Legacies of Sade

*This article contains spoilers* There is something downright uncanny about Mario Bava’s masterpiece of 1963, The Whip and The Body. It is deeply ingrained in the gothic storytelling tradition, while feeling completely refreshing at the same time. Bava’s filmography is ...

Since their formation in 1992, Carpathian Forest have established themselves as one of the more unique black metal bands to emerge from Norway. Lead by hedonistic frontman Roger “Nattefrost” Rasmussen, the group has been unapologetic with the themes they’ve incorporated ...

Vice and virtue are two concepts that are at the heart of many works by The Marquis de Sade. The two things are not diametrically opposed, although the moralism of vice recovery groups like Alcoholics Anonymous might want you to ...

For my money, director Jess Franco is the best and most prolific adapter of what I would call Sadeian cinema; he did borrow directly from the Marquis de Sade’s texts from time to time, but even when his loose plots ...

“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.” —Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Though Catherine Deneuve was an established force in European cinema by Luis ...

Considering the life and work of West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a barrage of associations and emotions come to mind. I can’t recall ever hearing about him discuss the Marquis de Sade or his relation to the eighteenth century ...

Greatest director of all time (fight me) Rainer Werner Fassbinder covered a range of genres throughout his absurdly prolific career, from science fiction and western to crime film and the melodrama he loved so much, but his overarching theme was ...

Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is generally acknowledged as the cream of the crop when it comes to Sade-themed cinema, specifically adaptations of his work. A few years before its release another Italian filmmaker adapted 120 ...

  Marat/Sade (Peter Brooks, 1967) is a play within a film, showing the inmates of an asylum performing Sade’s (Patrick Magee) play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under ...

“A writer of books with hope on every page, or the most vicious butcher of his age…” Marat/Sade, originally a play (1963) written by Peter Weiss that was later turned into a film (1967) directed by Peter Brook, is a ...