| Invisible Adversaries | |
|---|---|
 DVD cover | |
| Directed by | Valie Export |
| Written by | Valie Export Peter Weibel |
| Produced by | Valie Export |
| Cinematography | Wolfgang Simon |
| Edited by | Juno Sylva Englander Valie Export |
Production company | Valie Export Filmproduktions GmbH |
Release date |
|
Running time | 104 Minutes |
| Country | Austria |
| Language | German |
Invisible Adversaries (German: Unsichtbare Gegner) is a 1977 Austrian experimental drama film directed by Valie Export, her debut feature film. [1]
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.
The film was released on DVD by Facets Multi-Media in 2011 in a limited edition of 500 copies. [2]
Critical opinion regarding the film has been overwhelmingly positive. The Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who in 1981 included the film in his list of the ten best films commercially released in the United States during that year, [3] more recently wrote that the film is one "of the richest avant-garde features of the 1970s" and praised its "winning combination of sexual frankness and visual wit," [4] while another critic, Dennis Schwartz, wrote that the "film's beauty is derived from its sexual frankness and playfully drawn out intimate relationship scenes, witty use of photography, and its originality as it breaks free of conventional unities of body, space and time. Export skillfully edits montage and integrates video, still photography, and performance art with elements from Cubism, Surrealism, Dada and avant-garde cinema." [5] Artforum noted in November 1980 that "[w]atching 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 from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions" and it was called one "of the most original films in this year's exposition" and a "tour de force of cinematic invention" grounded in the director's "fresh and intelligent sensibility, characteristically self-referential. Her visual resources include mirrors, still photography, video, dance, and films within the film, all employed with a bold and surprising inventiveness" by the catalogue notes of the 1978 Los Angeles International Film Exposition. [6] Similarly, critic Alison Butler wrote that the "film is a witty and visually brilliant essay on gender and experience, culture and environment" [7] and program notes used by the San Francisco Cinematheque during a screening quote critic Amy Taubin as opining that the film "makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing – in life and in art" and critic Steve Anker underscoring that it is an important "crossover film" combining "avant-garde and theatrical sensibilities, made during the mid-1970s. It chronicles the nightmarish breakdown of a fashion photographer as she confronts her waning identity and security as a career woman; blending narrative experimentation, fantasy, fact and theoretical critique, it has enormous impact on independent features which followed it." [8] PopMatters noted that the film has "enough originality to nag at patient viewers and get at least partially under our skin" [9] and critic Michael Atkinson wrote that it is a "weird, restless, beguilingly offbeat bit of dreamwork." [10] The film was presented for the first time at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977, [11] it has won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival [12] and was recently called "seminal" during a screening at a repertory cinema, [13] "a strong and humoristic showdown" at another [14] and "a sonically-complex, montage-rich, darkly funny and uriniferous cornerstone of avant-garde cinema" during a screening at a New York University class. [15] Critic Peter Hajek wrote in the Austrian newspaper Kurier that "Valie Export presents this psychopanoptic view of the present in solid, striking images and often in unexpected humorous passages." [16] Critic Chris Holmlund, author of the scholarly article "Feminist Makeovers: The Celluloid Surgery of Valie Export and Su Friedrich," referred to Invisible Adversaries as a feminist version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , noted that the film includes references to famous paintings and to Un Chien Andalou , and wrote that therefore it "is visually rick, entertaining, striking, but also demanding." [17] A few reviews, however, were negative. For example, London's Time Out wrote about the film that it is "[n]ot unlike W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism " and that it will "probably age as badly" [18] and a reviewer for The Heights wrote that "I was expecting a great feminist work here, but got mediocrity. I cannot recommend that you see this film," though he nevertheless praised the film as a "cornucopia of video spectacle [in which] Export delights, confounds and amuses the audience with her antics." [19]
Viennese Actionism was a short-lived art movement in the late 20th-century that spanned the 1960s into the 1970s. It is regarded as part of the independent efforts made during the 1960s to develop the issues of performance art, Fluxus, happening, action painting, and body art. Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Others involved in the movement include Anni Brus, Heinz Cibulka and Valie Export. Many of the Actionists have continued their artistic work independently of Viennese Actionism movement.
Jonas Mekas was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide. Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers' Cooperative, and the journal Film Culture. He was also the first film critic for The Village Voice.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Valie Export is an avant-garde Austrian artist. She is best known for provocative public performances and expanded cinema work. Her artistic work also includes video installations, computer animations, photography, sculpture and publications covering contemporary art.
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. The film archive and theater is located at 32 Second Avenue on the southeast corner of East 2nd Street, in a New York City historic district in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s. A related movement developed in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
James Lewis Hoberman is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at The Village Voice in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper's senior film critic from 1988 to 2012. In 1981, he coined the term "vulgar modernism" to describe the "looney" fringes of American popular culture.
Canyon Cinema is an American nonprofit organization for distributing independent, avant-garde, and artist-made films. After starting in the 1960s as an exhibition program, it grew to include a nationwide newsletter and a distribution cooperative. Its exhibition activities were split off to form the San Francisco Cinematheque.
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.
Swedish artist Gunvor Grundel Nelson was born in 1931 in Kristinehamn, Sweden, where she now resides. She has worked as an experimental filmmaker since the 1960s. Some of her most widely known works were created while she lived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, where she became well established among other artists in the avant-garde film circles of the 1960s and to the present. As of 2006, she has to her credit 20 films, five videos, and one video installation.
Stephen Dwoskin was a major avant-garde filmmaker whose work was closely connected to the 'gaze theory' associated with Laura Mulvey; a significant disabled filmmaker – though he rejected being framed as such – and an activist for an alternative film culture, through such organizations as the London Film-Makers' Co-op and The Other Cinema. His films are held by the BFI and distributed by LUX. His archive is held at The University of Reading.
The Millennium Film Workshop is a non-profit media arts center located in New York City. It is dedicated to the exhibition, study, and practice of avant-garde and experimental cinema. It was also where the St. Mark's Poetry Project began. Ken Jacobs stated in 2013 that he chose the name Millennium "...because it would have to be that to actually give out equipment, education, space to work in, etc. for free. Dictionary definition: 'A hoped for period of joy, serenity, prosperity and justice.' "
The Cinematheque, founded in 1972, is a Canadian charity and non-profit film institute, media education centre, and film exhibitor based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Decay of Fiction is a 2002 American 35mm part color and part black-and-white experimental film noir project directed by independent filmmaker and artist Pat O'Neill. The film, initially conceived as a documentary, was produced by O'Neill and Rebecca Hartzell for Lookout Mountain Films. Filming took place in Los Angeles.
Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film Christmas on Earth.
Feminist Avantgarde: Art of the 1970s is an international series of exhibitions and a book publication curated and edited by the Austrian art historian Gabriele Schor about feminist art in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Norwich Women's Film Weekend was a two-day annual event that ran for 10 years, from 1979 to 1989, at Cinema City in Norwich. It was organised to 'promote and encourage women film-makers and present the audience with films dealing with women's issues', as the first programme (1979) put it. It was the first event created, curated, managed and implemented by a group called Cinewomen. The NWFW lasted longer than any other women's film festival in the UK and forms part of the history of women's cinema and feminism more generally, and also the history of culture and the arts in Norwich.
Side/Walk/Shuttle is a 1991 American avant-garde film directed by Ernie Gehr. It shows downtown San Francisco as seen at different angles from a moving elevator.