SYNTAGMA

Austria | 1983 | 17 min

A woman and her body, the place of encounter with herself, a double, a doppelganger, a space for questioning and re-founding language by way of non-narrative cinema. In the opening sequence, the woman’s hands, trusting and confused, move the images of the cellulose margins apart so that they can emerge from a film centre. A liberated organism departing from the limbs to extend their search, their liberation, to the whole body. By way of duplicating time and space, Syntagma explores a territory of double visions that express both unity and difference, untethering the female body from origin-related issues and opening a space of reflection on the subject-object relationship, on political resistance, and on sexuality. Thus, Austrian feminist artist Valie Export questions the regime of visibility putting the viewer’s gaze at the centre of a relational experience and provokes it on the codes of interpretation of the female body. (l.f.)