Every Man for Himself and God Against All

A program of films, by such disparate figures as Werner Herzog, Nagisa Ōshima, Stephen and Timothy Quay, Michael Haneke, and François Truffaut, united by their focus on figures who are not so much “discontented” with civilization, per Freud, as they are incapable of playing along with its rules and winning its acceptance. Feral humans (Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Truffaut’s The Wild Child), hapless subjects of smothering patriarchal tradition (Ōshima’s The Ceremony), insubordinate presences in institutions dedicated to the teaching of bootlicking lackeydom (the Quays’ Institute Benjamenta)… the protagonists of the films gathered here, by virtue of some more or less obvious mark of otherness, are seen to become unwitting antagonists to the hostile world surrounding them. The treatment they endure says something about the individuals in question, of course, but speaks volumes about the systems of control that most of us passively submit to.