As a follow-up to his stately horror film A Chronicle of Corpses, Philadelphia-based Andrew Repasky McElhinney recently finished Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, a digitally-shot art-porn hybrid inspired by the classic French transgressive novel.

     “Are you trying to commit career suicide?”  That’s a question the timid might ask Philadelphia-based filmmaker Andrew Repasky McElhinney, who moves in a bold new direction with his third feature, a “surrealist pornography” entitled Georges Bataille’s Story Of The Eye. Following his melancholy black-and-white character study Magdalen (1998) and the critically acclaimed period film/horror movie A Chronicle Of Corpses (hailed by New York Times critic Dave Kehr as one of the 10 Best Films of 2001), his new project is anything but safe. 

     McElhinney uses the French writer’s classic transgressive novel as a stepping-stone in much the same way David Cronenberg appropriated William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch.  In McElhinney’s radical reworking, the narrative follows a makeshift family at Club Sandwich, a fantasy parlor commandeered by a large black leather daddy (Claude Barrington White). It’s home to a female performer (Melissa Elizabeth Forgione) hiding a brutal body-scar like a secret, and her sensitive young sister (Courtney Shea).  The characters are all introduced and revealed through sex, and these scenes are framed by episodic chapter headings and quotes from the novel.  Ultimately, Georges Bataille’s Story Of The Eye is pornography in the same sense that Naked Lunch is science fiction, or that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a western.
 

Filmmaker: Why did you decide to follow up A Chronicle Of Corpses with something as “out there” as Georges Bataille’s Story Of The Eye? 

Andrew Repasky McElhinney: Well, it’s always about what’s next. These films take up your life for so long that when you’re done with them, you have this empty hole inside. It feels awful until you know what to fill it with.  I’ve spent much of my time [since finishing Corpses] trying to get an original script Flowers Of Evil made. I met with producers who liked Corpses and this new script, but ultimately they felt nervous about the content. So I had to find something else to care about. Georges Bataille’s Story Of The Eye happened because I knew actors who would fuck on camera, had access to the DV equipment and to this Club in Philly called 1616, and was in a position where I could start shooting right away.  It was a more organic process than anything I’ve ever done—conceived in a haze of marijuana and finished in a firestorm of tequila.  We shot in five Sundays throughout November and December 2002 figuring out where we were taking it as we went along.
     Usually when I make a picture, it’s very much about methodically plotting it out. This was a little different because we had three cameras running at once. We had a general sense of what was going to happen and it became about finding and capturing the moments that we liked.  Sort of like sports photography.

Filmmaker: How did you approach narrative storytelling within this atmosphere of improvisation?

McElhinney: We had a script every day we were shooting.  I started with the concept of “bizarre anticipation”—because it’s my favorite part of sex, because anything can happen at that point -- because you could fall in love.  We would improvise off the script but tried to at least get everything on our shot list.  When we sat down to write the second day, which was the “Abandoned Townhouse” sequence, we asked ourselves where this movie was going. We talked about the film happening in two halves: the first half being family life at the Club, with the second being the post-apocalyptic fall out following the [assassination of a central character]. As a result of that brainstorming, the actors all brought in certain elements for their characters.
For example, Sean is interested in video games, Claude had his collection of whips and floggers, and Melissa and Courtney brought in their Tap Dancing Eyeballs/Top Hat act from The Peek-A-Boo Revue. At that point, I said let’s bring in Georges Bataille and make it Story Of The Eye.

Filmmaker: When did you first read Bataille?

McElhinney: I first came into contact with him at the New School back in the late ‘90s.  It was one of the texts assigned that hadn’t been on my radar.  I remember reading the xexox pages in class, quivering within, and thinking “Oh my god! Where have these words been all my life?” It’s those books, like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, or Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican Writings, that makes me say, “Wow, this is why one ought to go to school.  To find out about these books.”
     The film is about Georges Bataille’s dramatic methods, philosophy and his book Story Of The Eye, but it’s not an adaptation.  That’s why the title of the film is possessive.  I think appropriation is far more interesting than adaptation.  Our film is about transgression, about being angry at the world.  This is a political film. We all focused on that. I mean, a black guy fucking a white guy in the ass? You can’t get much more political than that! We want the audience to confront that, interpret that. The movie is about desire, and about what is erotic, and about what is pornographic. It’s about confronting spectatorship and bearing witness.

Filmmaker: Did you observes the “rules” of the porno genre?  People show up in a room, maybe talk, and have sex.

McElhinney: Eye is only a porn film in the way Corpses is a horror film. In terms of rules, though, I suppose you do expect some sort of physical connection between actors.  But there’s a lot to be learned there. In order for people to screw, they have to communicate (or not communicate) and that is inherently dramatic. Considering a lot of Eye is people having sex for the first time, watching the way they touch or look at each other is very telling. That’s why I’m so defensive about saying that the members of this cast are actors, not just porn stars. The performers are all giving very detailed, highly nuanced performances. They’re not just showing up and copulating.  

Filmmaker: How did you adjust to the DV aesthetic after your more formal use of 35mm in A Chronicle of Corpses?

McElhinney: The messiness of video is a lot like the messiness of sex.  Both these things have always kind of freaked me out a little.  This picture had to be about getting over that, about moving on, about what’s next. The probing zooming and the chaotic nature of three cameras looking everywhere seemed like the best way to capture these moments.  [The cameramen and I] talked a lot about mid-period Warhol when he was working the zoom like crazy, or [Stan] Brakhage, who advocated the zoom, saying it mimics the way one’s eye darts around. Eye is about looking and watching, and what better way to accentuate that, than to call attention to where the cameraman is looking and watching?  

Filmmaker: I was reminded of the confessional nature of Henry Miller’s writing, and his belief that sex was completely natural, like birth or death. Interesting, then, that you chose to open the film with a birth sequence. 

McElhinney:  I find Miller too unconcerned with memory.  But we came to the idea of starting with birth footage because the film ends with a rather spectacular cum shot—a “little death” if you will. I thought structurally that it made the most sense to start at the beginning: birth.  Friends of mine were giving birth, so I called them up and asked if I could film it.  Rather than say yes or no, they gave me their collection of “How To Give Birth” videos.  I watched four or five hours of that, finding and re-editing a sequence from an old army doc.  I tried to dehumanize it as much as possible by cutting all the reaction shots.  Then I added the biographical note on Georges Bataille on the soundtrack to bring the uninitiated viewer up to speed. 

Filmmaker: What did you finally take away from the experience of making this film?

McElhinney: This film really made me confront my own sexuality and the culpability of my desire.  As with anything, once you confront that, you can either accept it or not.  Doing this picture really loosened me up and taught me to trust the process and not rush to the end result. I was so worried that after the pressure of Corpses’s unexpected success, and shilling Flowers Of Evil for a year and a half without success, that I would never get to make another film. Eye was about the discovery or reaffirmation of my personal desires, and accepting that they don’t necessarily fit into neat boundaries or labels -- and so-fucking-what!