Francis Bacon and the Time of Monsters

The Centre for Philosophy and Art is delighted to present Francis Bacon and the Time of Monsters, a new video essay by Ben Ware, illustrated and animated by Vanessa Brassey, read by actor Stephen Dalton, and edited by Jen at Envis Media. The project is generously funded by a British Society of Aesthetics Small Grant Award.

Watch the complete film, explore the individual chapters, and leave comments, on our youtube playlist.

Bacon’s paintings confront us with mutilated faces, screaming mouths and bodies that appear distorted, exposed or caught somewhere between life and death. The film asks how we should understand these monstrous figures — and why, more than half a century after many of them were painted, they continue to exert such a powerful hold on the contemporary imagination.

Moving between philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and close attention to Bacon’s paintings, Francis Bacon and the Time of Monsters considers the artist’s pursuit of what he called a “violent” impact on the spectator’s nervous system. It explores Bacon’s distorted portraits and bodies through thinkers including Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Milan Kundera and Karl Marx, asking what these images might reveal about desire, anxiety, identity, alienation and the pressures of modern life.

Although Bacon resisted the idea of himself as a political painter, the film also asks whether his disfigured figures might be understood as images of a damaged social world — and whether his work can help us recognise something of our own “time of monsters”.

Credits

Written by Ben Ware
Illustrations & Animation by Vanessa Brassey
Narrated by Stephen Dalton
Video production by Jen at Envis Media

A film by the Centre for Philosophy and Art, generously funded by a British Society of Aesthetics Small Grant Award.

With grateful thanks to The Estate of Francis Bacon for permission to reproduce the artworks featured in this film.

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2026.