The Story of I

1997 • Directed by

Jo Ann Kaplan

A woman sits alone in a bare white tiled bath, reading Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye.’ The bizarre events described in the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold in the liquid medium of the bath, she becomes the ‘eye’ of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, THE STORY OF I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina, seen throught he blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror.