Bastards

Originally published 21/06/23 on Letterboxd

“Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death”.

-Erotism, Georges Bataille

In which Denis’ observations of hands gliding over skin and skin transposed against barren landscapes are twisted- nay, mangled- into something too abominable to look at directly, which is also what makes the horrors that she documents here so transfixing to look upon. Agnes Godard uses the tangibility of digital early ‘10s digital to both render brutally clear and obfuscate these horrors, often clouding acts of violence in darkness but preserving a trace of the victim in the frame in a way that recalls the noirs of Ellroy more than any of Denis’ oeuvre.

There’s a rather thrilling denial of any genuine conviction or closure here too, where the blurry dialectic between pleasure and pain that Denis’ documentation of sex identifies is translated to a similar denial of any real discovery as to where the economy of carnage here on display here begins and ends. It may recall Demonlover, but that is a film that is at least partially seized by the euphoria of horrifying possibility- here, the suffocating spectres of familial legacy and human capital cast its proceedings in a layer of grime that can never completely be scrubbed off.