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Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye

2004, Movie, NR, 81 mins

Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye: Review

GEORGES BATAILLE'S STORY OF THE EYE | STORY OF THE EYE
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Of the two discrete pornographic traditions, the dominant one proceeds from the intent to arouse desire. The other, vastly (and understandably) less popular but embraced by the likes of Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade and novelist George Bataille, is rooted in the philosophical notion of sexually graphic material as a vehicle through which to confront, challenge and undermine notions of conventional order and propriety. Philadelphia-based underground filmmaker Andrew Repasky McElhinney's rigorously stylized provocation belongs firmly in the latter category and is less an adaptation of Bataille's first novel, The Story of the Eye, than an exploration of its thematic underpinnings, the intersection of eroticism, power and baroque perversity. McElhinney dedicates his efforts to Louis Feuillade, prolific director of Judex, Fantomas and other silent serials much beloved by surrealists; and Stephen Sayadian, whose X-rated Cafe Flesh (directed under the nom de porn "Rinse Dream"), was a hip landmark in dystopian smut, and his exploration of hardcore carnality is aimed at the brain rather than the groin. It opens with birth-of-a-baby footage, a nod to the golden days of road-show sleaze movies that justified their lurid thrills with similar "educational" fillips. The story proper (be warned, the inter title that reads "arranging narrative is a bourgeois mania" isn't kidding) begins with two women (Melissa Elizabeth Forgione, Courtney Shea), heads and arms hidden under oversize top hats, torsos painted to resemble faces (visually echoing Rene Magritte's "La Viol"), performing a tap routine to Irving Berlin's "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" on a private stage for a masturbating punk dandy (Querelle Haynes). A series of scenarios follows, by epigrams: a bleach-blond twink (Sean Timothy Sexton) in a sailor suit with a Black leather daddy (Claude Barrington White); one of the tap dancers with a woman in a harem costume; a battered woman climbing an endless series of stairs, urinating and dissolving into hysterics apparently brought on by a brief shot that seems to be from the Zapruder film; a woman with a scarred torso pleasuring herself while another women screams horribly somewhere off camera; and, finally, a woman watching a fornicating couple in a mirror before joining their acrobatic encounter. The film ends on several minutes of gray screen (interrupted briefly by a flash of color bars) accompanied by a persistent, industrial-sounding buzz. The less time you've devoted to thinking about the nature and uses of the erotic imagination, the more challenging this will seem. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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