BLOOD AND SUGAR: THE FILMS OF DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV (part 2)

NINA POWER revisits five radical, mixed-genre films from 1965–74 that explore sex and revolution

DUŠAN MAKAVEJEV - Mysteries of the Organism

SEXPOL AND INTERNATIONAL CONTROVERSY,  1971–74

​Regardless of the uniqueness and beauty of Makavejev’s earlier features, it is with WR that his reputation will stand and fall. Not quite banned, but not available either in Yugoslavia for sixteen years after it was made—“just not allowed,” as Makavejev puts it in interviews—the film is an explosive and ambitious mix of Makavejev’s earlier obsessions: sex and politics. But it has an international dimension that seeks to address not only repressive forms of social organization but also the dangers of freedom, or at least of the kinds of freedom that twentieth-century America sought to define itself by and against. It is no surprise that many have related Maka vejev’s work in this period to Herbert Marcuse’s thesis in OneDimensional Man (1964) that the supposed freedoms of capitalist choice are only more efficient ways of tightening the shackles of control. Far from being a straightforward celebration of sexual liberation as a superficial reading of the film might indicate, WR is in part about the dangerous effects of desire when the latter is—to use the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari once more—“deterritorialized” too quickly. (If you break an egg, it is useful to work out where the inside might land, for fear of soiling your clothes . . .) We have seen in the decades after Makavejev’s film how capitalism is faster and more efficient than other systems at recapturing desire for its own ends: WR can, in this sense, be read as a warning during a cultural cold war in which the opponents vie for hegemony over human passions. But it is also a film about the inherent unfairness or injustice of desire, regardless of political systems. One may very well want to “fuck freely” in the name of an egalitarian politics as the narrator implores, but there are some people that everyone wants and others whom no one wants at all. A politics based on desire will be unfair. 

WR caused a riot; how could it not? One of the outcries, oddly enough, was over Makavejev’s representation of ​Wil helm Reich, the unofficial hero of the film. In The New York Times (November 7, 1971), David Bienstock, then Curator of Film at the Whitney Museum of American Art, accused Makavejev of misrepresenting the teachings of Reich: “while Makavejev, on the surface, seems to be praising Reich, the actual content of the film mocks and maligns him. Makavejev then cloaks these distortions in a web of comedy and ‘avant garde’ ambiguity. It is an old trick. Hide the poison in sugar.” Bienstock’s irritation at Makavejev’s “misinterpretation” of Reich unwittingly reveals something about the filmmaker’s strategy, however: “hiding the poison in sugar” will actually form one of the central images of Sweet Movie a few years later; as the revolutionary Anna Planeta kills a renegade sailor from the battleship Potemkin, the blood from his stab wound taints their shared bed which is, absurdly, entirely made of white sugar. Makavejev is a master at mixing materials: the clean with the dirty, the sweet with the deadly. 

WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM: THE BATTLE FOR DESIRE

© 1971 Dušan Makavejev. DVD: Criterion Collection.

​WR is an astonishing fusion of interviews, found footage, propaganda, fictionalized accounts of the encounters between Yugoslav women and an invented Soviet hero, parodies of political speeches, and a vision of an America dangerously unable to cope with its own desires. It is at once a celebration of Reich’s insights (you can read the “WR” of the title as both Reich’s initials and “World Revolution”) and a critique of the commodification of sexuality, whether it be under capitalism, fascism, or communism. The Fugs’ song “Kill For Peace” accompanies Tuli Kupferberg from the band as he wonders around New York, dressed in combat gear, caressing and masturbating a gun and frightening businessmen. Cameos by Jackie Curtis, the glam transvestite from the Theater of the Ridiculous and sculptress Nancy Godfrey, who takes a penis plaster cast of the editor-in-chief of Screw magazine, Jim Buckley, all contribute to the idea that “confusion is sex” as Sonic Youth would later put it. Nevertheless, the Yugoslav storyline involving Milena (Milena Dravi´c), Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper), and Ljuba (Miodrag Andri´c) is perhaps the strongest part of the film—part joyful passion, part ambiguous take-up of the gestures of propaganda in the service of a sexual revolution, as when Milena, dressed half in military gear and half in her nightie, delivers an agitprop speech from the balcony of the tenement building to the proletarian masses below. “Socialism must not exclude human sensual pleasure from its program!” she declares, as a deranged ex-boyfriend chases her precisely for this very same sensual pleasure. Her eventual death, following an orgiastic encounter with a Soviet ice-skating champion who can’t handle the unleashing of pleasure that Milena induces, is vicious, but strangely in keeping with the excessive nature of the film as a whole: ​the Soviet Union can’t accept a different kind of socialism, its men can’t accept a different kind of woman. Milena’s decapitated head lives on in the clinical setting of the morgue, carry ing on her defence of revolutionary lovemaking. In recent interviews, included on the DVDs, Makavejev has spoken about current sexual liberation being only “freedom to discharge ourselves as machines.” Characters such as Milena represent a perhaps impossible alternative: a revolution in permanent movement rather than the “frozen” ones of Mao or Stalin, where political energy gets locked into fixed institutions and new forms of moralism. Makavejev stages the difficult moment between repression and liberation: what results is not the hippie fantasy of free, warmly expressed desire but a kind of dangerously overly emotive state, all too easily captured by cults of personality, groupthink, and fascism. “Can we organize liberation step-by-step?” Makavejev asks in one interview, mourning the all-too-quick slippage from repression to release to commodification. But it was WR that saw it coming all along. 

​With Sweet Movie, Makavejev deliberately forgets his step-by-step idea of liberation and opts instead for a study in revulsion, bodily and conceptual. The major sensation conjured up by Sweet Movie is disgust, and there are parallels with the work of the contemporary artist Paul McCarthy, a reveling in a combination of cultural nausea and sickness of a more visceral, immediate kind. Makavejev’s characters are murderers, seducers, chat-show hosts, gynecologists, capitalists, and renegades from revolutionary eras. But the true stars of the film are the myriad substances that seep from the lens in hyperreal color: blood, shit, breast milk, food, chocolate. If Sweet Movie is, as Makavejev describes it in one of the DVD interviews, “a love letter to Kodak,” it’s a love letter one might handle rather gingerly, for fear of contamination. The objects of his scorn remain much the same as in earlier films: the cheapness of capitalism, the deadly pomposity of ossified political systems, but the tone has changed. What was once a joyful and multidimensional act—sex—is now merely a commodity to be won on a TV show. Women are to be dumped in suitcases and smeared in chocolate. With Sweet Movie one is left with the unnerving question, has the whole world become horrible? A rubbish dump of ideas and useless substances? Did Makavejev give up on thinking that there might be another way out? Against the grain of the film, some have tried to excavate an optimism from Makavejev’s most deliberately unpleasant work: for Stanley Cavell, in an essay included with the DVD, Sweet Movie “attempts to extract hope . . . from the very fact that we are capable of disgust at the world.” Perhaps this is so, but it is a very different kind of hope than that hinted at by Makavejev’s films a decade before. It is ​relatively easy to see the film as a pessimistic response to the assimilation of the very things, freedom and sexuality, that Makavejev sought to explore so boldly, yet subtly, in his earlier films. 

© 1974 Dušan Makavejev. DVD: Criterion Collection.

​Again the film was met in the first place by a combination of repulsion and bafflement, and these remain the overwhelming responses to this day, legally and aesthetically. As Vincent Canby writing in The New York Times at around the film’s release (October 10, 1975), put it: “it is, I think, supposed to be an erotic political comedy, which may be a contra diction in terms.” Of course, he could have been talking about almost any of Makavejev’s output here, but the fact remains that Sweet Movie is an extraordinarily difficult film to like or enjoy: the scenes with members of Otto Muehl’s commune in which they vomit on one another, rub excrement into each others’ chests, make out while covered in food, and generally howl much like Lars von Trier’s “idiots” will do many years later, is undeniably unpleasant, unaestheticized, and luridly shot. But perhaps this is the point. 

​The film’s attack on American puritanism and crassness, as captured in the gynecological beauty show that opens the film, is undeniably heavy-handed. The utterly idiotic and money-centric Mr Kapital (John Vernon) wins the prize girl, a virginal Miss Canada (Carole Laure) whom he later daubs with alcohol to clean her before thrusting his golden penis, which shoots out clear water in her general direction. Understandably, she freaks out, and attempts to run away, leading to a series of encounters with male sexual stereotypes (the wellhung black man, the macho Latino romancer). She winds up in a daze at a commune with Otto Muehl and his merry band where she mostly refuses to play along, pausing only to suckle on some breast milk or gently caress a flaccid penis—but it’s not clear that Laure is acting her disturbance in these scenes, which only adds to the discomfort. Meanwhile, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) is merrily sailing the canals of Amsterdam in a boat called Survival. The vessel happens to be filled with sweets and sugar, which assist in her seduction of several male children and of a leftover sailor from Potemkin (Pierre Clémenti). While there are moments of real joy and celebration in Sweet Movie, the overriding feeling is one of “toomuchness.” This applies particularly to the spliced-in Nazi footage of the Katyn massacre, the mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals, and civilian prisoners of war by the Soviet NKVD, which was only admitted by Russia recently (the incident is also the subject of Katyn, Andrzej Wajda’s 2008 film). The corpses of the Polish officers receive an odd mirroring at the end of the film where all of Anna’s lovers are laid out on the banks of the canal, emerging from their cocoons as not quite lifeless after all. The juxtaposition of images again has the disturbing effect of feeling a little too much, not right at all: if this was the effect Makavejev was after then he succeeded in spades, but it is difficult to isolate a notion of hope amid all the various minor and world-historical horrors that Makavejev parades before us.

Perhaps because of the distaste and scandal generated by Sweet Movie, Makavejev’s star began to wane rather earlier than might have been expected of someone capable of making at least the first four of these re-releases. He has struggled to get funding, although he has made several notable films since the mid-1970s. But his output from the mid-60s to the mid-70s remains fundamental to an understanding of European cinema, and, beyond that, to the now closed-off possibilities of other ways of conceiving sex, politics, and film itself. Makavejev’s vision of a republic of free love, albeit a free love that understands the dangers of letting go too quickly, is both a celebration and a warning. It would be tempting to believe that we have outgrown Makavejev, that we belong to a time where sex has very little to do with politics, and cinema has very little to do with either, except as titillation in both cases (recent attempts to depict “politics,” such as Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex is as pornographic as anything found on a seedy Internet portal). If Makavejev leaves us discomforted, we should recognize this uneasiness as the reminder of what has been misplaced and forgotten in the decades separating us from his major works. However, we would do well to remain open to both the spirit and the specifics of these ruminations on love and politics, for if they have no part to play, then things may be even worse than we imagine.

NINA POWER is the author of One Dimensional Woman (Zero books, 2009), a critique of contemporary feminism.

ABSTRACT reconsideration of the fruitful 1965–75 period in Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev’s career, arguing that Man Is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, Innocence Unprotected, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and Sweet Movie raise questions about sexuality and politics which remain important.

​Keywords Man Is Not a Bird, Love Affair, Innocence Unprotected, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie

DVD DATA Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical [Man Is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, Innocence Unprotected]. 1965, 1967, 1968 © 2009 Dušan Makavejev. Publisher: criterion eclipse, 2009. $44.95, 3 discs.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism. © 1971 Dušan Makavejev. publisher: criterion collection, 2007. $39.95, 1 disc.

Sweet Movie. © 1974 Dušan Makavejev. Publisher: criterion collection, 2007. $29.95, 1 disc.

taken from here:

Academia.edu/Nina Power