Playful Politics: An Evening with Dušan Makavejev’s “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” (1971)

In this screening, we invite the audience to explore the complex dialectics of magic and realism, truth and fiction. Part cinema verité, part erotic communist manifesto, part figure skating film, Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Yugoslavia, 1971) takes on the challenge of re-enchanting communism through the ideas of antifascist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. We argue that the playful politics of Makavejev’s film make it neither docufiction nor docudrama, but what we call après-doc: a documentary that upends cinema verité by stubbornly refusing the cohesion of realist conventions, moving towards a dialectical concept of documentary that re-enchants as much as it illuminates or reveals.

The film screening will be followed by commentary and discussion led by Daniel Schwartz (McGill University), author of City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931, and Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania), author of Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s.

Admission is free, registration is not necessary.