose forked trunk Milena sat; a white horse (Eastern European emblem of energy and hope), steel pipes slanting diagonally upwards (like Cloudbuster tubes? and/or a 'Stalin organ' (Second World War rocket batteries, lorry-mounted)?); a campfire with outcasts (like Radmilovic, Jackie, and others?), a steel-webbed bridge (evoking Rangeley's?), and a rusting ship's hulk (contrasting with theflying-boat?).VI.'s God evokes, not Stalin the Terrible, but a God who, though he punishes,

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like Reality, may also, like Conscience, forgive. His judgment (and the film's) is uttered by Milena. This 'desolation row' contrasts with 18. 'The Egg People'. Milena and 'Commune' play Passing the Egg. Milena alone breaks eggs briskly. 19. Sex as Reproduction. See 8. One of Tuli's girls looks pregnant. Reich, Father and Son. Semen in Milena's corpse. 20. Heads You Lose. Milena's Talking Head. Trotsky's ice-picked head. 'Blind Faith' is losing your head. Heads electro-shocked. Shockworkers' plastic helmets (no-brain insensitivity?). 21. A Time-Mosaic. The Reichian story runs past and present simultaneously. The voice-overs, and the interviews to camera, correspond to a present tense. The oldfilms,because they move, bring the past alive again. The still photos, because they 'freeze' the movie for a moment, are more elegiac. In Yugoslavia, Stalin is alive and well. Chronology is pixilated ad lib. Reich's death in prison precedes the lynch-mob story, which is told twice, in 7 by Reich's son, in 10 by his dead father's voice, heard over a shot of his stone bust, a 'from the grave' effect. The museum ends with a plastic 'shroud' and 'ghostly' breathing: the resurrection, not of a man, but of his cause. Milena too, is, not just dead, but dissected, and still she won't lie down (which is pretty well the 'John Barleycorn' motif - fertility folklore from way back). Compilations - The Vow, Sexpol films, these old newspapers and snapshots - are doubly 'time-stamped': by (a) what the documents depict, and (b) the 'period quality' of the documents themselves. The film's now is '1971', conspicuously, geared as it is to politics and culture. But I'm writing this in 1998, when TO's 'present tense' is twenty-seven years past. Adding another time-stratum. 22. ad inf. Over to you, Dear Reader. Towards a Postmodernist Humanism? Though very well-constructed, WR is thoroughly 'postmodernist', in the sense of heteroclitic, multiidiomatic, and anarchically 'equalising' documentation and fantastication.

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Insofar as 'postmodernist' implies playfulness, the idea of a text as a 'zone of liberation', as an adventure playground, became conspicuous in the 60s, whose avant-garde stressed participation, free play, and the 'noninterpretative' response and use of texts. But if 'postmodernist' implies a radical relativism about reality and values, WR opposes its invitations to nihilism, and sustains the 'fully human' - body + emotion + intellect (poetry) + socio-moral commitment. It's an optimistic tragedy, a Rabelaisian sermon, in tune with the Twentieth Century, with its abstract, book-learnt, approach to real radical drives (sex, violence, self, power). 'Men live their beautiful, wild lives quite close to magnificent ideas and progressive truths. Myfilmis dedicated to those interesting, vague, in-between spaces.'

9 Citizen Reich WR, a 'satiric paraphrase', celebrates Reich, not for his 'correct views about everything', but for his spirit, and as a lone pioneer of the synthesis of Freud and Marx resurgent since the 60s. Most admirers of Reich consider his ideas as, in Sharaf's phrase, 'a complex mixture of creativity and major errors', and it's hardly necessary to 'question' orgone theory. Reich's life and ideas span several cultural 'epochs', and though WR is reliable, a few further points may be useful.29 Reich (1897-1957) grew up on a family estate, managed by his father and briefly by Reich himself, in Northern Bukovina, a northeastern extremity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After army service 1915-18 he studied first law, then medicine, in Vienna. The capital was deep in multiple culture-shock: the Empire's dismemberment, an upsurge of Social Democracy and Communism, and shifts from semibourgeois, semi-feudal, ideologies to modern, and modernist, ideas. Discovering psychoanalysis as a student, he promptly introduced himself to Freud, whose lieutenants then were Stekel and Adler. Freudian ideas were still fluid, adventurous, 'pre-classical'. For example, Adler's 'inferiority complex' theory, which might have redirected psychoanalysis from Sex to Power, thus anticipating Existential

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Psychoanalysis and Foucault, was still respected. Within a year Reich, aged twenty-three, was a practising analyst, almost, some thought, Freud's favourite, and while still in his twenties, led the circle's training seminars. Whereas Freud focused on childhood causes of neurosis, within the family, Reich focused on adult pressures, which led him to social factors. Already left-inclined, he was radicalised by seeing the Vienna riots of 25 July 1927 (eighty-nine workers killed). His forte was not theory, but speculation and action. (Significantly perhaps, his first book described The Impulsive Character', while his major work, on 'character-armour', involves checks on impulsiveness.) As with many thinkers (e.g. Bertrand Russell), his ideas went to extremes (e.g. that children shouldn't be raised by their parents), which were suddenly asserted, suddenly dropped. At the same time, he set up several 'sex-hygiene' clinics in working-class districts, a 'vulgarisation' ahead of its time, and at odds with Vienna Circle elitism. His emphasis on the social repression of benign sexuality increasingly gibed with Freudian pessimism whereby sexual drives were irreducibly subversive, in whatever society. While his radical activism menaced bourgeois acceptance of Freudian ideas, most Viennese Marxists detested his sexual ideas (often as 'bourgeois decadence'). So in 1930 he moved to Berlin, whose Communist Party briefly adopted his ideas, even distributing his sex-educational book for eight- to twelveyear-olds. By 1932, however, German Communists were very concerned not to scandalise the Social Democrats (hitherto classed as 'Social Fascists'); and, the Fascist threat apart, Moscow was in full U-turn from sexual permissiveness to neo-conservatism. In 1934 Reich approached Trotsky's Fourth International, which saw no way of using him. A militant anti-Stalinist by 1935, he abandoned Marxism by 1940. From 1938 he began to drop the term 'dialectical materialism', eventually substituting 'energetic functionalism'. The shift from 'matter' to 'energy' echoes Einstein (and scientific realism); the shift from 'dialectics' to 'functionalism' moves from an abstract form to an operational materialism.

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WR outlines his travels and troubles in Scandinavia in 1933-9, his shift to the USA, and his new concentration on 'orgone energy', linking matter, body and mind. Orgone energy, beneficial when flowing, becomes maleficent (stagnant, decayed) when blocked. Sexual repression can generate various diseases - depressions, psychosomatic disorders, allergies, ulcers, cancers - or various mental attitudes, of which more anon. Orgone boxes gather orgones flowing in from the atmosphere, and are therapeutic, while cloudbusters (from 1952) break up orgone accumulations in the skies. At first, 'orgone therapy' flourished, alongside 'talking' sessions, involving quite active, even critical, behaviour by analysts. Probably orgonomics appealed to 'transcendentalist' streaks in US thinking (e.g. Christian Science, Scientology, various 'hippie' cults (macrobiotics), 'New Age' cures). The film links Reich's prosecutions (by the Food and Drugs Administration, from 1947), with the McCarthyite witch-hunts, a reasonable surmise which may well have much truth. But also, the first attacks on Reich appeared in the New Republic, then very left-wing. One came from a journalist widely accused, on the left, of parroting Stalinism, and from then on Reich attributed the campaign against him to 'Red Fascists' (while refusing to name anyone at all as Communist to FBI enquirers). Another attack came from Frederic Wertham (whose campaign against violence in comic-books had deeply affected that industry). Sharaf discusses the charges against Reich, and the progress of the case, in fine detail. The FDA may have suspected large-scale medical fraud, and an unsavoury sexual cult. Wrongly no doubt, but not necessarily unreasonably: in medical matters, distinctions between unorthodoxy, dottiness and fraud, are necessary though difficult. The writings were destroyed as being effectively promotional material for treatments deemed fraudulent. However, the highly respectable New York publishers, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, began to reissue them from the 60s. Charles Rycroft's little book on Reich gives a plausibly severe judgment, to balance against the film.

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Eva Reich-Moise (b. Austria 1924), is his daughter by his first wife, Annie (b. 1903), seen in the 20s home movie; she later became a psychoanalyst and theorist. Peter (b. USA 1944) is Reich's son by his second wife, Use Ollendorff. The 'snapshot' of baby Peter dates from 1944, but the film context 'shifts' it to the Weimar era. Only Mad North-North-West? The question of Reich's sanity or madness is extremely difficult. Around 1932 many Freudian colleagues thought him 'brilliant but erratic, a child/peasant type, with fine emotional antennae', while his Freudian adversaries detected 'an insidious psychosis' (a diagnosis as impossible to refute as to prove). By normal definitions, Reich was entirely sane, being a very efficient survivor, organiser and persuader. Even if orgone theory, in its entirety, was, not just mistaken, but delusional, so, after all, are many, if not all, religious and political ideasystems. Freudians can reasonably deconstruct Marxism as a personal psychodrama projected on to a world-historical screen, while Freudian theory, in turn, is highly vulnerable to scientific criticism. As far as one can tell from published accounts, Reich throughout his life was assertive-persuasive with men, seductive with women. Like many anti-authoritarians, and intellectual pioneers, he was often overbearing. An assertive style was a norm among Germans and Austrians of his generation. His polemical writings abound in truly scary extremisms, and wildly sloppy overstatements. But they're often temporary positions, or typical of 'modernisms', which, half-unhinged by helter-skelter progress, were all extremism-prone. To some extent, they were rhetorical strategies appropriate to cultural conditions in the humanities. Reich as Avant-gardist. His theories overall shared the avantgarde's narrow enthusiasms, their hasty rationalisations, and their preoccupation with energies - sometimes primitive, savage or barbaric, sometimes idealised, sometimes mechanised (as with Cubo-Futurists, Constructivists, Vertov, etc.) and sometimes 'biologically mechanical' (as with Pavlov and Eisenstein's mentor Meyerhold). He began the 'synthesis' of Marx and Freud, and some eventual 'revisionisms' of each. With Malinowski, the British-based anthropologist,

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he challenged Freud's assertion of the universality of the Oedipus complex. Noting the repeated failures of Freud's 'talking cure', he (re)introduced into psychoanalysis the less impersonal techniques of its beginnings, while his combinations of talk and bodywork sought to outflank the enormous distances between the verbal and the psychosomatic. He diagnosed 'patriarchal authoritarianism' ten years before Fromm, twenty before Adorno, and forty before the feminist resurgence. His ideas directly inspired Lowen's Bio-Energetics, Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy, and Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy (thus facilitating the current shift to 'multi-method', eclectic therapies). His socially critical psychotherapy influenced Paul Goodman, R.D. Laing, Rudy Dutschke in Germany, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre. Writers whom he influenced include Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer - and William Burroughs (if that's a recommendation).30 In 1934, Eisenstein asked Reich for his Orgasm book, and whether or not one links Eisenstein's interest in 'ecstasy' with Milena's just before she dies, Eisenstein's 'biomechanics', his sensitivity to the physical body, and his theories of 'non-indifferent nature' parallel Reich's brave, if premature, stab at some 'unified field' of physical, physiological and psychic matter-cum-energy. This biological unity of body/mind, with its complex responses to environment and experience, contrasts sharply with the traditional Marxist option, for 'mechanistic' Behaviourisms (Pavlov, Watson), which compare the mind to a simple machine, run on very simple reflexes and associations. His view of the mind is less complex than Freud's, of course, but Freudian theory often reduces the body to abstract symbols, not a source of psychic structures. Where Freudian analysis centres on the patient's Unconscious past, often underestimating the autonomy of 'conscious' (adaptive) thinking, Reich's alertness to present situations looked forward to gestalt and cognitive therapies (which arguably qualify as 'postmodern'). Character and Character-Structures. Lowen, starting from Reich's ideas of character-armour, lists six basic character-types: schizoid, oral, psychopathic (controlling, like Citizen Kane), masochistic (complaining but submissive - like Jimmy Porter?), rigid, and mature, i.e.

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fully genital. Most people mix elements from several types. In WR, VI. shows schizoid traits (extensive dissociation of thoughts and feelings, autism of emotional learning, avoidance of intimacy, a numbing of desire, with potential violence when it breaks through). His Dostoevskian repentance may qualify as masochistic - though he's not spiteful, not complaining, but repentant, which in a way is generous. Milena has certain 'rigid' traits (aggression but not dissociation, relish oisturm und drang, resilience, guardedness; if male, successfully phallic; if female, equivalently passionate, but not always fully orgasmic). Jagoda, Ljuba and Radmilovic are orgasmic, in diverse ways. Insofar as they're easygoing, and Radmilovic more chivalrous than malicious, they fit the Reichian opposition of sexual satisfaction and viciousness; is their irresponsibility, or cynicism, or violence, the result of social injustice under Socialism? Given to panacea solutions though he was, Reich, like Freud, didn't think sexual satisfaction bred model citizens, such as VI. impersonates. He thought the 'fully orgasmic' character well capable of rage and violence, especially compared to those brainwashed by authority. Milena's attack on VI. can exemplify an adult, 'fully genital' rage - at once emotional, rational, determined and measured. VI.'s, arising from dissociation, is tragically indiscriminate. In Reichian theory, the major problem is not 'male violence' driven by 'the phallus', but the authoritarian inculcation of submissiveness, in both sexes, so that aggression is either inhibited or misdirected (or both). VI.'s energies are very controlled, very balanced, his manner careful, even feminine; his energy is 'held in'. The script calls him 'babyish' Patriarchy's obedient son? Or is he in love, in some sense sexually, with Stalin, i.e. C.E as God? Stalin's body-language is psychopathic. He's statuesque, totemic and replete with power so calm he seems reassuring. Body-language is sometimes supposed to be 'revelatory', but it lies as easily and consistently as words. If his sturdy body is phallic, it's a phallus whose sexual dynamic has become pure, almost disembodied, power. Stalin, Hitler and VI. are strong, socially powerful characters, with sexual charisma: here WR challenges another modern, permissive, idea,

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that sexual liberation is necessary for mental efficiency, and that sexual repression disables effective real-world functioning. More often it's lowprofile, harmless, well-adjusted, too protean to diagnose. Reich and Marcuse. From 1900 or so, most of the new psychologies envisaged a certain degree of sexual liberation. Reich went much further than Freudian orthodoxy until the 50s, when neoFreudians like Erich Fromm treated sexuality as relatively 'good' and 'harmless', in line with post-war moral optimisms. Marcuse's scholarly synthesis of Freud and Marx, in Eros and Revolution (1955) and OneDimensional Man (1964), appealed to academics as Reich (not literaryphilosophical) and Fromm (more liberal than militant) did not. Many admirers of WR would see it with Marcusian ideas in mind. Marcuse, like Reich, Kracauer and Adorno, whose Germanic Marxisms he shared, linked traditional repression to bourgeois family authoritarianism. But, modern capitalism had all but exchanged 'the heavy family' for new, subtler kinds of alienation - consumerism, 'fun morality',31 trivial pleasures - inducing a 'culture of narcissism' (as Christopher Lasch would call it) and a 'Me generation'. The new ideology was 'repressive tolerance', including a sort of repressive derepression, which encouraged sexual gratifications, of superficial kinds, so long as they were split from 'deep' emotions, which might have 'system-busting' claims and energies. Freud, Reich and Marcuse had very different ideas of what these deep, quasi-instinctive drives might be; the point is often made that Freud sees 'family' as central, Reich subordinates it to the flow of sexual desires, and Marcuse shows the least interest in interpersonal relations. Reich retains the Freudian scheme whereby emotional maturation shifts pleasure from 'infantile' pleasures (orality, anality, incest, onanism, etc.), to 'adult' satisfactions (genitality, heterosexuality and parenthood). The continued dominance of infantile interests constitute 'sexual perversity', including 'polymorphous perversity', i.e. sexual excitability by a wide range of 'infantile', superficial, attitudes. Homosexuality arises from unsolved problems at the Oedipal stage. Thus Reich, like Freud, and the Surrealists, refused homosexuality the 'parity of esteem' since demanded

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by Gay Lib, though relegation to 'second best', or 'handicap', or even disapproval, is hardly 'persecution' or 'homophobia'. (In this view, Jackie and VI. both relate to father-symbols - VI. to Stalin, who has neutered him, Jackie to his best, lost, lover, 'neutered' by Jackie as TV) Freudian orthodoxy can easily confuse same-sex friendships with Unconscious homosexuality; Reich more often 'exonerates' them, as consequent on the surmounting of Oedipal fixations. Freudian orthodoxy sharply 'sectionalise' the body, into zones, phases andfixations;Reich, like Lowen in WR, supposes a more 'holistic' energy, broadly flowing towards a 'fully genital' orgasm, which relaxes the entire body-mind system. Freud thought a child's glimpse of parental sexual intercourse psychically very dangerous; Reich was more nonchalant about infant precocity (as was the Kinsey Report of 1948, with its statistical tables of under-age orgasms). Freud was the more 'Victorian' in his concept of 'adult maturity' linking sexuality, family, society and, via 'parentality', concern for future generations. In many ways, Freud is less 'patriarchal' than 'parental', about sexuality (whence 'English School' emphasis on child/mother relations; and theorisations of the breast as 'first phallus' in the fantasies oiboth sexes), whereas Reich is pretty cavalier about sexuality, family and responsibility. Marcuse argued that bourgeois society harnesses 'adult' sexuality to socio-economic performance, whereas the free play of sexuality requires adult variants of infantile pleasures, without 'genital imperialism'. In a sense, he associates derepression with regression, but by 'infantile pleasures' he means the adult versions thereof, not the tabubusting perversities practised at, for instance, the Otto Muehl Commune (featured, revoltingly, in Sweet Movie). Walker Pearce, a mutual colleague, tells me that Marcuse was quite aghast at some versions of his ideas. WR suggests how 'self-pleasuring' (Dodson, Buckley), and cockand-cunt-collecting (Goldstein, Godfrey), can substitute part-objects for human subjects, conveniently for capitalist individualism. Jackie's transsexuality incurs complications additional to those of straight sex, whence her ironic bad luck, and relation to religious emblems, in a halfwistful, half-camp, spirit.

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Reich's 'equalising' of male and female orgasms, as psychic energyflows, though rough and vague, is highly amenable to feminism, though the problematics of Freudian theory about a phallus-which-isn't-thebodily-phallus is well beyond our scope here. 32 Sexual Perversity in Bohemia. Several critics assumed that Makavejev must be wildly enthusiastic about the Underground Sex shown in WR. No doubt he admires the bravery, the enthusiasm, even, the integrity, of his 'beautiful losers'. But, sexually as well as politically, their revolution goes off at half-cock.33 Tuli's gun-stroking protest remains a performance, which, brave though it is, fits Lowen's definition of the masochistic character (like so much satire). Would red revolution mean using that gun in some real action? As Reich used his .45? Which need not entail what Tuli parodies, a joy in sexual-berserk slaughter, conspicuous in Hollywood movies, and in many theories of war. From Orgasm to Orgone - and Beyond ... A final cross-fade 'melts' Milena 'into' Reich ... Reincarnation? ... Transubstantiation? ... Father and Mother of all the Orgasms? ... WR makes a quartet with three other 70s films about sexuality and deathwish, The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1973), The Empire of the Senses (Oshima, 1976) and Makavejev's Sweet Movie?*1 But it also belongs with a Soviet film which meant as much to Makavejev as to Chris Marker: Medvedkin's Happiness (1935).

10 Understanding Undergrounds Play Power or Apocalypse Now? In the USA, the 60s counter-culture was a loose, shambolic coalition, whose diversity, and volatility, reveals not one social trend, or one 'youth class', but a brief convergence by many, all going in different directions. 'Play Power' preoccupied some, Revolution others. The counter-cultures involved, sometimes together, but more often separately, Vietnam War protesters, Civil Rights campaigners, the rediscovered poor, humanitarians concerned for the Third World, various New Lefts who thought Socialism was the answer, not another part of

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the problem, and 'free radicals', like beatniks, hippies, and not a few students, expressing a new, often middle-class indifference to traditional expectations of property, propriety, careerism and working for money Many radicals, even Marcuse, supposed that 'free radical' lifestyles, however concerned with sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll, or naively optimistic about their commune and crashpad life-styles, expressed a 'proto-revolutionary' discontent, and idealism, which global and class conflicts would only escalate. Capitalism so dissatisfied its own young, that Its End was Nigh. Coppola was more sceptical, but intimations of an enormous smash-up inspired his new, grander, title for Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). For Coppola and Milius, youthful hedonism - surf, dope, a sexshow, shooting tigers - are ambiguously anarcho-energy, and pleasuredecadence. The criss-cross of Third World war, politics and internal instability, help explain Coppola's attempts to enlist, for Apocalypse Now, first Makavejev, then Godard's political mentor, J.-P Gorin. WR approaches the nexus of revolution/pleasure from another angle. All its protagonists are artists, of one kind or another (Milena's concern, as a beautician, is Tower Through Beauty'), militants for some 'politics of the personal', and divers sexual liberationists. The film doesn't purport to describe US counter-cultures generally, omitting psychedelia, Zennery, beachboy life, ostentatious love-ins, ruralist nostalgias, ecologyconsciousness, New Ageism, UFOism, the Jesus Christ Superstar syndrome, etc., while deftly reminding us of others: rock, demos, distrust of authority (Tuli), the hippie flair for festive parades and love-ins (Jackie and friend unabashedly sashaying down the street), and new mixtures of irresponsibility and unpretentiousness (Jackie's rueful frankness), Civil Rights, urban poverty (a Black Power bookshop is seen), and social apathy among urban whites. The very beautiful 'egg-game' at the start is a keynote image, about hippies as commune-ists and 'gentle people', and links with Hair (a Broadway hit of 1968) as distinct from popular confusions of hippies with Hell's Angels, communes with sick cults, and of gently psychedelic musings with the mind-boggling extremities of Performance. {Yellow Submarine (1968) is more like much 'Underground' feeling.)

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Deconstructing Revolution. The 'cultural revolution' of western youth responded to the 'end of scarcity', with mass affluence, mass leisure, teen-age spending-power, and therefore independence, the education explosion (spreading new ideas, and problems of their relativity), and 'baby boomer' confidence (50 per cent of Americans were under twenty-five). It was even easier than usual for a new class to mistake its hedonism for idealism. As large as political protest, and the surge of New (and Old) Left ideas, were, the socio-political struggles, however interinfluential, were essentially separate, and were indeed resolved piecemeal, largely by America's withdrawal from Vietman, to which protestors like Tuli did indeed contribute. Moreover, OPEC's 1973 oil-price hike stemmed economic optimism. In any case, much 'counter-cultural' thought was essentially spare-time reflection, pursued in the margins of entirely conventional activity Where Playboy developed 'fun morality' for 'educated business people', Screw was reading matter for a new sort of youthful lumpenbourgeoisie (students, rock artists, etc.), with its Bohemian-beatnik-'white negro'-hippie-Warhol-punk counter-intelligensia culture.35 Much of all this was less leftist than anarchist, and less anarcholeftist than anarcho-rightist (as per Goldstein's ultra-conservatism, or 'doing your own thing'). Outside academia, it was much less Marxist than a rebellion of rising expectations - a mutation within capitalism, a new capitalist ideology, developed by many serious thinkers. Student protest against Vietnam was fuelled not only by enlightened idealism, but also by fear of personal involvement, in fact, an individualism, an alienation from the body politic. From this angle, the counter-cultures, however disconcerting, combined internal mutations of 'capitalism' with some reforms, some innovations, and much rhetoric. Film studies, when influenced by 'cultural struggle' and 'political correctness', often underestimate the hedonistic counter-cultures, emphasising Althusser-style syntheses of structuralism, Leninism, Lacanian Freudianism, even Maoism a la mode (Godard, Lacan, Tel Quel), plus 'Paris May '68', academia, and 'political correctness', a legalist-bureaucratic trend, emblem of a would-be ruling subclass.

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Meanwhile, the counter-culture's 'thousand flowers', few of which were red, profoundly influenced the general culture, of which they were very much an outcrop anyway. Sexual permissiveness was well under way by the mid-50s, and then accelerated by 'the pill', i.e. market-driven bourgeois technology. Similarly with dope (in moderation), Zen and 'hippie-type' rock. The counter-culture's compatibility with capitalism is illustrated by its swift osmoses with foreign equivalents - from 'Swinging London' (1964?—73?) to 'Paris May '68', whose real concern was modernising French academia, which it swiftly did. Sociologist Alain Tourane, a participant, noted the contrast between the lively, undogmatic spirit of its spectacularly successful actions, and the primeval political language in which left radical theory misrepresented it. Far from being Leninist, its spirit was Situationist, i.e. a 'spontaneous' activism, like some 'Popular Front', such as Milena and Radmilovic might have improvised, against VI., or to save Milena from him, and him from himself. Counter-cultural 'vibes' achieved the weirdest penetration into Eastern Europe. Vaclev Havel, the much-imprisoned Czech poet and militantly liberal Socialist, on becoming President, testified to the inspiration he and his friends received from recordings of - would you believe? - Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. A fascinating case of signs having (textually undetectable) meanings. 'Only Revolution Ends War'. Seen early in WR, this serendipitous graffito epitomises many 60s ideas. 'Revolution' was gloriously ambiguous. If combined with 'Make Love Not War' and 'Flower Power', it meant only a nice, sensitive, New Man type of cultural revolution, like 'When the sound of the music changes, the walls of the city shake'. Sometimes it meant Civil Disobedience in a quasi-pacifist tradition, or, less principled, fooling draft boards, by pretending to be gay or mad. Even when combined with calls to violence, the notion of violence was charmingly vegetarian think of Cuba - twelve raggedy men like Robin Hood's band, a nearunanimous people, revolution Festival style, with Afro-Cuban rhythms and policemen sniffing flowers.

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Only a handful of Protestors expected, or wanted, Civil War, with official America vs. a Rainbow Coalition, out for blood (Vietnam veterans 'bringing the war back home', ghetto guerrilleros like the Black Panthers, rock-band guerrillas killing bourgeois as in Weekend (1967), bourgeois converts like Patty Hearst (1988), concentration camps as in Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971), and insurgency from Mexico to Canada as in Ice (Robert Kramer, 1969)). A key question among the Weathermen was 'Would you shoot your parents?' This American Revolution was supposed to chime in with Third World anti-colonialism, as per Cuba (1958), its missile crisis (1962) and Vietnam (circa 1965). Third World poverty seemed to validate, not just Socialist but Communist morals and methods. DeStalinisation had freed world Marxisms from misguided loyalty to 'Socialism in one country' and 'Uncle Joe'; the idealisation thus set adrift went to Uncles Fidel, Ho, Mao and whoever. Putting Lenin's and Trotsky's grand project, 'World Revolution', back on the agenda. And on movie screens. Quasi-Trotskyish films include Morgan - A Suitable Case of Treatment (Reisz-David Mercer, 1966), ha Chinoise (Godard, 1967) and, smartest of the lot, Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition (Maurice Hatton, 1968). Trotsky, organiser of the Red Army, thoroughly approved of massive violence, and indeed, Absolute Non-Violence is a rare, extreme and precarious position. We're all 'against violence of course', but, some wars are just wars. None the less, 'Only Revolution Ends War', in its Lenin-andTrotsky sense, reminds me of A War to End War'. Might it be a third World War, complicated by Civil War (class-war), all the world over, all at once? Is such a thing part of the solution - or the Final Solution? Should we trust all concerned to steer between Scylla (defeat) and Charybdis (apocalypse)? Is Non-violence bourgeois decadence? Self-castration? Idealistic deathwish? Common-sense? Rare prudence? Does World Revolution imply 'Better dead than Capitalist'? Switchboard, WR, Sweet Movie, the trick ending of The Coca-Cola Kid, brood over the persistence of violence - political, passional, perhaps part of life. I think it's fair to say that where western European

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humanism sees violence as an interruption to progress, reason, prosperity and peace, eastern European humanism has a longer, deeper, experience, oirealpolitik. Not just in Yugoslavia. Red Psalm (Jancso, Hungary 1972) stages national history 1848-1914 as one long dance of, not only death, but reciprocal assassination (the 1914 cut-off date avoids greater embarrassments: 1918, 1919, 1945, 1956 ...). Sweet Movie, Red Psalm, Danton (Wajda, subtextually about Poland, and bearing in mind Lenin's admiration for Robespierre), and, perhaps, Letter From a Dead Man (USSR 1986, released just before Chernobyl) remind us of the spectres haunting Marxist humanisms.

11 The Short Unhappy Life of Ex-Yugoslavia 1389 and All That. Yugoslavia's search for its 'Middle Way' between Marxism and capitalism attracted much international interest. But Makavejev's fellow-Yugoslavs would also know a cultural context, which WR evokes, by light little details, whose resonance form may not reveal. These notes on 'social background' may suggest a whole 'envelope of meaning' easy for outsiders to miss. Though lately our newspapers have begun to flash back, to the Turks' defeat of the Serbs in Kosova, 600 years ago .... From Sarajevo (1914) to Sarajevo (1992). At the end of the Great War, the victorious Allies linked portions of the, recently collapsed, Austro-Hungarian Empire, with Serbia, to form 'The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', which soon renamed itself 'Yugoslavia' ('Kingdom of the South Slavs'). A big exception to the Versailles Treaty's pursuit of 'national self-determination' (ethnic nation-states), it was widely, though not universally, popular among the peoples concerned, after long Imperial subjection, two Balkan Wars, and the Great War (whose heaviest death rate, one person in five dead, was suffered by the Serbs). Moreover, only a large, strong, political unit could resist divisive interventions from Germany, Italy, Russia, Britain and France, who each had interests in the region, if only thwarting the other Great Powers. The new 'Yugoslavist' spirit had first to contend with the nineteenth century

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'ethnic nationalisms' promulgated throughout eastern Europe by the political and intellectual classes - academics, linguists, students, schoolteachers, artists and even schoolboys, like the assassin who triggered the First World War {Death of a Schoolboy, P Patzaki, 1994). Nationalisms on the Germanic, volkish model vied with the French, preferred by Marx (hence Hungarian peasants in Jancso's Red Psalm (1972) sing French folk-tunes, 'La Marseillaise' and 'La Carmagnole'). New Yugoslavia had to harmonise eight different legal systems. It struggled to reconcile the Croat and Slovene preference for a federation, of semi-autonomous regions, which status they had wrested from the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Empire, respectively, and the Serbian Unitarism (an insistence on a strong, centralised state-structure) generated as the Balkan nationalisms of Byron's time began to close a half-millenium of Turkish imperialism. All three peoples were 'modernised', in the sense of acculturation to European concepts of law, property and 'bourgeois' rationality. But in the South, Turkish despotism and backwardness combined with ungrateful ecology to keep Montenegrins and Albanians in a 'pre-bourgeois' world of clannish mountain peasantry. The new state had multiple minorities (Hungarians, Germans, Walachians in Bird, one million gypsies), and three major religions (Muslim, Orthodox, Roman Catholic). In 1923 only internal immigration cut short an early bout of 'ethnic cleansing'. A Pan-Slavist movement pulled Serbia towards Russia, as also did Communism, while obvious rivalries divided these 'Easterners'. A pan-German movement attracted many with Austrian and German connections. Every ethnicity had its own, separate peasant movement, except for a Peasant International directed from Moscow and a (much weaker) 'Green International' in Prague. The Communists thought 'multi-ethnically', but their doctrines of class-war made Civil War inevitable; and Russian brutalities in the Ukraine appalled many, potentially leftist 'lower-middle' peasants. Biding their time, the Communists counted on a solid proletariat, which existed only in their predictions.36 Many communities, families, individuals juggled conflicting loyalties - and self-interest was the joker in every social pack. As crises

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interacted, alliances and policies changed, and social confidence generally was subverted, whence recourse to brutal simplifications, like 'ethnic cleansing'. As so often, social change obeyed, not some logic of History', but Chaos Theory. Makavejev once contrasted two Yugoslavian traditions, the 'mountain brigand' spirit, and Mediterranean dolce far niente. The first would be strongest in the mountainous South, where poor soil strictly limited agriculture, the second in more fertile regions, especially the Adriatic coast. Both turns of mind are 'pre-bourgeois', unacculturated to 'work-rationality', and a fortiori to Marxist rationality. A third tradition could seem more propitious to Marxist ideology. Many peasant villages had evolved collective structures, whereby property was owned, not by individuals, but by the extended family, the zadruga, with perhaps sixty to one hundred members. Three or four such families might dominate, or even comprise a village, and collectively decide many policies, from settling boundary disputes to choosing a priest. The system was patriarchal (in the true sense - old men dominated younger men), though cultural transmission was mainly woman's province. Proverbially, at least, 'village' connoted 'haven' and 'peace'. But family and village structures had 'clannish' aspects, strongly resistant to Communism's big, impersonal state-idealisms. By the 1890s, zadruga culture was more folk-memory than reality, rural depressions having compelled emigration, external and internal (into the towns). Heavy industry (mostly foreign-owned or state-supported) was largely limited to raw material extraction; manufacturing was largely workshopscale, and couldn't compete with German capitalism, aided first by Weimar's, then by Hitler's, Mitteleurop ambitions. Yugoslav proletarianisation was limited, fragmented, ill-organised and anomic. The folk-art documentaries which were Makavejev's first commissions, though not insincere, fitted Communist 'folk-heritage' theories, rather than live history. Man and Switchboard are powerful testimony to proletarian anomie, persisting within well-meaning, but heavily 'topdown' official structures. In WR Radmilovic's exuberant aggressiveness is

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half-brigand, half-proletarian. Milena is Westernised, though her radicalism is wilder-spirited than western Marxisms encouraged. A Foreign Affair. In 1968, not long before WR, Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, to crush the 'Prague Spring'. Tito, his fears of Russia revived, mobilised the People's Militia; Ljuba's promise to protect his woman was a reminder that Russian soldiers were tireless rapists. Russian genocide of a nation's officer class inspires a sequence in Makavejev's Sweet Movie (the Katyn Woods massacres). VI.'s switch from polite recognition of Yugoslavia's 'Third Way,' to strangling Milena, fits Russian praxis rather well, before, during and after Stalin. WR shows Stalin, but its Lenin quotations are quite hawkish. A Domestic Matter. Through 1941-5, Tito's Communist partisans were the one nationwide Resistance organisation. Croat Fascists slaughtered Serbs, but Resistance groups killed more Yugoslavs than the Germans did. Tito's partisans were typically bloodthirsty, but, accepted allies with no questions asked about earlier behaviour. Their hospitality chimed in with a resurgence of 'Yagoslavism', again inspired by the horrors of war. Yugoslavia liberated itself, thus avoiding a Russian takeover, and nationalist sentiment is ebullient in the 'heroic' war-films of the late 40s, when Communist cultural policies established a solid, stable movie industry. From 1945-8, Tito's prisons swallowed reactionaries, liberal democrats, and any good Communists whom Stalin wanted purged. A few hundred ethnic Italians, some Communist ex-partisans, were buried alive in quicklime, a nasty death, to put an end to some territorial disputes. The Italian C.P, at Moscow's request, made little protest. (With Comrades like this, who needs class enemies?) Afive-yearplan established heavy industry, using forced labour, while collectivisation alienated the peasantry. None the less, Tito (halfCroat, half-Slovene) understood the force of 'ethnic regionalism', and rather than try eradicating it, granted a certain 'devolution' to, primarily ethnic, regions. Afirst,involuntary, decentralisation .... The year 1948 brought the Tito-Stalin split, provoked by, essentially, Tito's independence; the specific problems ranged from Tito's

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interest in union with Bulgaria and Albania, to Yugoslavia's industrialisation, contrary to Russia's economic exploitation of its satellites in Europe. Only just in time, Tito purged the 'Moscow faction' around him, and set about their 're-education' whose horrors were enhanced by prisoners zealously purging one another. For all its excesses, Titoism unhesitatingly sacrificed purity to pragmatism (and Tito admired English Labour leftists like Aneurin Bevan). Economic boycott by Russia and her satellites inspired Tito's party to conceive a new ideology, so that Socialist ideas could exploit 'Yugoslavist' sentiment. In 1948-9 he proclaimed 'autogestion', roughly, 'worker's management' (one influence on which was English, G.D.H. Cole's Guild Socialism). Softening its style, the Communist Party became a League of Communists, and many Party meetings were opened to the wider public. Collectivisation ceased, and American aid, directed against Russian hegemony, boosted economic development. New job opportunities accelerated internal immigration, intensifying ethnic mingling. Most victims of purges were fairly easily accepted back. 'Liberalisation' was still a long way off. But life goes on, the concentration camps are merely background knowledge, from which everyday prudence feels pretty safe. When Father was Away on Business (Kusturica, 1985) and Tito and I (Markovic, Serbia/Yugoslavia 1992) describe the fairly easy co-existence of what, on the socially objective level, is Terror, with, not even denial, just forget fulness, and with continuing idealism, innocent, or partly innocent. Innocence projects another such 'separation', though in terms of self-absorbed moviemaking under Fascism. It's a normal response. By 1953 Milovan Djilas, an old comrade of Tito's, and sometime hard-liner, had developed his new theories. The New Class reasoned that Communist cadres, once in power, would always join with top management, the bureaucratic state apparatus, and other power-holding groups, to form a new Ruling Class, which would always prioritise its own interests, and behave like any boss class, but worse, given its more total control. The general idea wasn't new on the left (Bakhunin, Plekhanov, James Burnham), and was horse-sense, after all: hence Radmilovic's

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insults to Milena, and Tuli's doggerel, 'Who will police our police?' Djilas, expelled from the Party in 1954, went in and out of prison, or house-arrest, or publishing-bans, as liberalisation waned or waxed. But now, he wasn't liquidated. In 1956 Russia's invasion of Hungary intensified western, and New Left, approval of Yugoslavia's decentralising, democratising, tendencies. Industry developed apace, thanks to American support, and Russia's changed policies made friendlier Communist neighbours. Tito's 'Third Way', plus potential markets, linked her with 'Non-aligned Nations', like India, with whom, by 1961, she seemed co-leader of the Third World', which increasingly tended to the left. After Cuba 1958 the West seemed everywhere on the defensive. All this encouraged ideas of 'World Revolution'. But in Kusturica's Underground, the captive villagers' great industrial achievement is to build a tank; this was inspired by Yugoslavia's guilty secret, her vast arms trade to underdeveloped nations.37 The Enemies Within. As Communist liberalisers, like Milena, prevailed, daily life became easier, albeit erratically (the switchboard operator heats coffee on her upside-down iron). Bird upfronts the 'generation gap'. Its ageing engineer has memories which have frozen him emotionally; they're not revealed: are they Nazi atrocities only, or Communist atrocities also? The young heroine is a hairdresser, more sociable than Socialist, more sensuous than consumerist, free of political beliefs. In Switchboard the lowly rat-catcher misunderstands, as a glorification of his job, a song whose words, by Maiakovski, and music, by Hans Eisler, and 'Brechtian theatre' style, suggest something very different. Lyrics like 'Crush to death the rotten vermin!' are oddly negative, and not unlike Stalinist jargon about class enemies. They're in every home, under every bed. The parallel seems corroborated by Milena's quote from Lenin, whereby the very existence of a Socialist State proves the existence of a bourgeois fifth column. Muslims vs. Blondes. Makavejev, as a feminist, surely sympathised with Communist campaigns against Islam's treatment of women (hence a prize-winning documentary, There Where No Law

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Reigns, 1964). In Switchboard a Communist with Muslim roots goes mad with jealousy over his Hungarian lover. Is Islam to blame? Or 'socialism'? Or different ethnic moral codes? Makavejev remarked that Yugoslav spectators appreciated the intimate ethnic exchanges (food, songs ...) across a proverbial antagonism (Turks vs. Hungarians, as per Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula). Makavejev stressed also the affinities of Islam and Socialism, as codes of citizenship. In WK, the dark-haired lovers are irresponsible (but sexually natural), while Radmilovic's violence against law, order and property would fit the mountain-peasant-brigand mentality, of Montenegro. In WK, VI. removes his jet-black wig, amidst Jagoda's racist chat (is he Jewish? Lithuanian?), to reveal dull though neat blond hair. Did Milena expect a gypsy soul - romantic, sensitive, untamed - only to meet a People's Artist, i.e. a salaried artiste? Or perhaps her ideal was 'multicultural' (sultry soul, cultural Czarism, correct Leninism), versus an ideologically dominant ethnicity (Slavonic blond)? 38 Praxis Makes Perfect. Liberalisation and World Revolution being in the ascendant, Milena is gloriously confident she can reconcile Lenin, Reich and the masses. She all but personifies a certain 'Socialist humanism', like that of the Praxis Group (founded 1964, disbanded 1975, under official pressures). Belgrade students rioted in June 1968, against Communist conservatism, and 1971 saw a 'Croatian Spring', named after Prague 1968. A Spring too far, it made Tito clamp down. The "Vbung Communist League was purged; its expulsion of Makavejev (23 February 1973) is a date in some history books. Now Old School Communism had to run 'market Socialism' - in a mainly capitalist world-system. With Russia weakened, American aid dwindled. Food shortage returned. Regional governments, determined to stay in power, began playing to strictly local interests. Tito's personal prestige held things together. But the old classwarrior was no economist. His death in 1980 was the beginning of the end. From Tito to NATO. Regional governments, internally illiberal, unable to agree, evolved into mutually antagonistic 'baronies', each appealing to its own dominant ethnicity. But 'ethnic cleansing' was not

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just a throwback to 'pre-Socialist' racisms; Communist class-war, Stalin's and Tito's purges, had reinforced the idea that if ethnic tensions were a bit of a problem, then ethnic cleansing was part of the solution. The Uprooted. Perhaps Yugoslavia's collapse, and collateral horrors, had no 'root cause', only multiple factors, social, economic, political, personal. Sociology would expect a succession of upheavals to weaken civic idealism and favour anomie (normlessness), and here, regression to older positions:'pre-rationalist' individualism (un enlightened self-interest), a mountain-brigand spirit (Montenegro), and, not 'working-class solidarity', but gypsy irresponsibility/opportunism (I Have Even Known Happy Gypsies (Petrovic, 1967) and Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica, 1989)). In Underground, two brothers, joint patriarchs, heroically defy the Nazis, become Communist Party bosses, isolate their community, and abuse it over forty years. It's a dreamlike 'condensation' of brigand attitudes, peasant clannishness, proletarian irresponsibility, apparatchik irresponsibility. Marble Ass (Zilnick, 1992) is a tragi-comic saga, of a male prostitute in a rickety shack who loves the local neighbourhood psychopath. It's a crazy parody, or maybe mockery, of all that Reich, Milena and Jackie the TV romantic, hoped for. A shock for Socialists was that half a century of 'Socialist' rule had instilled so little civic sense, so little social responsibility. A shock for humanists, whatever their politics, was how ordinary conscripts accepted, or even relished their ethnic cleansing duties. Maybe 'prejudice' - ethnic, religious, whatever - is not yet understood. We assume that prejudice generates discrimination, but what if a need to discriminate generates prejudice? People need special friends, special allies (that's what alliance is). Sometimes we choose our allies for reasons of mutual aid, mutual interests. Sometimes we must rely on more abstract signs - like coins, tokens, symbols. Quite arbitrary symbols will do, and if no real differences exist, inventing them makes a basis for selection. Thus logics of arbitrary difference enter most social relations. Lenin thought The People need the State to protect them from their enemies (but when does The State invent Enemies of the People,

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to impose itself?). And indeed, The People is usually divided against itself. As Sartre puts it 'Hell is other people'. As Jagoda says: 'It's your kith and kin/Will do you in.' Hence Plato, Hobbes, Robespierre - and Hitler - all agree, 'The people in mass cannot govern itself.' As I suspect Lenin thought too. Which can only enhance our respect for Milena's, and WR's, famous last words: 'Comrades! Even now I am not ashamed of my Communist past.' Sweet Movie will explore Katyn Woods, and the 'Excremental Vision', not of Fascism, Red, Black or chameleon, but of the great, brave, pessimists, like Swift. It will explore 'the horror ... the horror', the 'heart of darkness' all humanisms must contend with.

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Credits W.R. MISTERIJE ORGANIZMA WR - MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM Yugoslavia/West Germany 1971 Director Dusan Makavejev Executive Producer Svetozar Udovicki Screenplay Dusan Makavejev Directors of Photography Yugoslavia: Pega Popovic USA: Aleksandar Petkovic Editor Ivanka Vukasovic Art Director Dragoljub Ivkov Sound Collage39 Bojana Marijan Production Companies Neoplanta Film (Novi Sad)ATelepool (Munich) Production Staff Stevan Petrovic, Bert Coetter, Milen Popovic, Srdjan Ilic Assistant Director Ratko Ilic Continuity Ljubica Petrovic Camera Assistants Zivorad Nesic, Ingo Hamer Chief Electrician Rade Stankovic

Stills VelisavTomovic Editorial Assistant Ankica Manic Costumes Mirjana Ostojic Wardrobe Milena Ivkovic Make-up Zorica Randic Hymn by/Sung by Bulat Okudzawa Sound Ludwig Probst, Dusan Aleksic Sound Editor Miodrag Petrovic Sarlo Research Assistant Gary Burstein, PhD Inserted Footage Permission Yugoslav Film Library United States of Erotica Gallery

Milena Dravic Milena Ivica Vidovic Vladimir llyich Jagoda Kaloper Jagoda Tuli Kupferberg street theatre marine Zoran Radmilovic Radmilovic Jackie Curtis him/herself Miodrag Andric soldier Betty Dodson Jim Buckley Nancy Godfrey Al Goldstein Screw editors J. Gelovani Ghost of J. V. Stalin Zivka Matic Dragoljub Ivkov Nikola Milic Milan Jelic Submitted to Yugoslav censor 10 May 1971 (then banned until 1986) 2350 metres UK Release Connoisseur US Release Cinema Five

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Notes 1 Rumour accused Reich of sexually abusing patients, not surprisingly, considering some of his ideas. Today's 'moral panics' and witch-hunts concern, not politics, but sex: Satanic rituals, child sexual abuse by parents, especially fathers, and sexual harassment. That box-office megabuster, Independence Day (1995), features male rape, by insects, out of UFOs! 2 Its film ancestry goes back through Will Rogers, some Buster Keaton settings, and the 'town feeling' in The Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). 3 Aaron Scharf had a story about FBI agents descending on a rural community, to investigate subversive ideas. They called a town meeting, where they were routed by backwoods rednecks, straight out of Deliverance (1972) who called the FBI 'Communistic', and threatened to shoot the investigators if they didn't get out of town. A Good Day at Black Rock. Oddly enough, or not so oddly, it's roughly the pattern of John Ford's most personal film, The Sun Shines Bright (1953). 4 Not that such sex-and-gender shifts are normally significant. They're more often neutral. As this context is highly sexed, the overtone creeps in. 5 'You say you want a Revolution;/We-ell, you know...' (Revolution, Apple, 1968). 6 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism; American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979), and Raymond Durgnat, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema (London: CollinsCassel-Collier-Macmillan, 1972). 7 Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre: The Original Theatre of the City of New York. From the mid60s to the mid-70s. Book 2 (London: Methuen, 1978).

8 On the Existentialist/Camp connection, strange as it seems, see p. 75. 9 John Donne, 'Love's Progress' (a, 1600). 1 0 I take 'phallus', a vexed term, to mean both (a) 'a representation of the erect penis' and (b) the penis itself, erect in a sexual context. 1 1 Presumably the 1934 film a.k.a. Jolly Fellows, The Jazz Comedy, Moscow Laughs, The Shepherd of Abrau. 1 2 Much discussion of 'Momism' preceded the feminist emphasis on 'patriarchy', as in E.J. Dingwall, The American Woman (New York: Rinehart 1957). In Godard's/\/x)irtc/e souffle (1960), a canny pundit says, The American woman dominates her man; the French woman, not yet'. 1 3 Christian Saint-Jean Paulin, La ContreCulture: Etats-Unis, Annees 60: la Naissance des Nouvelles Utopies (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1997), p. 79, slightly adapted. 1 4 It's widely accepted by psychologists. See H.J. Eysenck, Psychology is for People (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1954). More Freudian 'equivalents' appear in J.C. Flugel, Man Morals and Society (London: Duckworth, 1945), and Gordon Rattray Taylor, Rethink (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1972). 1 5 As tough/tender involves a continuum, it's not a 'binary opposition'. Many attempts at film theory confuse binary logic (either/or, with no intermediate positions), with structures generally (where interactions are usual). The differences between binary oppositions, structural interactions, and dialectical synthesis are beyond our scope here. 1 6 The ideas in The New Class circulated in Yugoslavia from around 1950. 1 7 There are more examples in East Side

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Story (ZDF TV, 1997), about East German musicals. 1 8 And 1969, as revised. 1 9 'Double bind' theory was popularised among left radicals by counter-cultural psychiatrist R.D. Laing (as in Family Life by Trotskyites Ken Loach and David Mercer, 1971), but its theory came from Gregory Bateson and team (Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia', in Behavioural Science, vol. 1 no. 4, 1956, reprinted in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London: Intertext, 1972). 2 0 Bourgeois culture over-generalises very much less than radicals geared to Freudian theory suppose. 21 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). 2 2 Writer Jacques Prevert, was a Trotskyite, Surrealist and populist poet. 2 3 As in Wajda's Danton (1986), where Robespierre = Jaruwelski, Polish pawn of Russian Leninism. 2 4 Raymond Durgant, 'If the Punishment Fits (Psycho and Feminism)', in Film Comment, Jan-Feb 1997. 2 5 As for 'the gift that God gave Cain', Jacques Hassoun, a dissenting colleague of Lacan's, argues, in L'Obscur objet de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1997), compares Cain's 'primordial crime' to Freud's theory of the 'primal horde' who kill the father; thus sin is the foundation of human solidarity. He links it with sexuality in a chapter called 'Le Penis du Diable'.

Liehm, Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak Experience (New York: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1974). 2 8 Some likely implications are spelt out in Thorkill Vangaard, Phallos: A Symbol and its History in the Male World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 2 9 This section is indebted to the most detailed biography of Reich, Fury on Earth, by Myron Sharaf (interviewed in the film). 30 Reich also had admirers on the radical right, notably the 'Oklahoma bomber' of 1995. 31 So named by liberal sociologist David Reisman in The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 32 Notably 'English school' psychoanalysis, as above; in post-Lacanian French psychoanalysis, a tendency to 'phallicise' female reactions (Gerard Pommier, L'Ordre Sexuel, 1989); and some re-assertions of heterosexuality/family/non-alienation (Tony Anatrella, Non a la Societe Depressive, 1995). 3 3 The current catalogue of a quite respectable Book Club lists, as one of its 'Favourites', Sex For One: The Joy of SelfLoving, by Betty Dodson, B.D., Ph.D; blurbline, 'How to explore the possibilities of sexual fulfillment through masturbation' (my italics). Reich okayed masturbation as trivial orgone-release in the absence of a suitable partner, but worried about it as attempted relief from neurotic anxiety whose causes should be cured. 3 4 Not forgetting fun pulp films like Hell raiser

2 6 Now we know that expectant mothers were forcibly aborted and the putative fathers publically caned. 2 7 E.g., Josef Skvorecky, All the Bright Young Men and Women: A Personal History of the Czech Cinema (Toronto: Peter MartinTake One, 1971), p. 71, and Antonin J.

3 5 Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights, 1957). Mailer is a crucial figure, a serious thinker, Warhol a blank screen for negative projections. 3 6 The political confusions of pre-Yugoslavia are nicely summed up in 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930), the much-loved

1,2,3.

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spoof on history such as every British schoolboy knew it, circa 1930: 'Chapter 57. Disraeli and Gladstone. 'Not very much is known about these extremely memorable ministers except that their "Peace With Honour" after the Balkans Treaty said: '1, that Bosnia should be ceded to Herzogovina; '2, that Herzegovina should be ceded to Bosnia (this is called the Eastern Question); '3, that Bulgaria should be divided into 3 parts (later Bulgaria would be divided into 1 part by Mr Gladstone); '4, that anyone found in Armenia should be gradually divided into twelve parts (Mr Gladstone subsequently criticized the effect of this clause).' A subsequent volume, And Now All This (London: Methuen, 1932), continues: 'Geography Part II. Muddel Europa. 'Before the Great War this medium-sized Geographical nuisance, variously referred to as the Mittle Entente, the Balkans, or Littel Europa, was the cause of a great deal of rather breathless diplomatic duplicity such as Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Moldavia-Wallachia and other Double Ententes. 'But owing to a widespread feeling after the War that what Muddel Europa wanted was more Geography and less History, the inhabitants were compelled to forgo their massachistic policy of being massocred whenever possible by the Ottoman Turk and get on with their agriculture, i.e., the cultivation of Oats, Goats and Croats on the Adriatic sea-board, and their commerce, e.g. the export of waltzes from Vienna, rhapsodies from Hungary, spotted dog from Dalmatia, czocholates from Czocholoslovakia and Funding Debts, Sinking Bonds, and Dud Czechs from everywhere.

'British attitude to All This: - Britons never (never) shall be Slavs.' 3 7 In Emir Kusturica and Serge Grunberg, // etait une fois ...Underground (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema/Ciby 2000, 1995). 3 8 Racist snobbery wouldn't require that 'all pure Serbs are blond', only: 'if he's blond he's surely the best type of Slav'. 39 Union regulations prohibited due credit for an extensive creative contribution. Author's acknowledgments: Ron Delves, Dusan Makavejev, Baba Radilovic.

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Bibliography ON MAKAVEJEV Makavejev, Dusan, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (New York: Avon-BardHearst YD 41, 1972). Postproduction script, with Makavejev's comments, and an interview by Phillip Lopate and Bill Zavatsky. INTERVIEWS Ciment, Michel, in Positif, no. 99, Nov. 1968. Ciment, Michel and Bernard Cohn, in Positif, no. 129, July-Aug. 1971. Cozarinsky, Edgardo and Carlos Clarens, Film Comment, May-June 1975. Thomsen, Christian Braad, in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubinstein (eds), Art Politics and Cinema: The Cineaste Interviews, (Chicago: Lake View, 1984; London: Pluto, 1985) ON WR Andrews, Nigel, 'WRMysteries of the Organism', Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1972. MacBean, James Roy, Film and Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). Vogel, Amos, 'Makavejev: Toward the Edge of the Real ... and over', Film Comment, Nov./Dec. 1973.

ON YUGOSLAVIAN CINEMA Passek, Jean-Loup and Zoran Tasic, Le Cinema Yougoslave (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1986). Vincenti, Giorgio de (ed.), Yugoslavia: II Cinema dell'Autogestione (Venice: Marsilio, 1982). ON THE YUGOSLAVIAN CONTEXT Bianchini, Stefano, La Question Yougoslave (Florence: CastermanGiunti, 1996). Dunn, John, Modern Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Garde, Paul, Les Balkans (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). Krulic, Joseph, Histoire de la Yougoslave de 1945 a nos Jours (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1993). Rupnijk, Jacques (ed.), De Sarajevo a Sarajevo, I'echec Yougoslave (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1992). Rusinow, Dennison, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948-1975 (London and Berkeley: The Royal Institute of International Affairs and University of California Press, 1977).

ON THE COUNTERCULTURE St.-Jean-Paulin, C , La Contre-Culture: Etats-Unis, annees 60 (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1997). ON LENINISM Blick, Robin, The Seeds of Evil: Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevik Elitism (London: Steyne, 1995). Djilas, Milovan, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957). ON REICH Boadella, David, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work (Chicago: Contemporary, Dell, 1973). Frosh, Stephen, The Politics of Psychoanalysis: Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory (London: Macmillan, 1987). Lowen, Alexander, Bioenergetics (London: Penguin 1976). Oilman, Bertell, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (London: Pluto; Boston: South End, 1979). Poster, Mark, Critical Theory of the Family (London: Pluto; New York: Seabury, 1978). Reich, Peter, A Book of Dreams (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

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Reich, Wilhelm, Character Analysis (1933; New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1972). The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933; London: Souvenir, 1972). The Sexual Revolution (1936; New York: Noonday, 1962). Function of the Orgasm (1948; New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1961). Wilhelm Reich: Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, ed. Lee Baxandall (New York: Random House, 1972). Record of a Friendship: Correspondence between Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill, ed. Beverly Placzeck (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982). Robinson, Paul, The Freudian Left (New York: Harper and Row, 1969; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Rycroft, Charles, Wilhelm Reich (New York: Viking, 1972). Sharaf, Myron, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983; New York: Da Capo, 1994)

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