Georges Bataille

The film contains the interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau.

Une jeune fille accompagnée de son fiancée et de sa famille rencontre lors d'une partie de campagne un jeune homme avec lequel elle vit une brève aventure.

Whipped by the death of her lover, a woman journey through a night of excess.

Whipped by the death of her lover, a woman journey through a night of excess.

While at a bullfight Simona begins flashing back to a torrid sexual relationship she had with George. Her relationship with George was one of open sexual discoveries which eventually led to revenge and murder.

Based on the 1928 novella written by Georges Bataille, the film takes place in a seemingly abandoned house where a group of people engage in bizarre wordless acts. Just as the book does, the film spans several vignettes.

The film contains the interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau.

A work of spiritual pornophany whose viewing provokes a retinal trance.

In The Wars photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text 'Madame Edwarda' with images drawn from his archive. 'Madame Edwarda' is a story with no beginning nor an end. A male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter in Paris by night. It's a story about lust, power, anxiety, desire, and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects of these on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in Northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text from the first years of World War II.

Our male narrator, Georges, reminisces about his first sexual encounters with the enchanting Simone. As the encounters become increasingly transgressive, the two characters struggle for power and dominance. The tables are turned; the story is then retold from Simone's very different POV to a horrific climax. 'Story of the Eye' is a scathing critique of the tendency, in both Hollywood and literature, to trivialize female sexuality and power. Simone and Georges battle over the metaphorical 'eye' but the real tension exists in the struggle over who gets to tell the story and ultimately, which story gets told. The hyper-reality of opera as a musical/theatrical device further exaggerates this dichotomy.

Ivan Cardoso short film adapted from a Georges Bataille story.

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films