VALIE EXPORT. EXPANDED CINEMA: REMOTE LECTURE
Saturday 31 May 2003, at 3pm
London Film School

The lecture text, which has been especially prepared by Valie Export, will be read by Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

“The concept and the intention of my early work in Expanded Cinema was to decode reality as it was manipulated in film, to transport the cinematographic apparatus into the installation of time and space in order to break out of the two-dimensionality of the flat surface. The deconstruction of dominant reality, the deconstruction and abstraction of materials, the attempt to find new forms of communication and to realise them were also in the centre of my analysis. My work was concentrated on breaking with the traditional form in cinema, the commercial-conventional sequence of film production, shooting, montage, projection, and to replace them in part with aspects of reality, as new signs of the real. Presentation, product, production, reality form a unity in Expanded Cinema.” —Valie Export in conversation with Roswitha Müller, in her book Fragments of the Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1984

INTERRUPTED LINE
Valie Export, 1971-72, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
“A line is filmed through the windshield of a moving car and proceeds on the rear mirror. The movement coming from the other direction and the ongoing movement is visible, both only interrupted by the driving car. The shifting interruption on the space-time line has the size of a car. The cinema as a car, the car as a joint of time (curvature between future and past), the cinema as an interruption of the normal time.” —Valie Export
“The camera is stationed in the back of a moving car and focuses on the dividing line ahead. At the same time, the frame includes the rear-view mirror, in which the dividing line is continued behind the car. The car functions as the interruption of the space-time continuum, as “the seam of time, a bend between future and past”. Metaphorically, the car stands for the interruption of the everyday flow of time by the time of the film.” —Roswitha Müller

MANN & FRAU & ANIMAL
Valie Export, 1970-73, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 8 min
“Instead of the holy trinity: father, son, holy spirit, instead of the profane trinity: mother, family, state, instead of the social trinity: father, mother, children the film treats the real trilogy in 3 sections. What unites man and woman (not uniquely for sure, but what is being concealed) is the history of nature.” —Valie Export
“The earlier films of Valie Export, one feels, were motivated by the author’s desire and needs to investigate her own subjectivity, with the audience as a necessary part of the transference and polemic. Mann & Frau & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures. Thinking about my ‘quite erotic’ tag of that film, I realise that as a viewer I am experiencing a sexuality like that of childhood – one motivated by curiosity, a prosaic pleasure in looking, but free from fantasy. It is quite unlike the experience of ordinary pornography which is invested with the erotic almost exclusively through its symbolisation of power.” —Joanna Kiernan

… REMOTE … REMOTE …
Valie Export, 1973, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
“Human behaviour in contrast to machines (animals) is influenced by events in the past, as far back as these experiences may lie. Therefore there exists a psychic paratime parallel to the objective time, where the prayers of anguish and guilt, the inability to win, deformations which rip open the skin, becoming aware of oneself, have their constant effects. I demonstrate something which represents past and present.” —Valie Export
“… Remote… Remote… was one of the films categorised by a considerable number of women as typifying despicable excesses and extreme violence. People frequently reacted to the film with horror, incomprehension and scorn. In showing emotion, gentleness and sensitivity as female qualities, there was no place for aggression – cutting and violently opening were equated with male behaviour; having to penetrate in order to possess. When Valie Export shaves and trims herself, the sight of her provokes fantasies, revolving around acts done to the body. Yet there is nothing dreadful about a woman trimming her body, especially in the places where she enhances the glamour imposed on her body by the civilising influences of the world around her. And the fact that you have to suffer to achieve beauty has always brought a knowing smile to a woman’s lips. The way in which Valie Export grooms herself however, involves unconventional touching and violation which goes beyond the familiar sight of a woman ‘harmlessly’ doing herself up. This triggered, and continues to trigger, huge defensive reactions among many women. Such a reaction represents the easiest way of emphatically rejecting something that has got right under the skin. No-one is allowed to encroach into the recesses of our private existence, in which the damage suffered and our own self-mutilation remains safeguarded behind a front of normality.” —Renate Lippert

SYNTAGMA
Valie Export, 1984, 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min
“Syntagma is like a rigid gaze directed at oneself as if one were two persons; staring at oneself and the camera staring at oneself. Through these two eyes only the staring can be perceived, reflections of identity, the mirror as something impenetrable, like a veil being scrutinised. The more the mirror reflects, the more it moves into oblivion like an impenetrable object even if it makes imprints of itself on pictures.” —Valie Export
“The connection of the elements of a picture implies its structure and its possibility, its form of representation.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 2.15
“According to this view, the representing relationship which makes it a picture also belongs to the picture.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.1513
“This short film consolidates not only the great variety of avant-garde techniques accumulated over two decades of work in Expanded Cinema, video and photography, but also the insights gleaned from her body work in performances, actions and installations. At the same time, feminism both as methodology and personal experiential stance, which had left an indelible mark on Export’s art during the 1970s, continued to be the single most important impulse and thematic source in her work in the 1980s. The reappropriation of the female body from its perceived sense of alienation has been at the forefront of Export’s feminist concerns. The female body, thus perceived, is in fragments, split and ruined, lacking cohesion, “the site not only of an anatomical but of discursive lack”.”  —Roswitha Müller, quoting Kaja Silverman “The Acoustic Mirror”

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