Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), dir. Claire Denis (2002)

Cinema is a materialization of our psychic life. It makes visibly tangible all psychic phenomena, including the work of memory and the imagination, the capacity for attention, the design of depth and movement, and the mapping of affects.

…Film repeatedly shows that pictures–moving pictures–are the current documents of our histories. Indeed, filmic memories–fragile yet enduring–are fragments of an archival process porously embedded in our path, part of our own shifting geography.

–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007)

A couple of weeks ago, I checked out VALIE EXPORT’s 1976 experimental film Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries). It was presented at NYU by Hari Kunzru.

A crazy tale of an alien invasion of everday residents of 1970s Vienna, Austria:

Invisible Adversaries film still

You can watch the film here.

The city stars in this film, in which the increasing paranoia of the human protagonist is matched by the harshness of personal interactions between the Viennese. While no “aliens” are ever seen–no little green men running around–strange occurences and affects seep into the spaces between people. Especially into the spaces between each person and her image, her reflections, her representations.

The doubles and shadows no longer walk in lock step with their originals. They have lives, affects, of their own.

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