Warning: the film contains scenes of explicit sexuality.
In resonance with the exhibition “Clair-obscur", the Bourse de Commerce presents Histoire des ténèbres, a film by French filmmaker Anton Bialas, which brings together the figures of Nero, Dante Alighieri, the Marquis de Sade, and King Ludwig II in the intoxication of their obsessions - between ecstasy and damnation, fascination and repulsion. A family portrait teetering on the edge of the abyss.
Anton Bialas’s first feature film explores the European soul through a cinema of drives and excess, where dreams descend into the depths, where everything seeps and throbs. These figures are not approached as simple historical characters, but as haunted embodiments of poetic, political, and destructive desires that continue to act within us.
Situated within an aesthetic that is both baroque and trash, Histoire des ténèbres diverts philosophical and historical narrative to compose a gallery of the damned, traversed by a performative dimension in which artifice coexists with the physical embodiment of bodies and actors. The film does not reconstruct the past but conveys what remains of these figures within our bodies, imaginations, and images.
Histoire des ténèbres places our contemporary relationship to desire, violence, and transgression under tension. The excesses of yesterday enter into dialogue with contemporary obscenity: a smooth, normalized, standardized surface where all dissonance appears neutralized. The film restores to cinema a space of risk and beauty, a place where disturbance, desire, and deviation continue to circulate.
The screening is accompanied by the presentation in the Foyer of in situ works by Anton Bialas, created especially for the event from certain motifs in the film.
About Anton Bialas
Anton Bialas, born in Paris in 1990. His films (Derrière nos yeux, À l’entrée de la nuit, Raie Manta, Groupe Merle Noir, and Eldorado) have been selected and awarded at numerous international festivals including Cannes Critics’ Week, the Berlinale, Locarno, FID Marseille, and Visions du Réel. In 2022, he presented Monuments aux vivants at the Bourse de Commerce, a short film about Daniel Pommereulle made with Ferdinand Gouzon. His first feature film, Histoire des Ténèbres (2025), extends his pursuit of a sensory and baroque cinema, blending transgression, history, and the margins.
CREDITS :
With: Sarah de Teliga, Clément Roussier, Philippe Berson, Ferdinand Gouzon, Kamilya Kuspanova, Christophe Bier, Andy Gillet, Felix Macherez, Camille Delvecchio, Marc Lochner, Thomas Lefèvre, Natascha Wiese, Rosie Sommers, Eugène Blove, Clara Depin, Laure-Lucille Simon, Anne-Lise Maulin, Jefferson Selve, Philippe Ivanov, Fabrice Carlier, Pierre Pleven, Frédéric Thallot, Henri Georgelin, Valérie Dassbach, Claire-Jeanne Heliot, Fabrice Carlier.
Works by Anton Bialas
Design and production: Louis Euiyop Jung
Light design: Arnaud Alberola
Costumes: Rezvan Farsijani
Construction: Bankal & Decker
3D scanning & printing: Atelier du Détail
Shell visual design: Sara Ann Kornmesser
Body sculpture: Lucie Schosseler
