Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers,

Death, Excessive, Hallucinatory, Lyrical, Perverse, Profane, Queer, Rebel, Sensual, Tragic, Visceral

Vienna-born actor, writer, and director Erich Von Stroheim worked mainly in the silent film genre (only one of his films was a "talkie"), but he seemed nevertheless to make a lot of noise. As an actor in Hollywood during World War I, he was often typecast as the leering, be-monocled Prussian villain.

Epic, Germans in hollywood, Perverse, Silent film, Tense

With an unerring ability both to describe evil and to place himself in its path, Polanski has created a body of work that never fails to elicit shudders and raise questions. He possesses a mordant insight into the politics of sex and violence, an inherent feel for the macabre, and an eccentric and

Erotic, Excessive, Homoerotic, Perverse, Polish new wave, Psychological

"Felliniesque" -- even if you have never watched a scrap of his film, this adjective summons up a world of oddity, magnificence, and pathos that testifies to Federico Fellini's creative genius. Initially part of the Italian Neorealist wave, he soon veered towards an idiosyncratic style all his own. F

Dark, Epic, Perverse, Polychromatic, Post-war italian film, Surreal