Footage from ‘W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism’ (1971) by Dušan Makavejev.
The film is far-out and intercuts fictional and documentary elements. The fictional side is an imaginative and satirical narrative about an outspoken female advocate of sexual liberation who seduces a Stalin-like Soviet celebrity figure skater. The documentary side clipped here features Reich’s daughter Eva and footage from Reich’s Orgonon estate in Rangeley, Maine, which is a beautiful place to visit. Makavejev said that the film was “in part, a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”
Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and protégé of Freud who developed a clinical approach that linked emotional life to the body, a social theory that linked sexual repression to authoritarian politics, and a body of experimental research into what he came to call orgone energy. Among other things he had a deep influence on the ’60s and ’70s counterculture, as many of his ideas became foundational to the human potential movement (bodywork, Gestalt therapy, primal scream and encounter groups popularized by Esalen all trace directly back to him) as well as commune and back-to-the-land communities.
I was once pretty obsessed with Reich as a student at the New School, where Reich taught in the ’40s until he started getting in trouble for claims about his orgone accumulator, which then fueled his paranoia. He was ultimately imprisoned for violating an injunction prohibiting interstate shipment of orgone accumulators, and died of a heart attack at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.
