WR: Mysteries of the Organism
(Directed by Dusan Makaveyev, 1971, English and Serbo-Croation with English Subtitles, 85 minutes)
16 December, 20 Uhr @ Cagliostro / Praxis Shop - Lenbachstr. 10 Ostkreuz, Berlin

Datacide presents the screening of “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” at Cagliostro on 16 December at 20,00. Originally titled “WR (Wilhelm Reich): Mysteries of the Orgasm”, this subversive critique was shown only at a few cinemas in Yugoslavia in 1971 and then banned. This forced the director to emigrate in order to continue his relentless critique of Marxist-Lennism, traditional sexual politics and all anti-liberatory tendencies of the Cold War era. “WR” masterfully uses collage filmic technique to interlace documentary, fictional and found footage together into a combative story on Reich’s sexual politics. The collage techniques shock the viewer and instigating critique at every level. Datacide (C. Fringeli and Nemeton) will make a short introduction and a discussion with the viewing audience at the end of the film to highlight some of the aesthetic and political issues.

The feature length film “Saila” by Julia Ostertag situates in the industrial ruins of East Berlin a visceral enactment of post apocalyptic terror. The remnants, both broken people and destroyed environments, after the near end of the world are never given a reason for continued life, nor is it ever specified what catastrophes coalesced to become everyday life for the film’s protagonists. “Saila” can be viewed as an experimental project that attempts to critique film as a visual medium and standardized genre by doing away with traditional narrative strategies such as linear character development and causal storytelling. [Read more →]

‘If you ask for my life, I will stab you in the heart’

1.

Four black and white camera angles show a subway station; no sound. A train arrives, people get on and off. The lights of the next train shine from the tunnel. An agitated man descends onto the tracks. His final moments are recorded in monochrome, 15 frames per second, 13, 14, 15.

In 2006’s “The Description of Bankruptcy”, director Lee Kang Hyun carries forward the haunting violence of this moment, the despair in the jumper’s anonymous fate and the events which would compel it in order to provoke reflection on the financial crisis of 1997 and its aftermath. Images of Seoul are overlapped with radio channel chatter, news reports stream lifestyle advice atop cityscapes. We are taken from one scene to another. Everyday life goes on in industrial spaces; a printing press rapidly stamps paper. Traffic passes through Seoul: ‘People who don’t smile a lot have wrinkles in their face’, a stone-faced man stacks papers in a printing machine, his gloves stained red. ‘…smile out loud as much as you can. One who smiles a lot also has less chance for mental illnesses such as hypochondria.’ Other workers steam-press clothing in a factory with the radio confidently declaring: ‘The time has come when all power comes from the people, as stated in the Constitution article 1.’ We are not given any cues to celebrate. Steam rises from the cloth.
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(BFI DVD 2007, RRP £19.99)

“Peter Whitehead and The Sixties” is the first official DVD issue of “Wholly Communion” (1965) and “Benefit of the Doubt” (1967), two documentaries ‘directed’ by an obscure and yet notorious figure. Peter Whitehead was, and is, a chameleon who excels at endlessly reinventing himself. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University he studied natural sciences but soon abandoned these to pursue fine art at The Slade in London. If one believes other versions of Whitehead’s life, then at Cambridge he may have been recruited by British Intelligence who propelled him into the bohemian art world. Regardless, in the mid-sixties Whitehead briefly but successfully refashioned himself as a film-maker (albeit not a particularly competent one). For many years Whitehead was close to Howard Marks, and veterans of the sixties counterculture tend to view his role as an important prosecution witness against this pot celebrity in a major drug smuggling trial as somewhat shameful. With the release of this BFI retrospective DVD, it would seem Whitehead is once more a film-maker….
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Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Shut [Warner Brothers]

“That’s what you say now, so at this moment you may even believe it.” (1)

1. A yuppie nightmare movie segues into the enigma of its director’s death. There are no more questions that could be answered. As there were previously no answers to be had. The director could be anonymous. But the author too is dead. Schnitzler died in 1931 and his traumnovelle lays it out: traum as dream and as trauma. The two almost interchangeable if it is that the dream is that which can present the ‘demand of the other’ and present it in such a way as for us to feel it as a pressure to respond (to our ‘other’ so to speak). But dream is fantasy too and the core here, the propulsion, comes as an imaginary infidelity. That it is desire that is beyond the demand. But is it good? Is it bad?
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