Revolutionary Sex in Portland, Oregon

The Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon, will kick off next week with a countercultural bang, as Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism screens in the theater’s eclectic Case of the Mondays series. Freely intermixing elements of fiction and documentary, the satirical essay film explores Austrian psychoanalyst and sexologist Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories through the story of a young woman’s sexual and political liberation. Makavejev’s provocative fourth feature—which was promptly banned in his native Yugoslavia, and eventually led to the director’s exile from the country—went on to become an art-house sensation internationally. As critic Jonathan Rosenbaum observes in his liner essay for our release of the film, WR continues to endure as an exemplary work of collage cinema, staging “shotgun marriages between seemingly incompatible elements to see what kinds of sparks spring from the encounters.”