Introduction: Everyone will agree that the cinema is one of our culture’s most powerful art forms. What it is best at is heightening emotions. With the form’s camera framing, music, editing techniques, and other elements, a master of the movies can concentrate our attention on the minutia and nuances of certain states of mind. This is especially potent when it comes to the erotic arts. In this series of bulletins, I will highlight films that capture some essentials of BDSM, D/s, S/m sessions, and power dynamics. 

We can do this because since at least the 1990s, dominant women have ceased to be a gag moment of comedy relief and become accepted, normalized if you will, from a gladiator-Booted Raquel Welch running a crew of slave girl rowing galley slaves in The Magic Christian (1969),  

to Heather Stephens as Jill the nominally shy librarian in Tomcats (2001). 

Venus in Fur (2013)

There is almost too much one can say about Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the “first masochist,” not to mention Roman Polanski, who directed this two-hander based on the idea of Sacher-Masoch in a play by David Ives, loosely inspired by Venus in Furs. The plot is set in a theatrical context, in this case an audition in an otherwise-empty theater, because, after all, sadomasochistic activities are inherently theatrical to begin with.

That’s a lot to take in. But the plot is simple. Thomas (Mathieu Amalric; “Thomas Novachek” in the original 2010 play) a stage writer-director is auditioning actresses for his forthcoming adaptation of Masoch’s novel. No one has proved pleasing. As a storm rages outside, in comes Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner, wife of Polanski; the character is called Vanda Jordan in the original play; and by the way, Game of Thrones’s Natalie Dormer won an award for playing the part on stage in London). She convinces Thomas to let her try out. Though she is crude and gruff, she finds herself “becoming” the “part” she is “playing,” and as they improvise Thomas finds himself “becoming” Severin von Kushemski, the masochist in the source novel. She proceeds to dominate him as Severin’s muse and tormentress Wanda von Dunayev. 

Despite this simplicity of the narrative, there are numerous levels going on here that intrigue the viewer and need to be unfurled to reach the heart of the play and its insights into the bond between Mistress and slave. 

The most important thing to assert is that neither the film nor play mock or ridicule Thomas’s artistic aspirations or his eventual submission. But there is a lot that gets between the film and its insights. It’s a film based on a play about a book about a real guy, all involving controversial figures. 

It all begins with Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (27 January 1836 to 9 March 1895). He was an Austrian nobleman with roots in Galicia, also an academic, a “public intellectual,” an extremely popular novelist in his time, and a man with a secret life. 

In his off hours he pestered women to dominate him. He required that they be nude but for shoes or boots but most important were the furs,  accented with a whip or a riding crop. He had two major relationships built around this situation, which were quite successful for a while, but, like many such unions, disintegrated, and as his mental faculties faded, Sacher-Masoch eventually died in an asylum. 

He left behind a string of some 35 books, a mixture of essays on matters of the day, and novels set in and recreating Galician folk tales, culture, and myths. The novels are especially hard to find, rarely translated into English, with often intriguing titles, such as his last work, Fierce Women. What could that be about? His subjects were often female leaders, Empresses, and Queens. Yet his most famous work is basically a domestic drama about the romance between a woman and the man who is trying to manipulate in into becoming his Domme. Talk about topping from below. This book is, of course, Venus in Furs. There, he gave full voice to his fetishes and fantasies. 

This book, too, is relatively hard to find, in a good translation. Perhaps the best comes as the second part of Giles Deleuze’s critical volume Coldness and Cruelty, an extended analysis of masochism as defined by Sacher-Masoch’s novel. Its only drawback is that it is an English translation of a French translation of the original German. 

Still, the book has had a long cultural influence.  It has been adapted to the screen about five times, and the Velvet Underground adapted it as the song “Venus in Furs”:

Kiss the boots

Of shiny, shiny leather

Shiny leather

On your knees. 

Rock connections don’t end there. Marianne Faithfull is Sacher-Masoch’s great-great-niece. 

Besides leading to the name for the complex of sexual inclinations known as masochism, bestowed by sexologist Kraft-Ebbing while the irritated Leo von S-M was still alive, Venus in Furs offered other innovations, including erotic cuckolding, the idea of the session, and the contract of sexual slavery. There is a lengthy contract between Severin and Wanda in the book, which resembles the real ones between Sacher-Masoch and his significant others, documents that give the woman unilateral authority over the male, with her only concession to his needs being she must wear furs “especially when she is feeling unusually cruel.” For “furs,” one can substitute any number of fetishes. Sacher-Masoch was very intense about getting a woman to sign such a binding piece of paper. 

This background is good to keep in mind when I get around to documenting the other movies based on the novel. 

As for this film, Polanski brings his own baggage to the production, and there will be those who won’t want to watch the film because of his background and legal troubles, which continually make the news, most recently at the 2020 Cesar Awards in France, in which Polanski’s latest movie, a drama about the Dreyfuss spy case of the early 20th century, won several awards, compelling many people to stalk out, protesting that august body’s honoring a “pedophile.” 

Venus in Fur was part of a streak of mostly play adaptations, and Polanski may have chosen the project as an opportunity to highlight the skills of his wife, with whom he collaborated only once before, on the Parisian thriller Frantic. Her co-star also looks an awful lot like Polanski. 

Thomas is a familiar type, a nominal artist who writes a play so that really he can dress up the lead actress is the manner he wants or desperately desires. Secret sexualists often have to engage in subterfuge to satisfy their bizarre cravings, especially back in the days of sexual repression when any deviation from normal heterosexist sex was blasphemy. 

As their matching of wits progresses, Thomas takes on the double role of writer-director but also result of his own “direction,” Severin, who in a concluding sequence, at the order of Vanda, carefully opens a carry bag that Vanda has thoughtfully brought along, and he lovingly adorns the Mistress’s feet with their contents. 

Like S. Crabb’s short story “The General’s Daughter,” Venus in Fur is the product of intellectuals (Ives, Polanski, the performers) exploring the philosophical and erotic ramifications of S/m, of dominance and submission, as Polanski has done since at least his first feature, Knife in the Water, later in Cul-de-sac, What? (who can forget the ravishing Sidney Rome being led around in wrist and ankle cuffs by Marcello Mastroianni n that film – well, probably few people, as the work was little seen), and The Tenant, where Isabelle Adjani has a cameo as a Booted Parisian pixie. 

But who cares what convoluted mental machinations the creators go through to justify their S/magery, when the result is Ms Seigner having her legs slowly ensleeved in black thigh-high leather Boots. After a little bit of forced feminization and stocks-bondage the film descends into delirious madness leaving Vanda, Thomas, and viewer poised in a moment of ultimate domination.

Bonus Images