Filmcollege: Psychosexual Drama + Possession (1981)Filmcollege: Psychosexual Drama + Possession (1981)

A lecture on psychosexual cinema by Hugo Emmerzael, followed by a screening of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, about a marriage falling apart.

This film programme begins with a lecture by Hugo Emmerzael on psychosexual drama. He looks at films in which desire, intimacy and sexuality change and destabilise the characters’ lives, and at how those films use sex to examine power, identity, jealousy and obsession, as well as the thin line between love and violence. The lecture connects Alfred Hitchcock with David Lynch and David Cronenberg, and then turns to work by Julia Ducournau, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Claire Denis, where inner feelings are made visible through the body.

After the lecture, the programme screens Possession (1981), directed by Andrzej Żuławski. The film follows a marriage that comes apart as jealousy, paranoia and violence take over, and the distinction between psychological breakdown, sexual desire and something more monstrous starts to blur.

Story written by Evenitto from the film catalogue