Art House Decadence

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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, Tokyo Decadence (1992)

Screening Notes and Content Warnings

Notes adapted from David Weir’s The Cinema of Decadence, forthcoming from Bloomsbury

Art house was originally a synonym for either an art gallery or a luxury retailer (like Tiffany and Co.), but in the early twentieth century the term migrated from the arts of painting, jewellery, and ceramics to the art of film. Variety first used the phrase in 1927 to announce the opening of the Brooklyn Little Theatre, whose inaugural screening – F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) – established the model: foreign, serious, and elevated. This niche genre emerged just as Alan Crosland’s talking picture The Jazz Singer (1927) revolutionised the industry, making foreign films harder to screen. Silent intertitles could be easily translated; sound films required costly multilingual versions until subtitling took hold in the 1930s and 40s. After the Second World War, art houses flourished, becoming synonymous with sophisticated alternatives to Hollywood.

Yet “art house” and “foreign film” are not synonymous. Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937) illustrates the distinction. Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, it was treated as a serious contender rather than a rarefied curiosity. What critics noticed, however, was its air of old-world decadence: monocled aristocrats on both sides of the trenches, sharing a dying code of cosmopolitan honour. This sensitivity to decay, refinement, and moral ambiguity would become a defining feature of later art house cinema, preparing the ground for films that probe beneath the surfaces of culture and society.

This strand invites audiences to explore desire, obsession, and transgression through the lens of art house cinema. From the composed streets of suburban America to the opulent parlours of European aristocracy, these films probe the hidden currents beneath the surface of civilisation. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) studies secret eroticism and the tension between decorum and fantasy, while Luchino Visconti’s L’Innocente (1976) reveals the corrosive elegance of upper-class infidelity. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1977) confronts power, violence, and perversion with merciless intensity. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) contrasts small-town sunshine with psychosexual darkness, exposing horrors beneath the familiar. Finally, Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992) explores urban alienation and commodified intimacy, where desire is both transactional and existential.

Together, these films 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.

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.

Luchino Visconti, L’Innocente (1976)

Buñuel and Pasolini both 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 the nationalist unification of Italy (1860-70), known as the Risorgimento which became the subject of two 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, epitomised by the bankrupt duke 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.

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.

David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is one of those rare films that seems to reach beneath the surface of everything familiar and emerge with something uncanny, almost physically tangible, yet impossible to define fully. The film opens in a small American town – Lumberton, North Carolina – where the sunlight glints off red roses, yellow tulips sway in manicured gardens, and children play beneath the perfect suburban sky. But Lynch quickly undermines this serenity. A severed human ear, crawling with ants, is discovered in a field, and the viewer is plunged into a hidden world where desire, violence, and perversion dwell just below the lawnmower hum of domesticity.

At its core, Blue Velvet is a collision of opposites. The film juxtaposes the idyllic and the obscene, the rational and the psychosexual, the innocent and the corrupt. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), returning home from college, assumes the role of amateur detective – but his investigation becomes entangled with his own voyeuristic impulses, and he soon finds himself navigating a landscape where sadism, fetishism, and erotic obsession are inseparable from the investigation itself. Lynch’s visual style mirrors this duality: scenes oscillate between garish, dreamlike lighting and suffocating darkness, long-held shots both exaggerating and defying cinematic expectation. The suburban exterior is a mask, a set-piece hiding the darker energies that Lynch insists exist in every backyard, every picket fence, every tidy street corner.

The film’s perversity extends beyond narrative content into the very form of the cinema itself. Noir conventions – mystery, investigation, femme fatale – are twisted, delayed, or denied. The plot at once resembles a Hardy Boys adventure and a Freudian nightmare, a mix of childish curiosity and adult desire. Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), nightclub singer and tragic figure, embodies the film’s contradictory impulses: she is both predator and victim, object of desire and agent of suffering. Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), in turn, embodies the extreme, almost mythic form of the id, acting out oedipal and sadomasochistic fantasies with explosive intensity. Through their interactions, Lynch stages a world in which innocence, curiosity, and morality are inevitably contaminated by observation, desire, and knowledge.

Blue Velvet is also a study in American suburbia as a theatrical, performative space. Every shot of lawns, flowers, and fire trucks is deliberately heightened; what seems picturesque is revealed as fragile, artificial, and threatening. Even moments of light – Sandy’s dream of robins bringing love to the world – carry the residue of unease, reminding the viewer that the boundary between nightmare and daydream is porous. The film insists that abnormality, perversity, and darkness are not aberrations but foundational truths of human experience, truths that lurk beneath every cheerful facade. It is a film simultaneously familiar and alien, violent and lyrical, perverse and profoundly human. It challenges the viewer not merely to watch but to witness, to confront the uncanny rhythms of desire, fear, and moral ambiguity. Every scene is a careful orchestration of tension, seduction, and dread, and every return to the suburban surface reinforces the lesson: the most authentic experiences lie in the spaces we fear to explore, in the shadows behind the perfect lawn – a nagging sense that all this normality is not normal. Or if it is, then normality is as false as the mechanical robins, which implies, in turn, that abnormality contains a greater truth. That is one of the more persistent lessons of decadence that Blue Velvet conveys in full: abnormality, depravity, and perversity intensify human experience and confer on it more authenticity than normality, morality, and virtue could ever hope to achieve.

Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992)

The decadent tradition migrated to Japan during the latter part of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), the period in Japanese history when Western intellectuals and institutions were welcomed to the formerly isolated island nation as part of a program of rapid modernization. In the early years of the twentieth century, the English word decadence was borrowed into Japanese as dekadansu (written in katakana as デカダンス) to express the sense of disillusion that a group of Japanese writers felt with the progressive ideology of the period. This early literary interest in Western decadence does not appear to have received cinematic expression, but it did establish decadence as a cultural possibility that might be exploited by filmmakers in the future. In the middle of the twentieth century, a more insistent and self-destructive sense of disillusionment set in after the Japanese defeat in World War II, a sensibility that informed the buraiha group (written in kanji as 無頼派, often translated ‘decadents’). Social disaffection informed these writers, whose rejection of American values—and of pre-war Japanese values—did find their way into the films of the period, but discontent with Western culture did not always extend into the film industry. As with every other national cinema, Hollywood has had an outsize influence on Japanese film: Yasujirō Ozu (1903–1963) venerated the silent films of Ernst Lubitsch (especially The Marriage Circle, 1924), while Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) admired John Ford’s epic westerns, as The Seven Samurai (1954) shows. At the same time, cinematic influence does not gainsay ideological critique: Kurosawa’s bitter treatment of corporate corruption in The Bad Sleep Well (1960) suggests an on-going disaffection with Western values that the film registers as a combination of social decadence and personal tragedy.

Ryū Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence (1992) might seem, at first, to offer a more ‘indigenous’ form of decadence, as suggested by the interpretive title by which the film is known in English, rather than the Japanese original, Topāzu (トパーズ, topaz). But the director’s bleak, intense exploration of sexuality, alienation, and desperation in the Tokyo of Japan’s economic bubble has the transactional, capitalist feel of Western society. 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. With very few exceptions, the mise en scène conveys a predominantly Western sense of décor and design. Most of the interiors, whether of sterile hotel rooms or expensive high-rise apartments, could just as well be in Los Angeles or London. One looks in vain for the tatami mats or sliding, paper-panelled doors that one sees in a film by Ozu, nor does the traditional sex-worker appear costumed as a geisha, replaced by a woman garbed as a dominatrix. 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.