Événement

INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES

aka Unsichtbare Gegner
Dir. VALIE EXPORT, 1976
Austria, 104 min.

Following a mysterious radio news report, photographer and artist Anna realizes that the city of Vienna, and the larger world, have been infiltrated by the "Hyksos", shadowy extraterrestrials able to infiltrate human bodies and control thought. Once her eyes have been opened, the signs are everywhere: strange encounters on the street, turmoil at home and abroad, and, soon, the crumbling of her relationship with her boyfriend, played by artist Peter Weibel, who co-wrote the film with EXPORT and drew from their own by then over relationship history. As an artist, Anna does all that she can to observe, document, and attempt to extract what may be real and what is all in her head.

But this is neither INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS, nor domestic melodrama (though encompassing bits of both), and no synopsis can truly capture the experience of watching INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES, which seamlessly blends the personal, the political, and the experimental. Anna's mental states and deteriorating sense of identity are conveyed through disorienting (or satiric) intercuts, the interposition of still photography, hallucinatory interpositions, mirrors, projected film, glaringly non-diegetic sound design, discontinuities in time and place, and paranoid confluences of chance. But the reality of Anna's condition is ultimately besides the point in the face of the larger world that fuels it: we don't need the pat explanation of the Hyksos to recognize the larger social and societal issues that whirl through the film.

Following the film's release, the conservative Austrian public and tabloid press branded the film's frank and still-refreshing female view of sexuality as "pornographic", EXPORT and Weibel's politics as "terrorist", and called for the resignation of the head of the state agency that had helped fund the film. EXPORT even received death threats. But the film's notoriety was assured, and it played for 13 weeks in Viennese cinemas. Its unique power remains undiminished by the four decades since original release. An unmissable statement of art and identity in the face of an unstable world.