After the credits of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, we find ourselves in a kind of theatre where, to the tune of "Puttin' On My Top Hat," two young women are dancing on stage for an audience of one: a decadent young man (Sean Timothy Sexton) who looks like Robert Downey, Jr., at the end of Less Than Zero.  The dancers look like Mr. Peanut, the Planter's Peanuts ad icon - giant top-hatted heads mounted on tap-dancing legs - except that their "eyes" are breasts.  The young man seems to be controlling their movements with the kind of toggle-switch used for video games, which is cradled in his lap.

This witty visual metaphor for our sexual fantasies kicks off the third feature by Philadelphia's Andrew Repasky McElhinney, who is rapidly gaining an international reputation. Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, should accelerate that process. McElhinney's first two features, Magdalen and A Chronicle of Corpses, are available on DVD from Alpha New Cinema.

Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye consists of a series of dreamlike episodes whose cumulative shock value I will only hint at.  In this respect the film is faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of Story of the Eye, the first novel by French writer Georges Bataille. Published under a pen-name in 1928, Story of the Eye created a scandal when it first appeared.  Today it is part of the post-structuralist canon taught in our universities, along with Bataille's later theoretical writings on death, eroticism, economic theory and mystical experience.  But Bataille's first published work, written at the urging of his analyst, still has the power to rattle our cages. 

Andrew Repasky McElhinney has made a film that performs the same service, even in these jaded times, without literally transposing the action of the book. Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye does begin, however, with a brief account of Bataille's life, and uses intertitles culled from the book.

In the haunted, specter-like narrative of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, the young man passes through a series of fantasy episodes for which he supplies the audience, and ultimately becomes one of the actors in the final fantasy, not unlike the heroine of Cafe Flesh, a minor masterpiece of post-apocalyptic pornography by Stephen (“Rinse Dream”) Sayadian, who is credited as one of the chief inspirations for the film.  The other inspiration cited is Louis Feuillade, grandfather of the Saturday matinee serial, who was admired by the surrealists for yoking imaginative episodes of fantasy and terror together to create careening cinematic express trains whose connection to narrative was tenuous, and to dreams, profound.

In Story of the Eye Bataille deconstructs his own narrative by revealing that it was generated from repressed childhood memories which returned to him as lewd fantasies - a verbatim quote to that effect appears as one of the intertitles in Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye.  Rather than copying those fantasies, McElhinney and his co-screenwriters have spun their own, which "Charlie Mackie" (McElhinney's editorial alter ego) has linked to Bataille's excavated memories via the intertitles and other associations. 

The most famous, is the image Bataille saw as a child of his blind, mad father throwing his head back as he urinated, so that only the whites of his eyes were visible - a memory which passed into the writer's unconscious and generated the obsessive images of eyes, testicles and eggs that structure the narrative of the novel.  In Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye a glimpse of Querelle Haynes rolling his eyes up is followed by an intertitle about the blindness of Bataille's father, and then by the "Oedipal" execution of Black Jam Daddy, Claude Barrington White. 

Later, a brief glimpse through a window of a head being thrown back - a flashback to one of the most traumatic events of 20th Century history - causes one of the sisters (Courtney Shea) to imitate the father in Story of the Eye, even to "his vaguely sardonic and absent laugh," as Bataille describes it.  At this point it's as if the buried images in Georges Bataille's unconscious mind are motivating not only the events of the film, but what Bataille called the nightmare of society.  "Our personal hallucination," he writes of one of the moments in the book where the narrator and his female accomplice have attained the apogee of lustful lunacy they are always seeking, "now developed as boundlessly as, perhaps, the total nightmare of human society."

French critic/filmmaker Jacques Rivette once said that any good film should be seen twice - "Once for surprise and once for ravishment" - and I have been deliberately vague about the details of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye 's content so that spectators can enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed.  Some of them, including a few admirers of Andrew Repasky McElhinney 's previous feature films, may be outraged by the surprises in this one, but others, like this reviewer, will applaud it as the filmmaker’s best work yet, and a promise of great work to come.
 

Bill Krohn has been the Los Angles correspondent of Cahiers du cinema since 1978.