The Wars

A bleak, demanding collage of archival images and explicit text that feels like an unsettling essay on power and desire.

Directed by

Oscar van Alphen

Genres

Drama

Overview

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.

How it feels

Bleak, dark, tense and melancholic. Slow-burning and demanding.

About

Power, corruption, class, isolation

Content

Strong sexual content. Mild violence and language. No gore.

Note

Written by AI, so it can be wrong. Full breakdown

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