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“This film deals with exploring one´s surroundings by means of the body, and the exploration of the surrounding body. Not only is something shown in this film, showing itself is shown, not only is something portrayed, portrayal itself is portrayed. A sense of space is created in a way possible only with film: seeing oneself from the front and back simultaneously, from above and below, and from outside in the center of the space. The film combines opposite parts of the space, which form the body´s imperceptible time-space continuum. Space is carried along, just like the camera.” – VALIE EXPORT
"This video film shows indecency in its modern form. While peddling naked female flesh was considered indecent in the past, we can see by the examples of today´s star athletes that skin full of advertising sells better. The same applies to politicians, of course, though in a more subtle way. Advertising on skin as the new indecency! I consider this film to be a continuation of my previous work with the body as a vehicle for social codes. While in the past it was religion that dictated male and female behaviour, which was also expressed in their physical appearance, business has now assumed this role. Business dictates physical behaviour, physical pressure in its most direct form, and even sets standards for how our bodies are to be represented. Religion no longer prescribes morality, that is now done by the global power of business, with its products and codes. Morality has found a new patron." (Valie Export)
Set in contemporary Vienna, the film involves a photographer, Anna, who discovers that extraterrestrial beings are colonizing the minds of her fellow citizens by raising the human aggression quotient. The outer world immediately becomes disjointed, yet the inner world does too, as Anna and her lover, Peter, try to hang onto their deteriorating relationship.
Tethered to one another by a rope, two figures standing on parallel escalators perform five ways of being together—“against each other,” “with each other,” “to each other,” “for each other,” and “each other”—challenging expectations of how people can and should coexist in public space.
"The middle line marking of the road is filmed through the windscreen of a moving car simultaneously with its own reflection in the driving mirror. The repeated interruptions of the space/time line are as big as a car. The car as a connecting link in time. The cinema as interruption of normal time flow.” – VALIE EXPORT
Menschenfrauen is a film about relationships and the psychological oppression of women in society. Franz, a journalist, maintains relationships with four women. His three mistresses are introduced with television dreams of intense emotional violence (in the first dream, a mother shouts at her daughter, explaining that as a girl, she does not deserve a room of her own), and the fourth is his wife. He is desperate to have each to himself. Franz never offers a substantial sign of love, but is willing to say anything and make any promise for affection. His dependence on women for fulfilment is explained through arguments with his wife. He claims "I am my own sound. The women produce voices within me." An understandable and sometimes sympathetic antagonist is one of the films greatest strengths. The emotional damage he causes becomes believable.
The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.
With sometimes painful directness, Valie Export conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children who were sexually abused by their parents, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.
Judith is a maverick reporter who is also seeking a satisfying relationship with various men. She finds corruption and power-games everywhere.
“The narrow passage or dangerous passage is a common motif in both funerary and initiation mythologies. I step inside and move through a corridor of electrically charged wires, constantly experiencing painful shocks and sinking to the floor. But I accept the challenge and, in a somewhat pathological increase in willpower, I press my head against the wires again and again. Society is a closed, structured space, which regulates all human energy through painful barriers. Only through an effort of will to overcome the pain (which is at the core of society) is one able to achieve a state of free expression.” – VALIE EXPORT