Betrayed Promises: Politics and Sexual Revolution in the Films of Márta Mészáros, Miloš Forman, and Dušan Makavejev

Eastern Europe has been a terrain on which the twentieth century has challengingly experimented with revolutionary discourse, and cinema has been there to document these experiments. This article focuses on a constellation of Eastern European films from the 1960s and the early 1970s that interrogate sexual practices in “real-existing socialism”: Márta Mészáros's Riddance, Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde, and Dušan Makavejev's Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. To what extent has the communist revolution also been a sexual revolution? How did it mange to reform (or fail to reform) some of the state's most enduring institutions, marriage and the family? Has the revolution betrayed its promises to radically address the “woman question”? Has it perpetuated bourgeois values? Could the subjects and regimes of Eastern Europe have survived a sexual revolution? What does sexuality tell us about the repressive politics of Eastern European revolutionary governments?