Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Mikesch/Treut, 1985): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm
This film is part of the Collective Visions of Pleasure season at the ICA Cinema and this screening will be introduced by the season curator Nico Hughes.ICA introduction:
Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.
Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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