Born a Yugoslav in Belgrade on October 13, 1932, died a Serb in the same city on January 25, Dusan Makavejev was catapulted over the East-West divide with the projection of WR (Wilhelm Reich), The Mysteries of the Organism, in 1971 at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. Until then, he was only a promising talent who led a tenacious guerrilla war against the Titoist censorship. With The mysteries of the organismfilmed in the United States and Yugoslavia, it embraced in the same anarchist and hedonistic derision merchant capitalism and really existing socialism, to the great joy of critics and the public.
But the promise of an international career as a planetary iconoclast that this stunning success carried was never fulfilled. From scandalous successes to failed attempts to infiltrate Hollywood, he only made a handful of films, not always very well distributed. Despite everything, he remains one of the major figures of the great liberation movement which shook world cinema in the wake of the spring of 1968.
As he points out in his latest film, A hole in the soul (1994), an autobiographical documentary medium-length film made for television, Dusan Makavejev reached the age of reason the year Europe sank into Hitler’s madness. At the end of his journey through the war, as a teenager, he joined the Communist Party. He obtained a degree in psychology at the University of Belgrade, but quickly turned to cinema. In 1958, a short film, Do not believe in monumentswhich depicts the efforts of a young woman to awaken the sensuality of a statue, provokes a first skirmish with the censors.
A formal freedom
His first three feature films lead him to a formal freedom that sets him apart in the landscape of socialist block cinematography. man is not a bird (1965) grafts a sensual story onto a documentary background whileA matter of the heart – The tragedy of a PTT employee (1967) mixes the loves of an explosive blonde and a Muslim pest-controller with excerpts from sexology lectures. At last, Innocence sans protection (1968) uses footage from the first talkie film shot in Serbian, in 1942, mixing it with newsreels showing the Nazi occupation of Belgrade.
Which logically leads to WR, The Mysteries of the Organism. The film begins – almost – like a documentary on the trajectory of Wilhelm Reich, student of Freud in Vienna, communist militant in Berlin, proselyte of free love, defender in the United States where he had exiled himself of the theory of orgasmic energy. Reich fled Stalinism, which left no room for his hedonistic version of socialism, and was imprisoned by American justice, which had his books burned. It is understandable that Makavejev recognized himself in this figure which serves as a common thread for a brutal and intelligent montage of street theater sequences, Soviet or Chinese news and satirical fiction in which an actress defends, before the Yugoslav proletariat, the Reich’s theses.
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