Central Bazaar

Five strangers explore their fantasies over a period of five days in Stephen Dwoskin's remarkable experimental film.

For this remarkable experimental film, provocative avant-garde artist Stephen Dwoskin gathered a group of strangers and filmed them exploring their sexual fantasies over a period of five days; the camera lingering on looks, movements, costumes and improvisations. A subversive investigation of social relations, or possibly a pretentious proto-Big Brother, the film, once seen, is never forgotten.

An important influence on Laura Mulvey’s theorising of ‘the gaze’ in cinema, Dwoskin’s work was nurtured in the underground orbit of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Jonas Mekas, offering an avant-garde alternative to the classical Hollywood spectatorship dynamics that Mulvey’s scholarship critiqued. The ceremonial gowns and make-up here not only evoke the eroticism of European horror movies but also highlight the film's interplay between performance and intimacy.