2001-2010 Andrew Repasky McElhinney Erotica USA

Andrew Repasky McElhinney – Story of the Eye (2004)

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
From Wikipedia

Andrew Repasky McElhinney is an American film producer born in Philadelphia in 1979. He grew up in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania and lived in Manhattan in New York City in the late 1990s while earning an English literature / Cultural studies degree from The New School for Social Research before returning to his home city in 2000.

McElhinney is also a film programmer who runs Andrew’s Video Vault at the Rotunda sponsored by The University of Pennsylvania. He is also a multimedia video installation performance artist specializing in Burlesque/Nude and Cabaret. He has also contributed articles to such publications as the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Ritz Filmbill.

In 1994, while in High School at Abington Friends, he formed “ARMcinema25.com”, a company devoted to producing avant-garde movies.

In 1994, McElhinney released the short films, The Scream and Her Father’s Expectancy. A baroque tale of incest and mutilation, Her Father’s Expectancy caused controversy upon its release.

In 1995, McElhinney made a silent musical entitled A Maggot Tango.

McElhinney’s first feature Magdalen was mostly well-reviewed in 1998 for its black and white camerawork from cinematographer Abe Holtz and its cast lead by Alix D. Smith.

In 2000, McElhinney’ sophomore feature was released. It was an 1807 period thriller A Chronicle of Corpses starring soap opera diva Marj Dusay. Jeremiah Kipp of Filmcritic.com gave A Chronicle of Corpses four stars and remarked: “What’s most impressive about McElhinney’s highbrow period film is its ability to satisfy snobbish cultural aesthetes while simultaneously fulfilling slasher film conventions. . . . Think of it as a caveat to those who secretly wished that Jack Nicholson (in wild-eyed mode from The Shining) had wandered into The Remains of the Day wielding a mallet. [A Chronicle of Corpses is] the art film from hell.”

His next film was Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye released in 2003. Dennis Harvey, reviewing Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye in Variety said the film was “A punk-pornocopia equivalent to Last Year at Marienbad.”.

McElhinney’s fourth feature film, Animal Husbandry (2008) is a word-for-word modern dress production of a romantic comedy from the 1930s with the subtext reexamined to explore issues of race, class gender/sexual identity in contemporary America.

MOVIE REVIEW

From The New York Times

Inspired by the notorious 1928 pornographic novel by Georges Bataille, the patron saint of postmodernism, Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s “Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye” is a genuine independent film, with no commercial prospects and no economic reason for being. It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, “A Chronicle of Corpses.”

If Bataille’s novel was an attempt to write that which should not be written – it is his work that introduced the notion of transgression, the violent, ecstatic breaking of taboos that became so important to postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag – Mr. McElhinney’s film is an attempt to show that which should not be shown. That means hard-core sex, performed in all the possible permutations by a fearless young cast.

Shot on digital video, “Story of the Eye” takes place largely in an old, abandoned house, where the sexual partners get together wordlessly, performing their couplings in a dreamlike daze, as if they were hypnotized by the acts in which they are engaged. The lighting is bright, the colors highly saturated, giving the film an almost clinical look (and indeed, it begins with a long clip of childbirth, apparently lifted from a medical film).

Though a narrator briefly intones a few sentences about Bataille and his work, there is no dialogue among the principals. Words have been banished from this privileged space, where, true to the work’s title, the eye is the protagonist. We look, but we also look away, and Mr. McElhinney wants to make us aware of our conflicting impulses. Every spectator will have his or her own limits, and when we instinctively glance away, we learn where those limits are.

Mr. McElhinney has also presented “Story of the Eye” as a video installation in art galleries, with monitors positioned so that spectators watching one screen can also watch the spectators watching another. Something similar happens even in the screening room, as eyes diverted from the screen encounter other eyes, also looking away in the dark.

Darkness finally settles over the film itself, when, after a dramatic climax that is also a sexual one, the screen goes black and the soundtrack swells with an electronic whine. At this point, Mr. McElhinney dares to attack his audience physically, bringing the whine up to mildly painful levels, as if he were trying to drive spectators from the theater (an invitation that many audience members will immediately accept). This is transgression in a literal sense, an act of aggression that Bataille would no doubt have appreciated. This is not a movie for passive consumption, but a film that bites back.

The final image in “Story of the Eye,” which opens today at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater in the East Village, is a simple set of color bars: the test pattern used by technicians to balance color values. It is a reminder that for all the aggressive, almost physical power of these images, they are, after all, patterns of light bouncing off a blank screen. In the terms established by “Story of the Eye,” the bars represent a happy ending. We have survived, and now we can see clearly, the eye reposing in a glowing field of color without content, light without shadow.

GEORGES BATAILLE’S STORY OF THE EYE

Produced and directed by Andrew Rapasky McElhinney; written by Mr. McElhinney, Bosco Younger, Les Rek, Dan Buskirk, Courtney Shea, Melissa Elizabeth Forgione, Sean Timothy Sexton and Telly, inspired by Louis Feuillade and Stephen Sayadian; directors of photography, Mr. Buskirk, Mr. Rek and Mr. Younger; edited by Charlie Mackie; music by Paul David Bergel; released by ARM/Cinema 25. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.