Ptarmigan operated in Tallinn from 2011-2014. We no longer maintain any presence in Tallinn, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced at Ptarmigan during these years.
Ptarmigan's Liminal Images series, in conjunction with the ongoing Workshop in Architecture and Vitality, will be screening Dusan Makavajev's 1971 classic, WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
WR - Misterije Organizma (WR - Mysteries of the Organism)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev
Yuvoslavia, 1971
84 minutes
English, Serbian, Russian and German with English subtitiles (imdb)
This feature-length film is described by Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art as:
... unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s; a hilarious, highly erotic, political comedy which quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution and advances a plea for Erotic Socialism. Only the revolutionary cubist Makavejev ... could have pulled together this mélange of Wilhelm Reich; excerpts from a monstrous Soviet film, The Vow (1946), starring Stalin; a transvestite of the Warhol factory; A.S. Neill of Summerhill; several beautiful young Yugoslavs fucking merrily throughout ... It is an outrageous, exhuberant, marvellous work of a new breed of international revolutionary, strangely spawns by cross-fertilization between the original radical ideologies of the East, Consciousness III in America, and the sexual-political radicalism of the early Wilhelm Reich ...
... Beneath the film's light-hearted frivolity and marvellous humour lurks a more serious ideological intent: opposition to all oppressive social systems, East or West, the removal of prurience from sex and a final squaring of accounts by the new radicals with the now reactionary Russian regime ... Makavejev is quite accurate in describing his film as 'a black comedy, a political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others.' ... The film is also a tribute to the ultimate power of ideas over institutions.