Georges Bataille

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.

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

The family of a Parisian shop-owner spends a day in the country. The daughter falls in love with a man at the inn, where they spend the day.

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

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

A traveller investigates the life and work of Georges Bataille. Through a staging of the writer's obsessive motives, the film succeeds in grasping the elusive: the sensitive nucleus of radical thought. The film contains the interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau.

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.

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

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

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

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.