Wrestling with Decadence: The Touchables (1968) and Swinging London Cinema of the 1960s

Abstract

The primary touchstones when considering the relationship between decadence and cinema are probably those films in closest chronological proximity to the emergence of the decadent tradition in literature and the visual arts in the fin-de-siècle period of the late nineteenth century – the same historical moment in which cinema itself was born. Hollywood cinema of the pre-sound era spanning the 1890s to the 1920s certainly offers no shortage of figures whose work is amenable to being categorized as decadent, including directors such as Cecil B. DeMille or Erich Von Stroheim, or stars such as Theda Bara or Louise Brooks (figures whose vampishness would eventually transmogrify into the spider women and femmes fatales of 40s film noir). Alternately, one might turn to representations of particular historical moments seen as decadent, such as the fall of Babylon or the decline of Rome, or in the twentieth century, the Weimar era and its tragic aftermath: the ‘divine decadence’ Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles attributes to her green nail polish in Cabaret (1972) that was also on dark display in films like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liliana Caviani’s The Night Porter (1974), both decried by Susan Sontag for espousing a sense of perverse decadent glamour. Or perhaps the relationship between cinema and decadence might be most effectively conceptualized through the aesthetic and narrative obsessions of particular filmmakers, possible examples including the likes of Visconti, Josef von Sternberg, Federico Fellini, or David Lynch, whose respective oeuvres are coloured by different kinds of engagement with decadent images and ideas.