Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Wilhelm Reich was one of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud. His concept of  muscular armour is part of body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy; he came up with the phrase “the sexual revolution.” He also created Faraday cages that built up orgone energy, the energy of life and orgasms, that he claimed could cure cancer. The U.S. food and Drug Administration made them illegal and later burned six tons of his books, sending him to jail where he would die within a year. Freud said of his work, “We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis.”

Reich also built cloudbusters that he said could make it rain and chased UFOs. Soon before he was to be released from jail, he died. He left instructions that there was to be no religious funeral, but that a record should be played of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” sung by Marian Anderson. His granite headstone reads “Wilhelm Reich, Born March 24, 1897, Died …”

I discovered him by way of the Tim Vigil comic book EO.

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, directed by Dušan Makavejev (Sweet Movie) was banned in Yugoslavia for sixteen years and when Makavejev spoke up about it, he was indicted on charges of derision toward the state, its agencies and representatives.

This feels like a cut and paste technique film. Documentary footage and clips from The Vow share the screen with Tuli Kupferberg of the band The Fugs singing “Kill for Peace” and “I’m Gonna Kill Myself Over Your Dead Body,” Betty Dodson drawing people masturbating, the Plaster Casters casting Jim Buckley of Screw magazine, scream therapy and a story where Milena (Milena Dravić) turns down the sexual advances of the worker class to obsess over Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović), an ice skater who is s symbol of Western corruption. After they finally make love, he beheads her.

Meanwhile, the scientists of 1971 are continuing the work of Reich.

Makavejev rails against Communism, American psychiatry, the buttoned up lack of sexuality in the world and anything that’s offensive, he finds it and shows it. Sweet Movie would take this even further. This is more than a half century old and still feels like a firebomb being set off in public.