Valie Export

What constitutes a deadly sin today? Seven of the world's best-known women directors produce their own version of celluloid sin in this omnibus film.

Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself.

Valie Export's third feature is an anti-romance in which the heroine, oscillating between two relationships, gradually discovers that both are impossible, not because the subjective processes of "love" are defective, but because the objective, social matrix in which both her male lovers operate is corrupt, immoral, murderous: in this film, the male world and its power structures cancel the possibility of love beyond the matter of sexuality, that is the objectification of love.

A woman gets in the bath and masturbates, challenging the voyeuristic camera before, during and after the act.

The body and specifically the "woman's body" is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export's notion of "body language" poses an ironic relation to these questions that acknowledges "the end of the body" or at least the final break with the way in which we understand it to be a biological, existential, or metaphysical entity... (imdb)

Valie Export's daring film about relationships, Menschenfrauen, focuses on Franz S., a journalist, and his relationship with four women: the kindergarten nurse Petra, the teacher Gertrude, barmaid Elisabeth and his wife Anna. (facetsdvd.com)

A woman giving herself a manicure cuts deeper and deeper until she bleeds.

VALIE EXPORT provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, with Vienna´s landmark, St. Stephen´s Cathedral, she extols it as a work of art instead.

A family is observed watching television. The viewer becomes the object of the family's gaze, as much as the family is the object of the viewer's gaze. (eai.org)