389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

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orlik
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#126 Post by orlik » Sun Aug 19, 2007 12:13 am

oldsheperd wrote:For anyone who really enjoys the perversity of these films I strongly recommend Miike's Visitor Q. I have no idea why this film isn't more notorious.
Me too, maybe it's just because the film has not had that much exposure, at least in the UK - it's on DVD, but as far as I know it had no theatrical release. It makes Pasolini's Teorema, on which it's loosely based, look like Bridget Jones's Diary. There's probably links that could be made with Makavejev's work in terms of regression etc - but in any case, I'll never think about milk in quite the same way again.
the revolutionary guy in orange was just like the Elmo Oxygen character.
That's the great Tuli Kupferberg, 'Beat' poet and former member of The Fugs, a Left-anarchist psychedelic-folk-garage group who basically invented punk at least 10 years too early - their albums are well worth checking out. Apparently Makavejev originally wanted to use the 'Yippie' anarchist and prankster Abbie Hoffman for this part, but - bizarrely - Hoffman demanded too high a fee.

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Person
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#127 Post by Person » Tue Aug 21, 2007 4:41 pm

I'm not sure where else to put this:

Film as a Subversive Art: Cinema 16 programmer, Amos Vogel talks about bringing avant-garde films to America. The book is brilliant and I'd love to see this documentary in full.

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John Cope
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#128 Post by John Cope » Wed Sep 12, 2007 3:25 am

From the always excellent Steven Shaviro:

[quote]Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974) is his follow-up to WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and the last truly radical movie he was given the money to make. Like WR, Sweet Movie is a dense montage of disparate political and sexual elements, but overall it is much more cryptic and baffling. There are two main plotlines. The first involves Miss World, the winner of a virgin's beauty contest, who is married to the world's wealthiest man, who of course is a crass American capitalist. The other concerns a young sailor from the Battleship Potemkin, a “sexual proletarian,â€

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Tommaso
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#129 Post by Tommaso » Sun Nov 04, 2007 8:44 am

Forgive the length and somewhat rambling and unfocussed character of this post, but somehow it's hard to come to terms with both these films in a brief way....

I watched "Sweet Movie" yesterday for the first time (incidentally, it was the 50th anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Reich), and must say that I'm surprised how much I liked it after all the things that had been said here and elsewhere (in good or bad). This is certainly a daring film, but as with "WR" (which I watched some weeks ago), the provocation is not for its own sake, and it surprises me how many reviewers even today seem to be shocked by it. Sure, the Commune sequence is somewhat tough stuff, but not more so than anything in Greenaway's "Cook", for example, and certainly far less than "Salo". The wild caricature of the industrialist and the sheer over-the-top character of his 'household' (his mother and the muscleman) also reminded me of Jarman's "Jubilee" in places, a film that to my surprise also is rather controversially discussed here.

What seems to me is underrated in the discussions of both "WR" and "Sweet Movie" is the sheer lyricism of both these films. The scene where Anna Planeta seduces the children is played wonderfully warm and is enchantingly 'sensual' (as opposed to the more 'sexual' quality of other parts), and VERY, VERY beautifully filmed. Here as with the whole film I thought everything about it is symbolic, perhaps even too overtly so. Anna, representing 'The Revolution', killing 'her children'. No hope, it seems, from this side, and also not – of course – from the western, capitalist world. In this respect a rather daring point of view for a film from the early 70s, and this individualism, this refusal of Makavejev to place his hope on either of the political systems – but instead radically deconstructing both – results in a quality of melancholy that pervades "Sweet Movie" even more than "WR". Still, the 'resurrection' of the dead children at the very end was an unexpected moment of 'hope'.
I'm not sure whether the Muehl Comune was seen by him as a possible third way at the time he made the film; it seems that he had at least some sympathetic 'understanding' at what they were aiming at, judging from what he says in the Cowie interview. But at least watching this now (with a mixture of disgust and amusement), it certainly seems to be another misguided hope. I'm only surprised that the Muehl commune apparently referred to Reich as their main point of inspiration. I guess poor Wilhelm (who, apart from being somewhat conservative and homophobic in his late years, was certainly against concepts of unfettered 'free love' and 'regression' for its own sake) would have turned in his grave more than once had he seen this....

Btw: I wonder that nobody seems to have commented on "Hole in the soul" in detail yet. It's more than an addition, but a fully fledged, very lyrical (again) self-reflection, and well: Makavejev comes over as a totally charming and nice old man, quite the opposite of what one would expect from a notorious intellectual provocateur. The impossibility of finding new work he wants to do reminded me remotely -and with the same sadness - of the later years of Michael Powell...
Another extra that endeared itself to me immediately was the TV appearance of the actress who played Anna Planeta, singing that song with the new Pasolini lyrics. Just wonderful, and good old Pier Paolo at his very best...

All praise to Criterion for bringing us these two (nay: three) films, then. I was initially not sure whether I should buy these films, but am now very thankful I did. Certainly the most intellectually engaging, thought-provoking, and - let's face it - beautiful films I had seen in the last months, from a director who seems to be very unjustly neglected today.

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jbeall
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#130 Post by jbeall » Sat Apr 05, 2008 12:48 pm

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:I was only offended at one part when they decided to use Beethoven over footage of some footage of a man jumping around with a plate of his own shit. This wasn't offensive because of the act, but mostly how he used Beethoven over the footage.
How did you feel when Smetana's "Vltava" was playing while Nancy Godfrey was making a plaster cast of Jim Buckley's penis?

Your comment also reminded me of Haneke's The Piano Teacher. I read that Austrian audiences strongly objected to the scene in the booth of the sex shop, where Isabelle Huppert is watching pornography while Schubert is playing in the background. Of all the "objectionable" moments of that film, this was the one that riled audiences the most (just as the suggestions that Schubert was a homosexual riled the public years before). But to get to the point: isn't Haneke trying to show that the sexual sublime and the artistic sublime co-exist on the same continuum? Or pointing out the similarity between artistic production and the production of waste? At least, that's one way of looking at it...

So by this logic (which I'm sure not everybody will agree on), the scene in Sweet Movie is offensive to you precisely b/c it's placing Beethoven and shit in the same continuum, rather than distancing the aesthetic from the bodily (or even the scatological). But Makavejev's films--both of them, even though I didn't much care for Sweet Movie--are using the body--as sexual body, as political body, and also as grotesque shitting body--as aesthetic fragments in the overall collage. Ergo, if you object to Beethoven being placed next to shit on philosophical grounds, it would seem to me that you're essentially rejecting Makavejev's entire premise, regardless of whether the other scenes struck a nerve or not.
Last edited by jbeall on Mon Apr 07, 2008 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Robin Hamlyn
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#131 Post by Robin Hamlyn » Sun Apr 06, 2008 5:17 pm

Your comment reminded me of Haneke's The Piano Teacher. I read that Austrian audiences strongly objected to the scene in the booth of the sex shop, where Isabelle Huppert is watching pornography while Schubert is playing in the background. Of all the "objectionable" moments of that film, this was the one that riled audiences the most (just as the suggestions that Schubert was a homosexual riled the public years before). But to get to the point: isn't Haneke trying to show that the sexual sublime and the artistic sublime co-exist on the same continuum?
Also the idea that the squalid and the exalted exist simultaneously. There is no "gradual descent" into the abyss. What I found challenging was Haneke's decision to represent a woman's addiction to pornography.

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The Elegant Dandy Fop
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#132 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:10 pm

jbeall wrote:
The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:I was only offended at one part when they decided to use Beethoven over footage of some footage of a man jumping around with a plate of his own shit. This wasn't offensive because of the act, but mostly how he used Beethoven over the footage.
Your comment reminded me of Haneke's The Piano Teacher. I read that Austrian audiences strongly objected to the scene in the booth of the sex shop, where Isabelle Huppert is watching pornography while Schubert is playing in the background. Of all the "objectionable" moments of that film, this was the one that riled audiences the most (just as the suggestions that Schubert was a homosexual riled the public years before). But to get to the point: isn't Haneke trying to show that the sexual sublime and the artistic sublime co-exist on the same continuum? Or pointing out the similarity between artistic production and the production of waste? At least, that's one way of looking at it...

So by this logic (which I'm sure not everybody will agree on), the scene in Sweet Movie is offensive to you precisely b/c it's placing Beethoven and shit in the same continuum, rather than distancing the aesthetic from the bodily (or even the scatological). But Makavejev's films--both of them, even though I didn't much care for Sweet Movie--are using the body--as sexual body, as political body, and also as grotesque shitting body--as aesthetic fragments in the overall collage. Ergo, if you object to Beethoven being placed next to shit on philosophical grounds, it would seem to me that you're essentially rejecting Makavejev's entire premise, regardless of whether the other scenes struck a nerve or not.
There's a major difference when people take a shit, supposedly, for art, and pornography. At least pornography doesn't try to disguise it self as something else. That scene in The Piano Teacher, I had no problem with, it's a in very different context than the scene in Sweet Movie.

I'm not rejecting the film as a whole on the basis of this one scene though, but rejecting it for being a terrible film altogether. Terrible mix of dated politics and pseudo-intellectual theories about the body. WR may have dated politics, but was much more focused and in all honesty more fun to watch than Sweet Movie.

It's still a shame though, I really wanted to like Sweet Movie.

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jbeall
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#133 Post by jbeall » Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:08 pm

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:There's a major difference when people take a shit, supposedly, for art, and pornography. At least pornography doesn't try to disguise it self as something else. That scene in The Piano Teacher, I had no problem with, it's a in very different context than the scene in Sweet Movie.
What pornography do you watch? I've seen plenty of porn with pretensions to "art." Porn "disguises" itself all the time; otherwise why all that irritating dialog when nobody's fucking?

I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing between shit (la merde pour l'art???) and pornography. Is it okay to say 'shit' as long as nobody does it? Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel has shit flying left and right, while Sancho Panza shits himself with fear in Don Quixote, and Milan Kundera defines kitsch as "the absolute denial of shit" (and talks about Beethoven, too, although not in the same section that he discusses shit).

I found that scene in Sweet Movie repulsive as well, but I just don't understand how your objection is any different from that of The Piano Teacher's Austrian audiences. And I don't see how shit (or pornography) is "being disguised as something else" in either film. It's precisely Makavejev's and Haneke's points to juxtapose the aesthetic sublime with the bodily grotesque. The degree to which I prefer Haneke's film is probably the degree to which I can tolerate looking at porn more than I can looking at shit, but that has much more to do with my preferences as a viewer, and not the artistic quality of the film.

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Tommaso
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#134 Post by Tommaso » Tue Apr 08, 2008 5:31 am

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:I'm not rejecting the film as a whole on the basis of this one scene though, but rejecting it for being a terrible film altogether. Terrible mix of dated politics and pseudo-intellectual theories about the body.
I'm not sure whether you took "Sweet Movie" perhaps a little too seriously. I didn't have the impression that Makavejev directly 'supported' the aims and ideas of the Muehl community, but used it as an example of how sexual and other politics went together at that time, pretty much in a near-documentary fashion. Using Beethoven together with shit of course is a move to highlight the aspect of the 'grotesque', and it's certainly irreverent. But you could object to similar scenes in Pasolini's "Salo" for the same reason, the use of Orff's "Carmina Burana" and other classical music in that film. Of course Pasolini had totally different points to make than Makavejev, but none of the two films are even close to being 'pornographic' in my view.

"Sweet Movie", I believe, is a very melancholic film in a way, deploring both the breakdown of the 'official' society and the apparent cul-de-sac that the antagonists of official culture have run into. Whereas WR was a joyful or at least playful way of 'breaking the rules', "Sweet Movie" takes back the aspects of hope that are in the earlier film. In this respect, it's a disillusioned film, and if not the better of the two (probably not), perhaps the one that is more to the point from today's point-of-view.

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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#135 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Fri May 30, 2008 12:22 pm

Senses of Cinema has published two very good articles on Sweet Movie.

One is by Makavejev himself here

The other is a chapter from an upcoming book here

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blindside8zao
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#136 Post by blindside8zao » Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:24 am

Can anyone comment on Stanley Cavell's essay for Sweet Movie? I know of his name because I'm about to start grad studies in
Continental philosophy in Boston and though I haven't read his stuff was surprised to notice his name here. It appears he does a lot with film.

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#137 Post by karmajuice » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:53 am

Aside from the Sweet Movie essay I've only read one thing by Cavell, but it is well worth reading. It's called Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage and it's a philosophical perspective on a series of classic screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, among others). I'm not sure what else he's written on film (I remember he actually mentions a Sweet Movie essay several times throughout the footnotes; I suspect it may be a more substantial one than the criterion essay, but I'm not certain).

Pursuits of Happiness is brilliant, though. It's the only book-length film analysis I've read and it's rooted in some philosophy I'm not particularly familiar with, but even so I really enjoyed it. Hell, it floored me. Not casual reading, but perhaps essential. I don't think I've read anything better, in terms of film criticism; a few things are comparable, but this is more or less the summit of my critical experience with film.
I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

(I was going to say, from what I understand the book was a landmark in terms of film criticism, but I wasn't sure how accurate a description that was. So, in a slapdash attempt at research, I typed "landmark film criticism" in google; an interview with Cavell about the book was the first result. That makes it official.)

onedimension
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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#138 Post by onedimension » Wed Jul 25, 2012 12:06 pm

Was reminded of Sweet Movie in another thread- a couple of comments on what's already been posted:

1. Beethoven probably shit, as best historians can tell; is it possible he thought of any compositions while actually intimately relating to a bedpan or outhouse? That juxtaposition tends to be repressed- it may be juvenile to bring it to the surface, but I'm not at all certain of that.

2. Lots of SM deeply disturbed me, and it's mostly because of Cavell's take on it that I gave it a second viewing and some thought- he's a very smart and respected interdisciplinary philosopher, though not without critics. But I agree with Tomasso that the imagery of the film was very powerful and often beautiful- apart from the "gross-out" content, or the legitimacy of the movie's ideas, many individual shots were arresting and memorable..

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movielocke
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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#139 Post by movielocke » Sat Apr 08, 2017 3:26 am

after thoroughly enjoying the eclipse set last year, I queued these up via filmstruck in the last couple weeks. there's certainly always a place for transgressive art, so I understand where they're coming from, but I just wasn't very impressed with either of these as films.

They seem to both lack the sharpness that characterized his first three films. In an era when we grew up with Real Sex on late night premium cable and internet streaming video arriving with twins like "two girls one cup" and "never going to give you up", everything here seems so benign.

For an audience, like myself, what does it mean to take the sting out of the transgressiveness of these films? I think it means that one starts to pay more attention to the politics and ideas that are being explored along these transgressive vectors, and for the most part, since I felt no transgressiveness, I was very unimpressed with both of these as films.

One film is a bunch of toxic/discredited alternative health crap (right up there with the midichlorians and homeopathy) rather unjustly revered by the film. I honestly thought after viewing it that it was a brilliant mockumentary, as the film was more fun as a deliberate mockery of the general tendency of the human race to believe people like Reich.

The other film begins strongly, but descends to madness--which is actually a well achieved and deliberately realized affect and a nice indictment, simultaneously, of both capitalism and communism. But the insights of the film along these ideas are basically as thin as the one sentence I just typed.

It's disappointing that they're both such poor films, when the films in the eclipse set are all so excellent.

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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#140 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Apr 08, 2017 2:17 pm

I enjoy both those films, in part because of the cultural zeitgeist they document (and definitely more than Innocence Unprotected). Sweet Movie has a shaky start but things get progressively better as they get gooier!

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R0lf
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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#141 Post by R0lf » Wed Apr 12, 2017 2:36 am

Between the Makavejev and the Burroughs doco Criterion now have two movies which feature Orgone Boxes!

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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#142 Post by DeprongMori » Wed Apr 12, 2017 12:56 pm

R0lf wrote:Between the Makavejev and the Burroughs doco Criterion now have two movies which feature Orgone Boxes!
With Orson Bean in Being John Malkovich, there is a tangential connection to a third. Orson Bean famously wrote a book about his experiences with the orgone box entitled Me and the Orgone, excerpted here.

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#143 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Fri May 15, 2020 12:44 pm

Does anyone know why WR is unavailable in the Criterion store? Is this recent?

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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#144 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:02 am

I was hoping that Cinemas Underbelly, a YouTube channel that talks about some of the most extreme films ever produced, would get to this at some point: here's the video on Sweet Movie (NSFW, and warning for brief images of vomiting).

It might also be worth noting that Sweet Movie, despite being extreme enough in itself (here's the BBFC case study detailing why it has never officially been released in the UK), is kind of acting as a relatively 'mainstream' introduction to the much more extreme (and morally dubious) work of Otto Muehl and his collective troop during the Viennese Actionism period of transgressive performance art, who appear in Sweet Movie as similar commune members and give a brief taster of some of the things that they do in far more graphic detail in Muehl's own films. I have sometimes wondered if some of this was an influence on Lars von Triers' The Idiots.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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hearthesilence
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Re: 389-390 WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie

#145 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Jul 17, 2021 3:23 pm

Jean-Luc Garbo wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 12:44 pm
Does anyone know why WR is unavailable in the Criterion store? Is this recent?
I don't know why it's now (or rather still) "unavailable" but I hope they bring it back fast! They screened a 35mm print at Anthology right when COVID hit NYC, so I didn't risk it and skipped the screening. I actually placed the DVD on hold at the NYPL, but then the lockdown struck so I cancelled it. If it's streaming in HD on the Criterion Channel, maybe I'll finally give in and subscribe.

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Re: 1157 Daisies

#146 Post by Rupert Pupkin » Wed Aug 17, 2022 9:53 pm

I was wondering if Criterion stills own the right for "Sweet Movie".
There is since several years a 720p HD with subtitles ingrained (aka burnt-in) and I expected a blu-ray release since years.

Calvin
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Re: 1157 Daisies

#147 Post by Calvin » Fri Aug 19, 2022 2:02 pm

Rupert Pupkin wrote:
Wed Aug 17, 2022 9:53 pm
I was wondering if Criterion stills own the right for "Sweet Movie".
There is since several years a 720p HD with subtitles ingrained (aka burnt-in) and I expected a blu-ray release since years.
You'll be happy to know that Camera Obscura will be releasing it on 4K UHD in Germany

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