Reviewing Dusan Makavejev's 1971 W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism one American film critic wrote: "A movie that, had he been compelled to see it, would surely have given John Wayne a stroke." Something similar almost happened to Tito when he saw the film. He was a big fan of John Wayne and obviously shared with him similar taste in film. Makavejev's W.R. was banned in Yugoslavia. In USA its distribution was limited in some areas to pornography cinemas where it was billed as a "sex film". However the film was not about sex but rather about sex and freedom. Both capitalism and communism in their late modernist versions could once agree that sex - to some extent - needs freedom. But Wilhelm Reich's point - and the very idea of Makavejev's W.R. - was that freedom needs sex. This was too much for both sides of the Cold War divide. Nobody seems to be afraid today of this once so fearsome liaison between sex and freedom. It has become history, or more precisely, an art history. Is that all?
