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Inspired by the notorious 1928 pornographic novel by Georges Bataille, the patron saint of postmodernism, Andrew Repasky McElhinney's Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye is a genuine independent film, with no commercial prospects and no economic reason for being. It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, A Chronicle of Corpses.
If Bataille's novel was an attempt to write that which should not be written - it is his work that introduced the notion of transgression, the violent, ecstatic breaking of taboos that became so important to postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag - Mr. McElhinney's film is an attempt to show that which should not be shown. That means hard-core sex, performed in all the possible permutations by a fearless young cast.
Shot on digital video, Story of the Eye takes place largely in an old, abandoned house, where the sexual partners get together wordlessly, performing their couplings in a dreamlike daze, as if they were hypnotized by the acts in which they are engaged. The lighting is bright, the colors highly saturated, giving the film an almost clinical look (and indeed, it begins with a long clip of childbirth, apparently lifted from a medical film).
Though a narrator briefly intones a few sentences about Bataille and his work, there is no dialogue among the principals. Words have been banished from this privileged space, where, true to the work's title, the eye is the protagonist. We look, but we also look away, and Mr. McElhinney wants to make us aware of our conflicting impulses. Every spectator will have his or her own limits, and when we instinctively glance away, we learn where those limits are.
-Dave Kehr - The New York Times
DVD FEATURESUncut Fullscreen VersionEnglish audio
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