Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 7:30pm
VALIE EXPORT's Invisible Adversaries

361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Invisible Adversaries, VALIE EXPORT, 1977, digital projection, 110 mins

One of the landmarks of 70s counter cinema, VALIE EXPORT’s debut feature Invisible Adversaries begins with a premise nicked from alien-attack thrillers like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Anna (Susanne Widl), a Viennese media-and-performance artist not unlike EXPORT herself, begins to believe that extraterrestrial doppelgangers called Hyksos have secretly arrived on Earth and are inducing conflict by controlling human minds. The film follows Anna’s everyday life as she becomes increasingly tormented by this knowledge, working in her darkroom and studio, having sex and fighting with her lover, Peter (Peter Weibel). At the same time, the film’s narrative rapidly unhinges into a collection of enigmatic and disjunctive set pieces that could reflect a complete societal breakdown, Anna’s mental collapse, or both.

“Anna’s schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long moving camera takes…with violently edited montages; private with public spaces; black and white with color, still photographs with video; video with film; earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles,” Amy Taubin observed. “Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view of a woman. EXPORT privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions.”

Conceptually dialectical and viscerally transgressive, Invisible Adversaries attempts a double-barrelled assault on both mind and body. This is emphasised by EXPORT’s elliptical statement on her film. “For a long time, I have been working on artistic representations of physical states, on what the body feels when it loses its identity, when the self eats its way through tattered skin, when steel casings keep the joints from flexing and the exhausted identity is fastened to modern mythomania using steel nails,” she writes. “When dreams and sleep, the storage bed of unconscious thoughts, become a battleground where all preexisting images begin to be torn to shreds, then in the rents we see the real picture, the drama of human self-realization: in search of a home, the hangman’s noose tightens round your neck.”

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.