Biography

Andrew Repasky McElhinney is the creator of the short films The Scream (1994), Her Father’s Expectancy (1994), A Maggot Tango (1995) and the features, Magdalen (1998), A Chronicle of Corpses (2000), Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (2003) and Animal Husbandry (2009).

Shot in Philadelphia when he was 17 years old, McElhinney’s debut feature, Magdalen is a gossipy meditation on art, drinking, smoking and screwing.

It was followed in 2000 by A Chronicle of Corpses, a lushly detailed, early nineteenth century period piece, concerning the last days of a family of once wealthy aristocrats. It is a totally unique film, a sinister and darkly comic (a)morality play named as one of the top ten movies of the year by The New York Times.

McElhinney’s third feature, and his first created with digital video, Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye is a movie about spectatorship, inspired and informed by the academic, transgressive and yet oddly sentimental philosophy of Georges Bataille. The movie appropriates the title of Bataille’s most famous work for a mesmerizing examination of bizarre anticipation. Film Threat called the pictures “a new landmark in underground cinema.” Subsequently, Dr. Beth Johnson, who is a lecturer in film at Liverpool Hope University in the UK, wrote a monograph on the cult favorite entitled: Realism, Real Sex and Experimental Film: Mediating New Erotic’s in ‘Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye,’ which is to be published in Palgrave Press's forthcoming tome, Audio Visual Media.

Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s fourth feature, Animal Husbandry is a modern dress production of a 1930s play with the subtext reexamined to explore issues of race, class gender and sexual identity in contemporary America.

McElhinney is also a repertory film programmer with the University of Pennsylvania’s Rotunda and the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill Branch; as well as an educator, journalist; film/text editor; DJ and multimedia video installation performance artist who occasionally directs for the stage.

McElhinney recently contributed the monograph, A World Destroyed By Gold: Shared Allegories of Capital in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and Ulmer’s ‘Isle of Forgotten Sins’ to Scarecrow Press’ anthology, The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer.