Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Porton, Richard

Titel

WR: Mysteries of the Organism/Sweet Movie

Ist Teil von

• Film international (Göteborg, Sweden), 2008-05, Vol.6 (3), p.69

Ort / Verlag

Bristol: Intellect Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text (EBSCO)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Runtime 85 Minutes DVD US, 2007 Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (Region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Extras Audio commentary assembled from Raymond Durgnat's 1999 book on the film Hole in the Soul, Makavejev's 1994 'tragicomic autobiographical short film, originally made for the BBC'. Expelled by the German Communist Party in 1932 for encouraging sexual enlightenment among the working class and imprisoned by the American Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s for promoting the 'orgone accumulator' - boxes designed to be entered for the purposes of harnessing 'primordial cosmic energy' - Reich was rediscovered by the counterculture and perversely honoured for his being ostracized by both prudish Communists and capitalists. A contemporary of the Beats and member of 'The Fugs', the late 1960s only bona fide anarchist rock group, Kupferberg's facetious take on American militarism circa the Vietnam era (he dresses as a marauding soldier and befuddles conservative New Yorkers with his hippie hairstyle and marine garb) serves as a witty segue into a seriocomic overview of Wilhelm Reich's life and career. Even though Sweet Movie became most notorious for the stomach-churning food orgy performed by Otto Muehl's theatre troupe on the ill-fated boat - not to mention scenes of Anna stripping for dewy-eyed young boys - it might be easy to forget that this succès de scandale is in fact a melancholy dirge for an ultra-left tradition snuffed out by both the failure of mainstream Communism and the unfortunate success of neoliberalism and the ideology of the so-called 'free market'.