Cinema of Decadence

A wide-ranging study of decadence in European, American and Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day.

From the shadowy glamour of early European cinema to the bold visions of twenty-first-century filmmakers, The Cinema of Decadence traces a rich history of film shaped by excess, artifice and desire. Beginning with the decadent imagination of Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Frank Wedekind, David Weir explores how their ideas influenced silent-era filmmakers such as Erich von Stroheim, G. W. Pabst and Ernst Lubitsch, from the figure of the Vamp, immortalised by Theda Bara, to the fatal allure of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929). The book moves through Hollywood’s golden age, shaped by émigré artists such as Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, and into European art cinema, with chapters on Fellini, Pasolini, Buñuel and Visconti. Weir follows decadence into the underground films of 1960s and 1970s New York, the distinctive aesthetics of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, and contemporary reimaginings including Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023). The result is a wide-ranging history of cinema’s fascination with beauty, corruption and transgressive pleasure.