For the 2025-26 season of Decadent Cinema, the Decadent Film Club is delighted to present two streams: Art House Decadence and The British Renaissance of Decadent Bodies. This selection of films explores desire, transgression, and the aesthetics of excess across different eras and cultures.

These are bold films, not for the faint of heart - viewer discretion is advised

Curated by Dr. Alice Condé, Dr. Jessica Gossling, and Prof. David Weir.

Richard Hoggart Building, Cinema, 18.30-20.30

Regular DFC attendees, please note that these screenings will now take place on Mondays.

Strand I: Art House Decadence

Monday 29 September 2025: Luis Buñuel, Belle de jour (1967)

Monday 13 October 2025: Luchino Visconti, L'Innocente (1976)

Monday 27 October 2025: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò (1975)

Monday 17 November 2025: David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986)

Monday 1 December 2025: Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992)

Strand II: The British Renaissance of Decadent Bodies

Monday 12 January 2026: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, Performance (1970)

Monday 26 January 2026: Ken Russell, The Devils (1972)

Monday 9 February 2026: Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress, Sebastiane (1976)

Monday 23 February: Peter Greenaway, The Draughtman’s Contract (1982)

Monday 9 March 2026: Emerald Fennell, Saltburn (2023)

These screenings are free, but booking is advised. Book HERE.

Film Club Location

Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London.

It is a short walk from both New Cross Gate and New Cross stations (Zone 2) on the main rail network and London overground; about a 7 minute journey from London Bridge and 30 minutes from London Victoria. It is on bus routes 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453.

The screening will be in the cinema in the Richard Hoggart Building. A map can be found here. The cinema is fully accessible and on the ground floor.

For exact directions to Goldsmiths please see the How to Find Us page on the Goldsmiths website.

Screening Notes and Content Warnings

Strand I

Art House Decadence

This strand invites audiences to explore the shadowed corridors of desire, obsession, and transgression through the lens of art-house cinema. From the meticulously composed streets of suburban America to the gilded parlors of European aristocracy, these films probe the hidden currents beneath the surface of civilization. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) initiates our journey with a study of secret eroticism and the tension between social decorum and private fantasy, while Luchino Visconti’s L’Innocente (1976) exposes the corrosive elegance of upper-class infidelity, revealing how desire quietly erodes moral structures. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1977) confronts power, violence, and perversion with merciless intensity, demonstrating the extreme consequences of human cruelty and authoritarian control. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) juxtaposes the sunny surface of small-town America with psychosexual darkness, showing that even the most familiar spaces conceal hidden horrors. Finally, Ryü Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992) offers a contemporary, urban exploration of alienation and commodified intimacy, where desire is both transactional and existential.

Together, these works illuminate the spectrum of decadence in cinematic art: a fascination with excess, taboo, and transgression that challenges viewers to confront the provocative, unsettling, and often exhilarating truths hidden within human experience.

Content Warning:

This strand features films that explore extreme human behavior, sexual content, psychological and physical violence, sadism, and other transgressive themes. Viewer discretion is strongly advised and only over 18s will be admitted. The material may be disturbing or triggering, including depictions of assault, sexual coercion, and graphic violence. These works are presented for their artistic, cultural, and critical significance, not for sensationalism. Please consider your comfort and well-being before attending.

29 September 2025: Luis Buñuel, Belle de jour (1967)

Luis Buñuel has long been celebrated as cinema’s great poet of perversity, a director fascinated by the ways desire, repression, and ritual intersect in bourgeois life. From his early surrealist provocations like Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930), to his later explorations of fetishism in films such as Él (1953) and Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Buñuel returned obsessively to the idea that sexuality reveals itself most powerfully through the indirect image: a close-up of shoes, a fetishised gesture, a comic or shocking incongruity. In Belle de jour, perhaps his most elegant and enigmatic work, these obsessions find their fullest expression.

The film tells the story of Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful young bourgeois housewife whose marriage to the devoted but passionless Pierre (Jean Sorel) leaves her unfulfilled. Plagued by fantasies of domination and humiliation, Séverine begins to live out her desires in reality by working afternoons in a discreet Parisian brothel. There, her encounters with clients move between the absurd, the enigmatic, and the disturbing – scenes that Buñuel often renders more powerful by withholding visual detail and leaving the audience to imagine what takes place. Two sequences illustrate this strategy. In one, a respected gynecologist acts out his carefully scripted masochistic ritual. When Séverine fails to meet his demands, she is made to watch, through a peephole, as another prostitute performs the ritual ‘correctly’. We hear the cries of pain but never see the action – forcing us, like Séverine, to register both fascination and repulsion. Shortly afterward, she services a hulking, wordless client who opens a lacquered box that emits a mysterious buzzing. The contents are never shown, but Séverine emerges visibly transformed and satisfied. By refusing to visualize the perverse acts themselves, Buñuel implicates the spectator, drawing us into the imaginative space of Séverine’s own fantasies.

This ambiguity aligns the film with a broader tradition of decadent art. Like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, from which the very name Séverine seems derived, Belle de jour explores masochism not as mere pathology but as a complex aesthetic and psychological condition. Buñuel stages these dynamics with irony and wit: the gynecologist’s ritual plays like a parody of psychoanalytic theory, while Séverine’s own desires remain enigmatic, resistant to clinical explanation. The film’s source material, Joseph Kessel’s 1929 novel, was a far more conventional tale of marital frustration and double life. None of the masochistic episodes central to the film appear in the book; they are entirely Buñuel’s inventions. This difference is crucial: where the novel ends with melodrama and confession, the film closes on an ambiguous fantasy, collapsing dream and reality into an unresolved image.

Belle de jour thus exemplifies Buñuel’s distinctive approach to cinematic decadence. Rather than portraying perversion directly, he frames it through ellipsis, irony, and the surreal logic of dreams. The result is not only a study of bourgeois hypocrisy and erotic repression but also a poetic meditation on the unseen dimensions of desire. Buñuel’s cinema of decadence turns perversity itself into a kind of visual poetry – enigmatic, unsettling, and enduringly modern.

13 October 2025: Luchino Visconti, L’Innocente (1976)

Buñuel, Fellini, Ferreri, and Pasolini all find a place for perversion in their cinema of decadence, and so does Luchino Visconti, but he deals with decadence in a more historical and novelistic manner. That his major films are both historical and novelistic is not only due to the semantic ambiguity of the Italian word storia [story, history], but also to Visconti’s engagement with the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács’s theory of the historical novel. For Lukács, the artist working with history must not only narrate events but interrogate the very idea of progress, offering a ‘ruthlessly truthful investigation and disclosure of all the contradictions of progress’. Visconti also differed from his art-house contemporaries in being a titled aristocrat, with a family lineage stretching back centuries. His personal stake in the decline of the old order sharpened his decadent sensibility, which he openly claimed, describing himself as ‘imbued’ with decadence, ‘un decadente’ fascinated by ‘the analysis of a sick society’.

Visconti linked himself to writers like Baudelaire, Huysmans, Proust, and above all Thomas Mann. Mann, he said, was ‘a decadent of German culture’, while he was one ‘of Italian formation’. That formation was shaped by the Risorgimento (the nationalist unification of Italy, 1860-70), which became the subject of several of his films. Senso (1954), adapted from Camillo Boito’s proto-decadent novel, dramatised aristocratic betrayal of nationalist ideals, and Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1963), based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, offered a more ironic portrait of aristocratic decline, epitomized by Tancredi’s paradoxical maxim: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’. In both films, the aristocracy’s survival was achieved at the expense of genuine revolution – a process Antonio Gramsci derided as trasformismo. For Visconti, himself both aristocrat and Communist, the contradictions of class, ideology, and aesthetic beauty converged in this decadent ambivalence.

The connection to Gabriele D’Annunzio was inevitable. However repelled Visconti may have been by D’Annunzio’s fascist politics, he acknowledged him as an inescapable cultural ancestor: ‘We’re all his children’. D’Annunzio, through novels like Il Piacere (1889) and L’Innocente (1892), shaped Italian decadentismo. Unlike the French decadent hero Des Esseintes, who lives decadence as memory, or the transgressive but moralised figures of British decadence, D’Annunzio’s antiheroes pursue pleasure actively and philosophically, often filtered through Nietzschean notions of the superuomo [superman]. In L’Innocente, the aristocratic libertine Tullio Hermil embodies this type: a man who believes himself beyond judgment, beyond morality, and beyond the reach of law. Visconti’s L’Innocente (1976) translates D’Annunzio’s novel into cinema with the lavish authenticity of his earlier period dramas, this time immersing the viewer in the opulence of the belle époque. The casting of Laura Antonelli as Giuliana underscores the film’s historical layering: an actress associated with contemporary sex comedies playing a nineteenth-century aristocratic wife, yet also coded with echoes of Visconti’s own mother and even the legendary actress Eleonora Duse, D’Annunzio’s mistress. Giuliana thus becomes both a period figure and a vehicle for more contemporary values, particularly resonant in the context of 1970s Italian feminism.

Where D’Annunzio framed Tullio as a Nietzschean superman, Visconti reimagined him within the tradition of the inetto [inept man], a figure that had long occupied Italian cinema, from the desperate father of Bicycle Thieves to the hapless antiheroes of 1960s comedies. In Visconti’s hands, Tullio is no longer a triumphant superuomo but a decadent failure, a man undone not by his superiority but by his inability to reconcile desire, morality, and social change. The result is a film that is both a sumptuous celebration of decadence and a critique of it. L’Innocente dramatises not only one family’s collapse but also the sickness of a society drifting toward fascism. Its glittering surfaces – costumes, interiors, gestures – seduce the eye, even as the narrative exposes corruption, cruelty, and decay. The contradiction is deliberate: Visconti’s artistry lies in making decadence irresistible while revealing the rot beneath.

27 October 2025: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò (1975)

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is less a film than a provocation, a work whose extremity still reverberates as both scandal and statement. Loosely adapted from the Marquis de Sade’s notorious novel, Salò relocates its tale of ritualised sadism from eighteenth-century France to the twilight of Mussolini’s fascist republic in northern Italy. This shift transforms Sade’s allegory of aristocratic corruption into a brutal meditation on the mechanisms of modern power. What emerges is not simply pornography, not even straightforward political allegory, but a cinema of cruelty that remains among the most challenging works in the history of film.

Pasolini, whose career had already veered from neorealist dramas to bawdy adaptations of medieval texts, declared Salò the beginning of a ‘trilogy of death’, a deliberate counter to the earthy vitality of his earlier ‘trilogy of life’. By 1975, he no longer believed in vitality; he saw consumer capitalism as a new, insidious form of authoritarianism. Salò takes this disenchantment and stages it with clinical detachment. Long static shots, symmetrical compositions, and an absence of melodramatic editing lend the violence a disturbing matter-of-factness. The film is as formally classical as its content is transgressive, a contradiction that forces the viewer into a deeply uncomfortable awareness: atrocity can be both systematic and banal.

The libertines at the film’s centre – four men drawn from the pillars of establishment power: aristocracy, clergy, judiciary, and finance – are not eccentric deviants but representatives of authority itself. Their ‘experiments’ in domination reduce young men and women to objects, stripped of individuality, coerced into complicity, and ultimately discarded. In this sense, Pasolini’s sadism is not about eroticism at all. As the psychiatrist Robert Stoller noted in the same year the film was released, perversity here is ‘the erotic form of hatred’. Pleasure rarely registers; what matters is the exercise of power, power made grotesquely literal.

If the film is notorious for its depictions of sexual violence, degradation, and ritualized cruelty, it is just as striking for its intellectual density. References to Dante, Nietzsche, Huysmans, and Baudelaire run alongside images that few viewers can stomach. Pasolini deliberately overlays the refined and the obscene, insisting that fascism thrives in precisely this dissonance: a cultivated veneer masking systemic brutality. Even the setting – a villa adorned with modernist paintings confiscated from deported Jews – embodies the contradiction of fascist ‘taste’ feeding on what it condemns as decadence. Reception of Salò has always been fraught. Censored, banned, and reviled as obscene, it has also been championed as an essential political work, a mirror held up to the darkest recesses of twentieth-century history. Pasolini himself was murdered shortly after its completion, a brutal end that cemented the film’s legend and blurred the line between art and artist.

Nearly fifty years on, Salò still resists assimilation. It cannot be comfortably classified as erotic, nor dismissed as mere shock cinema. Instead, it confronts its audience with a question that remains urgent: is decadence the domain of the marginal perverse, or does it reside at the heart of society itself, in the institutions that normalize cruelty under the guise of order? Watching Salò is an ordeal, but one Pasolini insists we cannot look away from – because what it depicts, however stylized, is never wholly past.

1 December 2025: Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992)

Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992) is a bleak, intense dive into the world of transactional sexuality, alienation, and desperation in the Tokyo of Japan’s economic bubble. The film follows Ai (Miho Nikaido), a fragile but determined young woman working as an S&M escort, whose encounters with clients become ritualized spectacles of humiliation, submission, and psychological unravelling. Unlike cinematic treatments of decadence that frame transgression as aesthetic excess or eroticized fantasy, Tokyo Decadence treats fetish and violence less as spectacle and more as symptoms of cultural disintegration. Ai’s sessions – bondage, injections, role-playing humiliation – are not erotic celebrations but mechanical repetitions, hollow performances offered for sale, emphasizing endurance over pleasure. Early in the film, Ai visits a fortune teller who urges her to adopt three conditions – among them wearing a pink topaz ring – that become symbolic in her life. When she loses the ring and risks everything to try to retrieve it, the quest becomes a powerful metaphor for her search for identity and transcendence amid degradation

Visually, Tokyo Decadence juxtaposes sterile hotel rooms, neon nightscapes, and quiet domestic interiors with moments of brutal intimacy. The camera frequently adopts a voyeuristic stance, implicating the viewer in Ai’s humiliation and the ritualized cruelty she endures. As The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw observes, ‘Murakami doesn’t believe in light and shade. He loathes the Japanese society which uses its ‘wealth without pride’’ and frames sex and violence as entwined forces in a ‘rotten country’. Yet Murakami’s film is not without ambiguity. Ai is not simply a passive victim; there are moments when she appears to seek connection or escape – particularly in her reveries about a married artist she once loved. But these moments of longing are tentative, fragile, and destabilized by her profession and Tokyo’s unforgiving underworld. The narrative does not offer redemption or resolution, but a sense of Sisyphean repetition – cycles of degradation from which escape seems both necessary and impossible.

Tokyo Decadence is a confronting, sombre work – neither erotic fantasy nor clean moral lesson – but a slow, steady dissolution of hope, dignity, and identity. It is not a film for comfort. Rather, it is a film-of-exposure: of shame, longing, and the damage wrought when love becomes unsellable.

Strand 2

The British Renaissance of Decadent Bodies

This strand explores the enduring fascination of British cinema with the body, as a site of pleasure, excess, and transgression. Decadence is intimately bound to corporeality: the body offers profound sensorial delights yet imposes limits that imagination, aesthetic innovation, or narcotic stimulation seek to overcome. It is both vessel and spectacle, a medium for desire and a target of social and moral scrutiny.

Across decades, British filmmakers have used the cinematic body to probe these tensions. From the hallucinatory chaos of Performance (1970) and the eroticised violence of The Devils (1972) to the ritualised masochism of Sebastiane (1976), the formal precision of The Draughtman’s Contract (1982), and the moral perversities of Saltburn (2023), the screen becomes a laboratory for exploring bodies that transgress norms of gender, sexuality, and class.

Decadent bodies occupy a liminal space between the ecstatic and the dangerous, luxury and transgression, reflecting wider anxieties about taste, power, and social order. In cinema, they reveal desire and excess as both spectacle and critique, pushing audiences to confront pleasures and taboos simultaneously. By focusing on these corporeal extremes, this strand invites reflection on what makes a body decadent, how decadence shapes the imagination, and how film continues to make the invisible dimensions of desire and social constraint visible.

Content Warning:

This strand contains material that may be disturbing or triggering for some viewers. The films include graphic sexual content, nudity (including full-frontal), sexualized violence, and morally transgressive behaviour. Scenes of drug and alcohol use, self-harm, and psychological manipulation appear throughout. Some films depict non-consensual sexual situations and depictions of physical and emotional abuse. Only over 18s will be admitted and viewer discretion is strongly advised, particularly for those sensitive to sexual or violent imagery.

 12 January 2026: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, Performance (1970) 

Performance is a violent sex-and-crime drama featuring Mick Jagger that the New York Times critic John Simon placed in a new ‘genre’ of cinema that was not plot-driven or character-driven but shock-driven – ‘shocks piled on shocks’. Simon termed this genre ‘the Loathsome Film’ and included in the category Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Russ Meyer’s parody of his own brand of sexploitation flic featuring top-heavy vixens and panting ‘bosomaniacs’; Myra Breckinridge (1970), Mike Sarne’s adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel about a male-to-female transexual, featuring the film critic Rex Reed as the pre-transition Myron Breckenridge and Rachel Welch as the post-transition Myra; and End of the Road (1970), Aram Avakian’s black comedy adaptation of John Barth’s novel of 1958 that involves an explicit abortion scene (drawn from the novel) and an avant-John-Waters scene of sex with a chicken (not in the novel). As for Performance itself, Simon draws on the decadent tradition to describe how the filmmakers somehow force the audience to imagine things even more prurient than what is on the screen, ‘stimulated into visualizing perversions unrecorded by the camera or by Suetonius’. He also comments on the ‘magisterial decadence’ of a sex scene involving ‘two cavorting bodies of four sexes’ (by which he evidently means that both the man and the woman are bisexual), with the woman making ‘the hermaphrodite in “Fellini Satyricon” seem positively monosexual by comparison’. He also discerns the cinematic cognate of le style de décadence when he notes how the shotmaking often produces ‘a jumbled, fuzzy mass of unidentifiable parts’, observes ‘the lurid bric-à-brac’ of the mise-en-scène, and finds in ‘almost every sequence … a structural orgy’ made up of ‘disparate and jarring elements’. 

 26 January 2026: Ken Russell, The Devils (1972)

Ken Russell was never an underground filmmaker, yet his work occupies a similarly transgressive space: sensational, outré, and provocatively self-indulgent, his films frequently alienated mainstream audiences as thoroughly as those of experimental auteurs. Russell’s penchant for épater le bourgeois – literally, ‘to shock the bourgeoisie’ – links him to a tradition dating back to George Bernard Shaw, but Russell’s approach combined historical imagination with flamboyant excess, resulting in a singular form of cinematic decadence. Derek Jarman, who collaborated with Russell as a set designer, recalled being asked to conceive scenes ‘that would most upset the English audience’, an instruction that would culminate in some of Russell’s most notorious work.

Following the critical success of Women in Love (1969), whose nude wrestling scene scandalised and enthralled in equal measure, Russell pursued a camp-inflected trajectory that fully flowered in The Devils (1971). Drawing primarily from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952), Russell chronicles the trial and execution of Urbain Grandier, a seventeenth-century French priest accused of inciting demonic possession among Ursuline nuns. Historical fact becomes a springboard for extravagant visual invention: Louis XIII performs as a glittering, drag Venus, priests resemble 1970s rock stars, and the convent is a locus of grotesque, ecstatic sexuality. Set design by Jarman enhances the anachronism, creating a surreal, modernist space in which medieval events unfold with both horror and aesthetic audacity.

The film stages sexual hysteria as spectacle, moving from Sister Jeanne’s rapturous fantasies to orgiastic public exorcisms, in which naked nuns and priests enact elaborate, masochistic rituals. Russell blends religious iconography and sexual excess with deliberate anachronism, a camp sensibility that turns historical narrative into provocative visual poetry. Yet even as The Devils indulges in lurid imagery, it operates as critique: the frenzy of possession exposes the manipulation of faith and politics, as Cardinal Richelieu’s ambition and the King’s absolutist desires exploit religious hysteria to consolidate power. The film thus negotiates the boundary between celebration and condemnation, reveling in depravity while underscoring its social and political functions.

Contemporary reception was polarized: critics denounced the work as obscene, blasphemous, or morally degenerate, while others recognized its audacious artistry and intellectual provocations. In London, Alexander Walker decried Russell’s ‘masturbatory fantasies of a Catholic boyhood’, yet such excess aligns Russell with a lineage of decadent aesthetics, in which moral and sexual transgression becomes a lens for cultural critique. Russell’s fascination with the diabolical, the erotic, and the theatrical positions him as a decadent fellow traveler, one who, like Baudelaire, finds in vice a source of artistic vitality. The Devils thus remains a landmark of British cinematic decadence: at once shocking, beautiful, and intellectually subversive, it transforms historical and religious excess into a spectacle of enduring, provocative fascination.

 9 February 2026: Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress, Sebastiane (1976)

Derek Jarman entered cinema through painting and set design, his work on Ken Russell’s The Devils marking the start of a remarkable career in film. Raised in a middle-class military family, he studied literature and art history at King’s College, London, before attending the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1967. Early recognition came through exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and other contemporary art circles, but a series of fortuitous encounters in 1970 propelled him toward cinema: first, a chance meeting led to his invitation to design the sets for The Devils, and second, he began making short Super 8 films documenting both his artistic work and his life within London’s gay avant-garde scene. He became a fixture of the city’s camp and queer performance culture, winning the Alternative Miss World pageant in 1975 and cementing his place among the emergent gay counterculture.

Jarman’s first feature, Sebastiane (1976), produced by James Whaley and co-directed with Paul Humfress dramatizes the legend of St. Sebastian through a radical lens. The film is set in Roman times, yet Jarman’s use of Latin dialogue, deliberate anachronisms, and vivid, stylized visuals undermine conventional historical realism, creating a liminal world where decadence, eroticism, and martyrdom coexist. Sebastian’s status as outsider and martyr mirrors the social condition of gay men in 1970s Britain: his sexuality, enforced exile, and masochistic pleasures resonate as allegories of marginalization and desire. The opening sequence – a stylized orgy celebrating the emperor’s ascension – establishes the film’s audacious visual language, mixing erotic spectacle with ritualized performance, colorful phallic iconography, and camp exaggeration. Throughout, Jarman juxtaposes the cruelty and indifference of imperial power with moments of homoerotic intimacy among soldiers, depicting sexuality as both pleasure and social defiance.

Sebastiane destabilizes traditional notions of Christianity and decadence. Sebastian’s faith – infused with sun worship, erotic desire, and ambiguous martyrdom – challenges moral binaries, echoing Nietzsche’s critique of life-negating morality. Similarly, Jarman interrogates historical decadence: Nero’s reign, imagined as a ‘golden age’ of inventive cruelty, contrasts with Diocletian’s supposedly more tolerant but less thrilling persecution. References to cinematic history, from Fellini’s Satyricon to DeMille-style spectacles, further blur the lines between historical, artistic, and eroticized narrative, creating a self-conscious reflection on representation itself.

Premiering at the 1976 Locarno Film Festival alongside Pasolini’s Salò and Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Sebastiane drew condemnation for its explicitness, yet it also secured mainstream distribution in the U.K., marking a rare public platform for unapologetic homoerotic cinema. Jarman emphasized that the film’s radicalism lay in presenting homosexuality not as a social problem but as a normalized, ecstatic form of desire. Scenes of intimacy and devotion, rendered with slow-motion lyricism, allowed audiences unprecedented visibility into queer life, establishing Sebastiane as a landmark of British gay cinema. Its audacious fusion of camp, historical narrative, and erotic spectacle signals both a continuation and transformation of the decadent tradition, situating Jarman at the vanguard of queer, avant-garde filmmaking.

 23 February 2026: Peter Greenaway, The Draughtman’s Contract (1982)

Peter Greenaway emerged into the public eye with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a film that seemed to arrive fully formed yet is the culmination of a long apprenticeship in both documentary and experimental filmmaking. After studying at Walthamstow School of Art, Greenaway honed his craft editing government films for the Central Office of Information while simultaneously exploring experimental shorts, absorbing and refashioning influences from both British and American avant-garde traditions. He drew inspiration from the post-structuralist aesthetics of the French nouveau roman, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose cerebral, formally intricate narratives shaped Greenaway’s own visual and narrative sensibilities. Equally influential were Restoration dramatists such as William Congreve, whose wit, verbal precision, and socially codified games of love and power provided a historical precedent for the film’s intricate interplay of contracts, social hierarchy, and sexual negotiation.

Set in 1694, The Draughtsman’s Contract takes place in the tense aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, a period that saw the consolidation of parliamentary monarchy and the rise of Britain as a modern bourgeois state. The narrative follows Richard Neville, a draughtsman commissioned to produce twelve drawings of an estate and its gardens in exchange for sexual access to his patrons, Mrs Herbert and her daughter, Sarah. These ‘contracts’ echo the proviso scenes of Restoration comedy, negotiating desire and social advantage with intricate wit. Yet Greenaway’s narrative is far from the playful morality of Congreve or Wilde; it infuses traditional sexual and social conventions with cruelty, duplicity, and power inversion. The women wield their authority to manipulate Neville into participating in schemes of inheritance and subterfuge, turning the estate – and the men around them – into instruments of poetic justice and strategic advantage. Greenaway’s visual rigour amplifies these themes. Each drawing and perspective is framed through the draughtsman’s grid, creating a formal order that contrasts with the unpredictability of human behaviour. The meticulous camera work, including lateral tracking and controlled panning, underscores the tension between observation and knowledge: what is seen may be contradicted by what is heard, and the rationalist assumptions of empiricism are repeatedly undermined. Figures intrude upon meticulously drawn vistas, statues come to life, and visual order is subverted in playful yet unsettling ways, aligning the film with decadent and postmodern sensibilities.

The Draughtsman’s Contract thus stages a sophisticated interplay between reason and artifice, narrative and spectacle, social ritual and erotic intrigue. Its wit, ambiguity, and stylized aesthetic transform a period setting into a laboratory for exploring the instability of perception, the complexities of desire, and the artifice underlying social and sexual contracts. Greenaway’s film is at once a historical meditation, a formal experiment, and a decadent entertainment, demonstrating how narrative indeterminacy, visual precision, and moral ambiguity can coexist within a richly constructed cinematic world. In this, he situates himself within the lineage of British artistic decadence, marrying intellectual rigor with aesthetic audacity to explore the pleasures and perversities of observation, knowledge, and human desire.

 Monday 9 March 2026: Emerald Fennell, Saltburn (2023)

 Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn explores opulence, desire, and social performance through the perspective of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a young man navigating the world of the aristocratic elite. The film’s extended closing sequence, in which Oliver dances naked through the mansion’s rooms, signals Fennell’s deliberate engagement with multiple forms of spectatorship, challenging conventional assumptions about the male gaze. Oliver starts out as a sympathetic working-class student at Oxford University who feels out of place among his wealthier peers, until one of them, the rakish Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), befriends him and invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, an opulent estate in Northamptonshire. Once there, Oliver is drawn into a complex web of desire, social manoeuvring, and performative rituals within the house, where status, privilege, and sexuality intermingle.

The film’s narrative and mise-en-scène have prompted critics to compare it to a mixture of Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Like Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Saltburn presents sumptuous interiors and the complexities of elite social life, though stripped of the religious and wartime contexts that defined Waugh’s work. The story’s temporal setting in the early twenty-first century renders Oliver’s manipulations believable in a world where digital traces of identity are more readily scrutinized. At the same time, Oliver’s character evokes Highsmith’s Tom Ripley: a charismatic yet morally ambiguous figure, navigating elite social circles with cunning and calculated charm. Fennell also evokes Pasolini, particularly in the ways her film foregrounds bodily presence and desire as instruments of disruption. The narrative’s attention to sexualized performances and the uncanny theatricality of the household resonates with the subversive energy of Teorema (1968), where the arrival of a mysterious figure destabilizes a bourgeois family. In Saltburn, these interventions are psychological and social, rather than strictly erotic, as the characters’ assumptions and hierarchies are unsettled, revealing the fragility of inherited privilege.

Reviewers have noted the film’s blending of stylistic influences as an example of ‘contamination’, a term Pasolini used to describe the interplay of disparate artistic modes. In Saltburn, the elegance of British aristocratic décor meets the moral perversities of the middle class, producing a rich aesthetic tension that is both entertaining and unsettling. Fennell’s direction highlights the contrast between surface beauty and underlying corruption, using the estate itself as a stage for the negotiation of power, desire, and identity. Ultimately, Saltburn is a study in decadence, both social and aesthetic, and a reflection on the ways privilege, charm, and performance intersect. Through Oliver Quick, Fennell interrogates the allure and danger of assimilation into elite culture, while exploring themes of manipulation, attraction, and the performative nature of social identity. The film’s stylistic and narrative sophistication situates it within a lineage of British literary and cinematic decadence, while remaining distinctly contemporary, offering a provocative and visually sumptuous meditation on desire, power, and the architecture of social spaces.

Through its sumptuous setting, calculated provocations, and psychosexual narrative, Saltburn situates itself within a lineage of decadent cinema while asserting a contemporary sensibility attuned to gender, gaze, and the interplay of desire and power. Fennell’s achievement lies in her capacity to balance style and perversity, evoking historical references and literary antecedents while constructing a uniquely modern critique of class, privilege, and moral transgression. Saltburn is at once a stylish thriller, a social satire, and a celebration of decadence in its most unsettling and exhilarating forms.

For more information about these or any of our screenings, please email drc@gold.ac.uk.

These screenings are free, but booking is advised. Book HERE.

Film Club Archive - Past Screenings