TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING

Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye

Directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney

2003, 81 minutes

Starring Melissa Elizabeth Forgione, Querelle Haynes, Courtney Shea, Sean Timothy Sexton, Claude Barrington White

DUE TO THE GRAPHIC NATURE OF THIS FILM, NO ONE UNDER 18 ADMITTED

One of the most provocative and enigmatic works of 21st century American independent cinema, freely appropriated from one of the 20th centuries’ most notorious pornographic books, writer/director Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s 2003 movie, Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye takes place in a seemingly abandoned house where a group of people engage in wordless acts of passion. The movie showcases a complex, remarkable soundscape by avant-garde musicians City of Horns, as the action covers a period from evening to morning, and the sexual couplings among the members of the house become increasingly harrowing as daylight arrives.

In its initial theatrical run, Variety declared Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye “a punk-pornocopia equivalent to Last Year at Marienbad,” while The San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote, “Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye is a provocation that hypnotizes, a hallucinatory narcotic.”

The New York Times called Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye “transgression in a literal sense, an act of aggression that Bataille would no doubt have appreciated. This is not a movie for passive consumption, but a film that bites back.”

Museum of Modern Art artist Andrew Repasky McElhinney is an independent filmmaker and experimental theater director best known for his 2000 gothic horror film A Chronicle of Corpses, an audacious blend of Vermeer lighting and genre plotting, praised by Dennis Lim in The Village Voice for its “rancid opulence and humid religiosity.” McElhinney’s other movies include A Maggot Tango (1995), Magdalen (1998), Animal Husbandry (2008) and Christmas Dreams (2015). McElhinney is currently completing work on Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions, a history of the city from 1960 to 2010 as seen through five different neighborhoods, each shot in a different film format.

This is an 18+ event

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