Reich
youth can be the subject for a good fiction film. In his youth he was a charismatic leader, a young doctor in the revolu- tionary movement in Germany, who tried to introduce sex and love into the revolutionary movement and keep the movement alive. But what happened to Reich actually: he started the Sexpol movement in Germany; in 1930 they had about 30,000 members and organized lec- tures all over Germany. Reich’s ideal was that the Communist Party should organize youth around dance-halls, not to try to get young peo- ple to dull political lectures-to find young peo- ple where they really are. I even remember reading about young Nazis, members of the Hitlerjugend, coming to hear Reich and leaving the Nazi Party after getting a deeper understanding of their own inner troubles, their rea- sons for being politically active. I have heard from our ambassador in Paris-he attended Reich’s lectures when he was a student in Prague in 1934-that there were thousands of students just all over the hall, sitting on windowsills and in the staircases, like Columbia in April ’68, or Berkeley; and he was a kind of prophet of a new time, an affirmative culture-some kind of new integrity between man and his social life.
What happened at the end of the Sex- pol movement was that Reich was thrown out of it. It was organized by the Communist Party; and what he was teaching was too much for them. First they banned his books from all Party bookstores; and then they organized a majority in the Sexpol movement and threw him out. It was just a few months before Hitler came to power, so it is not widely known. So you see first he was oppressed by people in his own movement. He was very devoted to the revolu- tion, but he realized that the revolution didn’t need him. And when Hitler came to power, his books were suppressed and then burned. And then it was repeated, in ’56 and ’57 by such a democratic government as the American one.
Reich was actually sent to prison for con- tempt of court. They chased him because of “illegal interstate sale of orgone accumulators”- devices that had not been scientifically proved. But then he didn’t appear before the court; he said “Science has to judge me, and not an agency for food and cosmetics that is connected with the interests of the cosmetics industry.” He was very angry, and had good reason to be. He got two years for contempt of court.
WR
what was very important for me was to preserve the in- tegrity of every piece. So that means I didn’t mix into documentary shots with his patients; or there is stock footage of Reich and his col- laborators, and the commentary that is run over it is some sort of just interpretation of what people were talking about then. The film is very complicated; there is a lot of playing in the film; but I never played in the separate pieces, I kept them as separate blocs.
I thought for years about how Reich could be explained.
Reich says that contemporary human beings have re- actionary bodies-rigid bodies. And our charac- terological stiffness is rooted in muscular armor. Psychological armor equals muscular armor, on the biological level. And we are conditioned to be like that from our early months of life. So it seems that the task of changing people is much more complicated than it looks like if you just feel you can apply Marx’s theories and make a redistribution of wealth or abolish private prop- erty, and everything will be OK. That’s not true, because people are repeating-that’s what happened in the whole so-called socialist world today: it’s just one great repetition of all the rigidity of bourgeois society. So when I made my film Man Is Not a Bird I was trying to ex- plain that you can have global changes but peo- ple can still stay the same, unhappy or awkward or privately confused; and in all my other films I try to follow this line, and I came gradually to Reich, who really explained why we are un- able to change quickly. We are able to change, but not so quickly, and probably some people are unable to change at all.
Well, I will tell you that we got a recommendation from the International Evan- gelical jury in Berlin-composed of priests and people connected with the ecumenical move- ment-and they gave a recommendation for the film to be seen and discussed on the subject of the “importance of eroticism, sexuality and love for political freedom.” So it seems that people understand that the main topic of the film is not sexuality but human personal happiness con- nected with political freedom, which means men in the social environment. Generally reactions in Europe were more political than sexual, to the effect that “sex is not so important in the film.” (In fact, that’s not true.) But it seems that people are getting the message that the main thing in sexual repression or sexual freedom is actually the political content of human personal freedom
In Yugoslavia we got in trouble very quickly when we came back from Cannes [where the film won the grand prize]. A screening was organized by people hostile to the film-they got about 400 people, mainly older people, some of them connected with some sort of preservation of traditions, that means people who are taking care of monuments and graveyards and museums, plus old revolution- aries, so-called hard-liners who are now out of the main social activities and are on the margin of social life taking care of their memories of our glorious past-and they were mad. It was terrible. People just started shouting. It was an extremely unpleasant experience.
On what grounds were they angry?
Because Stalin was connected with sexuality! Stalin was connected with the phallus. And they are just completely unable to see any connection between political power and sexual potency; the sexual meaning of political power was completely strange to them, and they were completely sexually upset. They were sweating, trembling, a lot of physical signs: they were just showing complete physiological distress. But these reactions were expressed in very political terms: “politically unacceptable,” “ideologically wrong,” “attitude of the enemy,” this kind of political cliche were all activated against the film.
Have they banned the film?
They succeeded in stopping it, so far, on administrative grounds, although we have the necessary signatures on the censorship board. But they didn’t dare to send the police to take the film away from us; they don’t want to fight us in the courts. Meanwhile new censor regula- tions have been set up and a new board has come in, so we are tied up in all this legal procedures business.
The film contains some very satirical scenes against organized Communism-for instance that scene where the madman is banging his head against the wall and on the sound track is this hymn to the glorious Communist Party, “from which all our blessings flow,” and so on. Is the film attacked as being anti-Com- munist, and if so how do you reply?
D.M.: It’s interesting that the film was at- tacked on those grounds by a very tiny portion of Party members, and in fact not so much by Party members as by ex-Party members who were thrown out of the Party as Stalinists. It seems that for most people in the country it is clear that the film is not anti-Communist but anti-Stalinist.
J.M.: It’s also anti-Leninist, however.
D.M.: Oh, no, that’s not true. The film is dis- cussing some points in Leninism, or about Len- in, but the film is not anti-Lenin, in my opinion. Even some people in high Party positions told me the film is clearly anti-Stalinist, and the film is clearly against blocs, and the film is for inde- pendent communism or independent socialism. So it seems many people understood the film politically as an honest contribution to inner discussion in the communist movement. Now about Leninism. In the film you have direct quotations from Lenin in two places: one is where the awkward Russian figure-skating champion is trying to talk to the Yugoslavian revolutionary girl, and they have no other way to talk with each other but to whisper political ideas in a very tender way: so they speak about “what are the tasks of youth,” and this is an exact quotation from Lenin.
J.M.: And the other is the statement about the Appassionata Sonata and how it makes him want to treat people nicely and pat them on the head, when what is needed at this time is to hit them over the head.
D.M.: Yeah, because he believed that we must change people. Lenin was a true neurotic, a man torn by his wish to change people and the world, and his wish to help people. So I think to talk about Leninism in terms of a theoretical outcome of a deep wish to change-this is an effort to understand, both to criticize and to understand, but I don’t think it is just hostile if you are critical. And then if you remember the moment when the Russian says, “In prin- ciple we are against any violence,” and she touches him on the most important part of his, uh, revolutionary organism, which he is trying to forget-and then he hits her. So at the mo- ment he turns to pure violence. You remember what is the next shot? She looks at him, but he is not there any more: there is Stalin. Stalin crying. That’s a beautiful shot, and I took it [from a Russian feature]. Stalin watches the bench in the snow where Lenin used to sit, and he is crying. This is pure demagogy, and I loved this scene for its shallowness, this kind of kitsch quality, surrealist qualities. But I introduced it into the film at a moment connected with Lenin. Of course everything is distorted a little, or made into caricature, because the music that follows the skater Vladimir Ilyitch’s speech-he is a kind of positive hero, beautiful, an artist- not the real Lenin, he is kind of a marzipan rein- carnation-that music is of course not the Ap- passionata but some Hungarian gypsy music entitled “Like a Beautiful Dream”: low-level music, not Beethoven. So there is another shift in meaning between his speech and the music on the sound track. Then if you remember the scene that follows, Stalin is receiving a letter that is addressed to Lenin. So I think that Stalin is the worst possible reincarnation of Lenin- all forceful features of Lenin, all Lenin’s efforts to change things forcefully, they were reincarnated in Stalin. This is the part of Lenin’s revo- lutionary program that I can’t agree upon; be- cause forceful change can’t bring change: that’s I think very simple.
E.C.: Do you think that traditional “organ- ized communism” is inherently anti-sex? Can the anti-body, anti-sex attitude of the tradition- al left be escaped?
D.M.: I think it is not only communist or- ganization that has been anti-sex; it seems to me that all organization in the world-look at the churches, look at governments, look at the police, the army, everything is anti-sex; the es- sentially homosexual structure of the whole gov- ernment is completely hidden; we have only males in business, in politics, in the army and police-so all that is a pure continuation of boy- hood; this kind of homosexual male period is projected into the structure of the whole so- ciety, so women are completely outside of the image of any kind of meaningful social organization. They are kept just to medicine, teach- ing, and “humanitarian” cages, completely out of the main power structure. The only movements that were connected with the body were fascist movements: they were talking about blood, and earth, and body, but again in I think a different kind of homo- sexual overtones, and not in a fully heterosexual meaning. It seems to me that the sexual significance of movements and organizations is completely de- stroyed in our alienated style of living. And my idea was to build a movie that is a kind of interplay between organization and spontaneity. For it seems to me that the all-anarchism of, let’s say, the New American Cinema or the an- archism of the New Left, this kind of totally unorganized way in which people are now re- acting to power structures, is inefficient because it lacks organization; yet if it turns to organization it takes the same old forms, like the high- ly organized, militant, puritan, self-sacrificing groups, so this just perpetuates the old system of power and fighting power with power. And it seems to me that we have to fight power with spontaneity and humor, but in a more organized way than it is done. It seems to me that some future society which I believe in, a society organized on work and love without any politi- cal mediators-work, love, and communication, let’s say-must be a highly organized kind of society that has a lot of space for all kinds of spontaneous activities. In my film-I worked eight months on it in the editing room to get this kind of strong organization, yet trying to preserve all the spontaneity possible in the film. And I feel that’s the reason it is puzzling: peo- ple are not sure where I am leading them.
Actually the film is very traditionally struc- tured. There are the first three reels of docu- mentary introduction, and then we have this very slow dramatic exposition, then we have the conflict say in reels five and six, and those highly emotional things in reel eight-the plas- ter-caster scene, which is a kind of climactic scene; and then you have a melodramatic con- tinuation in reels nine and ten which in purely dramatic terms explain this conflict between personality and society: “You are able to love mankind but you are not able to love a human person.” (The women’s libbers are very happy with this scene, where she is hitting him trying to awaken him to real masculinity instead of this empty masculinity.) And then you have this kind of cathartic song at the end. So as you see the whole structure is very traditional: you are supposed to be relaxed for a few reels, then puzzled, then you have a build-up of the con- flict, then the big chase, and then you have catharsis! But this traditional organization is completely invisible in my film: there are a lot of other attractions, and they are done in this kind of open-structure way so that everybody is projecting his own thing into the film. I call it the “liberating trap”-an open structure that forces people to throw their own irrationalities into the film. There are so many things left un- answered, so many questions posed-you must answer them in order to be able to “survive,” to be able to follow the story, to go on. And there is not time enough left for thinking, just for projecting your own wrong ideas, your own misinterpretations, your own irrationalities into the film-but then to go on. At the end many people are very restless, puzzled, confused-but highly interested in the subject. They’re ready to come see the film again, to read more Reich, to ask me about all kinds of things.
I am very skeptical about systems, liv- ing in a country which is not in this big bloc of “freedom-loving” nations in NATO, and also is not in the big bloc of “freedom-loving” na- tions in the Warsaw Pact; in Yugoslavia we don’t see very many differences between life in America and Russia as far as big ideas are con- cerned: these big, beautiful, patriotic ideas that enable big countries to smash small countries and kill people in the name of humanity, or im- pose their own systems of values on others. So I think these big superpowers may have the same policy on the global level. On a practical level of course America is very different from Rus- sia-because in Russia each individual has his own happiness delivered to him by the govern- ment or Party, and here everybody has to fight for his own happiness in the market. But it seems to me the sets of illusions are very simi- lar, and the inflexibility of the two systems is very similar. Of course the American system is much more flexible in responding to the mar- ket, but politically many things that are against all economy are perpetuated. So more and more, all over the world, people feel that something must be done: systems that start from people spontaneously organizing themselves in some sort of meaningful groups, and then not alien- ating their power to some sort of more “repre- sentative” higher levels-just preserving their own communal power. I think the new means of communication that we have in the media, in this electronic world, enable us to live in our small ethnic groups, or very specific groups, yet being able to communicate all over the globe without the necessity of having this type of power structure to mediate in our names. I be- lieve in a world without states, a world without politicians, without these political structures rep- resenting alienated power.
R.S.: A kind of loosely structured anarchy?
D.M.: No, a kind of well organized anarchy! I think the failure of world communism to do anything meaningful is that it built some sort of very militant, Christian-style militancy of fighting for a paradise that will come for our grandchildren, and for them we must put our- selves through the fire; and this leads to terrible things, like millions of people put in concentra- tion camps by their own comrades, and many of them in the camps even believing that the camps were good for the system. You remem- ber that many people died shouting “Long live Stalin!” even when they were being killed on Stalin’s orders. This self-sacrificing revolution- ism is the same kind of religious, Judeo-Chris- tian kind of bullshit.