In The Wars photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text 'Madame Edwarda' with images drawn from his archive. 'Madame Edwarda' is a story with no beginning nor an end. A male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter in Paris by night. It's a story about lust, power, anxiety, desire, and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects of these on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in Northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text from the first years of World War II.
Directed by Oscar van Alphen
Your score–
Not scoredImages
Related
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
My Neighbor Adolf
Most
Battleground
Cardboard Boxer
Gracie
Adopt a Highway
The Fugitive
Salomé
Charm City Kings
A Question of Faith
Waiting for Anya
El Chicano
All Day and a Night
The House on Carroll Street
Flashbacks of a Fool