BADS films are bold films. Viewer discretion is advised.

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

Strand I: The British Renaissance of Decadent Bodies

Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, Performance (1970)

Ken Russell, The Devils (1972)

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress, Sebastiane (1976)

Peter Greenaway, The Draughtman’s Contract (1982)

Emerald Fennell, Saltburn (2023)

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

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

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.

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’. 

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.

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.

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.

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