Oscar van Alphen

The Wars

In The Wars photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text 'Madame Edwarda' with images drawn from his archive. 'Madame Edwarda' is a story with no beginning nor an end. A male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter in Paris by night. It's a story about lust, power, anxiety, desire, and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects of these on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in Northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text from the first years of World War II.

Obsessions

A hole in the wall of a rented room in Amsterdam is the starting point of this English-language 'sex and suspense mystery', as Pim de la Parra defines his first feature film, inspired by Hitchcock and a variation on the Rear Window theme. The film's events pick up when a painting falls from the wall. The tenant of the room, a medical student, peeks through the tiny opening at his neighbour. What he sees quickly makes him get his text books. It is not only sex that stirs his curiosity. Hidden out of sight, he witnesses puzzling and disturbing events, all pointing to crime. While the student gets more and more involved in the mystery, his fiancée, a journalist, receives an assignment from her newspaper to report on a murder case. Before long it appears that they are both involved in the same event. Happenings follow one another with increasing speed until a completely unexpected twist in the story brings it to a surprising conclusion.