W.R Mysteries of the Organism by Dušan Makavejev

 

The film deals with the relationship between political systems and sexuality, and presents the controversial life and work of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The film is based on Reich’s theories, according to which totalitarianism is a direct consequence of sexual repression and frustration.

In W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, the even the structure of the film is liberated. Makavejev creates a collage of different stories and forms. A story shot as a feature film about Yugoslav woman Milena, intertwined with performance art where the poet Tuli Kupferberg walks through Manhattan in a military uniform, a biographical documentary about the life of Wilhelm Reich, excerpts from other films… Also, there are documentary sequences with artists Betty Dodson who sketched masturbation, the editorial staff of the pornographic magazine Screw and Nancy Godfrey, a member of the group Plastic Caster who made penis castings of famous men and then made a documentary out of it.

Sequences are often linked to each other, and function in response to each other, using associative montage. In the very form of his film, Dušan Makavejev comments on the issue of sexual repression and totalitarianism, two phenomena that imply restraint, restriction, and control. While the content of the film itself depicts the hypocrisy of both capitalist democracy and communist authority, W.R. Mysteries Organisms are separated from established systems by their form. Makavejev uses the anarchical structure of the film Mysteries of the Organism, to express his aspiration for sexual, political and all-encompassing liberation.

The film begins with Tuli Kupferberg, who interprets the phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custody? ie. Who will guard our guardians ?, the Roman poet Juvenal. We see Tuli in civilian clothes for the first time, reciting through a voice over as he slowly dresses in a military uniform. Who will police our police?

The sound of the recitation is achieving a gradation as Kupferberg is going through a transformation from civilian to soldier and the reciting slowly turns into singing.

According to Wilhelm Reich, repressed sexual energy is released into violence. This scene shows this by using sound to imitate the structure of orgasm, which reaches its climax when Kupferberg is already dressed in a military uniform, carries a rifle and a helmet.

He who chooses his slavery, is he a slave still?, Kupferberg recites in the scene. The character of the soldier is set in a democratic America, passing through Manhattan throughout the film. Throughout the film, this question applies to both democracy and communism. Makavejev shows us that neither one of these political systems is truly free. When we meet Vladimir, a Soviet skater who firmly believes in communist political ideas, but we also meet a sexually frustrated man who, when he reaches his sexual freedom, does not know how to deal with her, and turns to violence. On the other hand, largely through the character of the American soldier, we get the impression that America whose myth lies in its synonymy with freedom, is unfree in its own way.

Makavejev sets the scenes up so that they function almost as a response to one other. Through the structure he also constantly draws a parallel between the political and the sexual, the capitalist and the communist.

As a soldier comes out of the frame, he discovers graffiti Only revolution ends war! (Only the revolution will end the war!). This scene is accompanied by three scenes; Milena, her roommate and a man, pouring egg yolk on their palms, intertwining their fingers.

An older couple is sitting in the grass.

A pornographic film over which Milena's voice talks about freeing orgasms and life energy, and that the freedom of love and work creates a society of workers' self-management. Here we can see the connection between the soldier and graffiti from the first scene, and the following love and sex scenes. A revolution that ends wars and violence must also include a sexual revolution. Yugoslavia, which emerged from the revolutionary movement and the reorganization of society for the benefit of workers, did not experience complete sexual liberation. Usually the idea of America is automatically placed as the opposite of socialist and communist society. However, Makavejev immediately follows up with a documentary part of the film that talks about Wilhelm Reich. Makavejev shows us that a democratic society is equally as sexually and politically frustrated. Reich, who escaped Hitler and Stalin, was censored in America, arrested, his works destroyed and burned and his life ended in prison. Makavejev shows us how the opposing political ideologies are connected with the manipulation and control of sexuality.

In the second half of the film, the driving force and the main focus is the character of Milena, a young woman who shares the name of the actress who embodies her. Milena is a progressive Yugoslav woman, a feminist heroine who believes in the idea and practice of free love. However, while Makavejev familiarises the viewer quickly with Milena's beliefs, she is set as a contrast to her roommate, Jagoda. While we see Jagoda from the beginning as a participant in sexual relations, Milena relativizes and intellectualizes sex, using the notion of sexuality to reach a political point.

Unlike her, Jagoda enagages in the release and consumption of "life energy". The peek of this paradox comes when Milena is giving a speech from her balcony to the inner yard of her building. While she promotes "free love", her roommate makes love. In one frame, Makavejev shows us the bodies of Jagoda and her partner, while in the background, through the window, we see the outline of Milena addressing the crowd gathered. At the moment, Milena seems like a party official who is distracted by general slogans: "Our path to the future must be positive in life. Socialism must not exclude human satisfaction from its program." While Milena attacks her listeners for doing nothing to get out of sexual misery, she herself has not yet been portrayed as a sexual being, except through her contextualization of the sexual act as an instrument of the revolution. This impression of party bureaucracy is reinforced by the insertion of a scene from a film about Stalin in which he also speaks about the working class.

At the very center of the film, Makavejev sets a crescendo scene, depicting people achieving orgasm in a group environment. By doing so he achieves that the core of the film becomes an orgasmic release of cosmic and life energy.

HAPPY TOGETHER by Wong Kar-wai

 

A retrospective of Wong Kar-Wai's films at the Rollberg cinema gives viewers the opportunity to see some of his most famous films such as Chunking Express (1994), In The Mood For Love (2000) and Fallen Angels (1995) and the subject today: Happy Together (1997). 

As a director, Wong Kar-Wai is known for his use of everyday life and objects to portray melancholy, loneliness and the passage of time. His films are poetic and often extremely metaphorical. Kar-Wai has a minimal amount of dialogue in most of his films, including Happy Together. Relationships are shown through objects, colors, movements. Cities and their rhythm play a big role and seem fast, busy compared to the people who live in them. The characters are constantly in motion. Their perception slows down while the world speeds up. His films, including this one, usually talk about unsustainable relationships and unrequited love.

Happy Together depicts the relationship between Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung), two young men from Hong Kong who moved to Argentina together. Their relationship is in a peripetual limbo between breaking up and reconciling again. The film has very little dialogue. Emotions are mostly conveyed through the expressiveness of acting. Tony Leung in the lead role confirms his title of the man who talks with his eyes. Kar-Wai, as in most of his films, uses voice over. Characters narrate their thoughts, ideas, feelings. Through the voice over at the beginning of the film, we learn the nature of Fai and Po's relationship, before we get to witness it. Fai explains to us the significance of the line Let's start over, which Po will use every time they return to each other. Voiceovers were used as a tool of introspection and contribute to the sense that the passage of time for the characters in the film is subjective. The characters are stuck between the present and the past and don't always know how to navigate that feeling. Each character in the film struggles in his own way with his own imbalance in the perception of time.

When speaking about the film, Wong Kar-Wai explained that Happy Together is not just a story about a relationship between two people, but a relationship between an individual and his past. "When people come to terms with themselves and their past, only then can they be happy together." The future is uncertain for Fai and Po. They are in an unknown country, lonely, without friends, family or money. Fai tries to earn enough to return home. Po, in order to survive, becomes a prostitute. We can conclude that their present is not ideal. Therefore, both of them escape into the past. Fai is so desperate to keep Po by her side that she hides his passport. They represent comfort and familiarity to each other in an environment where everything is unknown to them, and the future is terrifying in its uncertainty. We can see this fear of the unknown and the continuous return of Fai and Po to each other as a fear of death. In his book All About Love, bell hooks analyzes how the society we live in dictates the way we love. "The more we watch spectacles of meaningless death, random violence and cruelty, the more fearful we become in our everyday lives. We cannot accept the stranger with love because we are afraid of the stranger. We believe that the unknown person is the messenger of death who wants our life. Although we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know than someone we don't know, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the new.” For Fai and Po, even the pain they inflict on each other is not new. It is easier to bear than potential, fictitious pain that they have not yet met. Which they may not know how to deal with. Through them, Kar-Wai actually makes an extremely accurate and important commentary on human nature. Everything we know, even if it was agony, is less terrible than a potential disaster, agony, pain that has not yet happened to us. Which we are not familiar with and which, perhaps, we do not know how to navigate. Even in their most non-turbulent moments, Fai and Po do not give the impression of people who are truly happy together. The love between them can be felt, but the true happiness and satisfaction in being together cannot. Their moments are divided into calms and storms. Their most touching and passionate moments are again permeated with melancholy.

By being placed in an unknown space of a foreign country, through the film they are operated on by social norms. We don't get to see how their family reacts to their relationship or if they know about it, we don't know the attitude of their friends, government laws, etc. This makes Kar-Wai not focus on homosexuality, but only the love, problems and relationships between the two. Wong Kar-Wai himself said that he constructed the film in such a way that it talks exclusively about the relationship between two people, who happen to be both men. The most we learn about the perception of homosexuality in the society they live in is when Chang asks Lai what kind of women he likes, and he says everything. Through this small act of concealment, the director gives us a signal that the idea of relationships between two men is not necessarily socially accepted. However, we never feel that their homosexuality separates them from the society in which they live. What plays a bigger role in this is the fact that they are strangers, on the opposite side of the world from home. Young people without money and a plan in an unknown place.

The way the film was shot contributes a lot to the feelings it evokes. The film begins in black and white. The choice of black and white lasts as long as the breakup between Fai and Po. When, for the umpteenth time, they return to each other again, the film continues in color. Towards the end of their relationship, the colors become increasingly saturated. Through the picture we can almost feel the discomfort of the heat. The framing adds to the feeling of claustrophobia. The colors are often so bright that they are almost violent. The most dominant colors in the film are red and orange. Red is a color that symbolizes passion and love, but also blood, war, violence. The relationship between Fai and Po is not physically violent, but there is something oppressive about their passion, with a toxic emotional intensity.

Towards the end of the film, the colors become cooler, contributing to the feeling of loneliness in both Fai and Po. In one of Fai's last lines before leaving Argentina, he says, "All lonely people are the same." The image reflects his words. Fai and Po were filmed in the same space, both seeming more like part of a mass of people than individuals.

The motif of the Iguazu Falls runs through the entire film. Fai and Po have a lamp with a waterfall painted on it. At the beginning of the film, Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing try to visit the waterfall together, but along the way they get lost, argue and break up. At the beginning of the film and at the end, we see footage of a waterfall that is scary and beautiful at the same time. A waterfall is a force of nature, something we cannot control, something bigger than us. In a way, Lai and Ho are constantly trying to control each other and refuse to accept the natural course of their relationship's dissolution and the natural course of their own personality development. Therefore, their relationship was doomed from the start. Fai breaks free from their toxic cycle by going to the waterfall alone and finally, leaving Argentina. Iguazu Falls is on the border between Argentina and Brazil. There is a legend related to the waterfall, that one of the deities planned to marry the beautiful girl Naipi. However, Naipi was in love with the mortal Taroba. Naipi and Taroba fled from the deity across the river in a canoe. Enraged, the god cut the river, condemning the lovers to an eternal fall and creating the Iguazu Falls. Throughout the film, Fai and Po seem to be stuck in a cycle of eternal decline. At the end, Fai stands in front of the waterfall, as the water violently splashes him. Po, in Fai's apartment, lets out a cry of pain realizing that Fai is no longer there, looking at the waterfall-lamp. While Po cries and inhales Fai's blanket. Fai stands alone in front of the waterfall, soaked to the skin, thinking about how Po should have been there with him. However, Wong Kar-Wai demonstrates to us that sometimes despite how much people love each other, it is impossible for them to be together in a healthy way.

Happy Together was created when Wong Kar-Wai and his director of photography, Christopher Doyle, like the characters in the film, went to the farthest place from Hong Kong - Argentina. Like the characters, they had no plan. They didn't have a written script, they just let themselves go on an adventure. In 1997, Britain handed over Hong Kong to China. Hong Kong's future was suddenly full of uncertainty. One of the critics' interpretations of this film is as a metaphor for the political relations between China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The relationship between Fai and Po and its complicated nature represent the uncertain times that await Hong Kong at the time, with great anxiety among the population. Fai and Po, because of their sexual orientation, represent the social freedoms available to those in Hong Kong. The allusion to Fai's difficult relationship with his father, China, is in the hope that the two nations can live side by side in the future. Hong Kong is the runaway son on the other side of the world, but now it must return and reconcile its differences with old-fashioned China. However, although it is possible to find a metaphorical link between the geo-political relations of China and Hong Kong and the characters in the film, it seems that Happy Together is above all a study of human nature, fears, desires, insecurities and relationships.