WR: mysteries of the organism

Makavejev employs documentary and narrative forms in his radical manifesto concerning the intersections of sex and politics. It begins with a documentary consideration of WR, Wilhelm Reich, a psychotherapist and one-time colleague of Sigmund Freud, who posited that sexual repression was one of the by-products of class oppression, that sexual liberation, one of the goals of revolutionary struggle. Reich's controversial and troubled biography is interwoven with a satiric allegory, set in Yugoslavia, centering on a female worker's explorations of free love, and documentary footage featuring American leftist and counter-culture radicals of the late 1960's waging guerrilla warfare in New York City. Stalinist oppression casts its sinister shadow in excerpts from a 1946 Soviet film entitled The Vow. (Does not circulate).