Event

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

aka Die Praxis der Liebe
Dir. VALIE EXPORT, 1984
Austria, 91 min.

Drifting between two relationships, journalist Judith realizes by chance that she's not the only link between her very different lovers. In fact, they may also both have known another man, now dead by supposed suicide beneath a train. Fascinated (and running into professional hurdles with a rejected story about pornography), Judith allows herself to be drawn deeper and deeper into a web of arms trafficking and deceit, attempting to piece together the story of his death across the personal and public spheres of her life.

In THE PRACTICE OF LOVE, VALIE EXPORT continues to interrogate body, identity and the dynamics of power, building upon her prior features, but here recomposing her questions as a taut political thriller. As clues and intrigues build up in a complex network, though, they serve not to elucidate the plot so much as EXPORT's larger questions. And so the film's noir structures, as well as the protagonist's initial certainties, begin to fragment under internal conflicts, the indifference of power, systematic misogyny, and a battery of disorienting cinematographic techniques equal in creative force and inspiration to anything in her prior films. The film's chronology skips forward and back, far-off violence infiltrates the streets of Vienna, the body is re-examined through photography and projection, and EXPORT demonstrates once again her rare facility in expressing essential ideas through radical techniques.

"A stunningly coherent indictment of male dominated society." --Alison Butler, National Film Theatre, London.