A battery stimulator, a cerebral vibrator

Roger Ebert, in his Great Movies column, features a film called 'WR -- Mysteries of the Organism.' I had never heard of it before, but Ebert makes a good case. Actually, before I read word one of his, I was hooked by this image from the film:

This is # 8 in my There's something in this about all women file. You longtimers will know that's a caption I give to pictures I seem to find about once a month, although I never go specifically looking for them.

I mean it, though; I don't just assign the caption to any picture of a wonderful-looking woman-if I did, more of the women on this list would have made it. There has to really be something in the photo that is about all women, or at least as I think of them.

Anyway, back to what Ebert says about the film and its director, Dusan Makavejev:

Bald, burly and bearded, Makavejev has fashioned a career out of poverty, windfalls, luck and genius. The year "Sweet Movie" played at Cannes, he had a suite at the Carlton Hotel. The next year, I asked him if he was staying at the Carlton again. "Wife and I have tent on beach," he said. "Some years Carlton, some years beach."

The new editions of Makavejev's films in the Criterion Collection include fascinating supplementary material, not least a little documentary on the "improved" version of "WR." The movie was purchased by the BBC's Channel Four, which asked Makavejev to re-edit some of the more graphic scenes. He was happy to oblige. Key elements of the "plaster casting" scene are obscured by starbursts of psychedelic colors. And an opening nude sequence from an old silent sex film is tidied up with goldfish swimming past the crucial areas.

There is also Makavejev's own short doc about the experience of leaving the dissolving Yugoslavia and finding himself in Hollywood. Monique Luddy, wife of the co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, takes him to buy some trendy clothes. He looks dubiously at a colorful shirt. She encourages him: "If the producer doesn't like you, maybe he'll like the shirt."

This sounds like a man whose country (films) I need to visit...