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In contrast to Cummings' kumrads "afraid to love," a perpetual Red orgasm. "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich" who fled Nazi Europe only to see book-burnings in Eisenhower's America, a dialectical jamboree on the mad scientist. The call to arms is a roll in the hay ("for your health's sake, fuck freely"), thus the orgone box in a garage in rural Maine. Relatives and disciples, the New World's meat markets and barbershops photographed for the benefit of Herzog's Stroszek, straightforward views of therapy sessions let the lunacy speak for itself. The documentary skin tears to accommodate philosophical skits and impish juxtapositions, Rabelais' "fine yolks of eggs" break and smear merrily. "Between socialism and physical love there must be no conflict!" New York and Belgrade and their respective kooks, Dusan Makavejev keeps them swirling with a juggler's smiling concentration. Street theater with Tuli Kupferberg in fatigues, glitter-dusted Jackie Curtis and boyfriend licking each other's cones, casual Friday at the Screw office. Opposite these vérité glances, genital acrobatics in Yugoslavia: The heroine (Milena Dravić) proselytizes while her roommate (Jagoda Kaloper) humps beau after beau, a matter of theory and practice. The ideal Lenin is the headliner of the Moscow Ice Follies (Ivica Vidović), "the sporting kind" yet so repressed as to follow intercourse with murder. "The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love." Makavejev's body politic, tragic and exultant, made to dance through sustained montage-collision. Sex as life's fluidity, fascism as its hardening—a signature daisy-chain follows from the plaster-casting of a penis to a Stalin impersonator in tinted propaganda to the military caveman jacking off his rifle. Freud on the dartboard, electroshock phantoms on the sidelines, "How Karl Marx Fell in Love." Smetana and Coca-Cola jingles, "Kill for Peace" and "The Prayer of François Villon." Only connect? Nothing less than Green's The Brain That Wouldn't Die for the beatific punchline, the decapitated liberator has no regrets.
--- Fernando F. Croce |