Invisible Adversaries
Invisible Adversaries German Unsichtbare Gegner is a 1977 Austrian experimental drama film directed by Valie Export, her debut feature film.
Critical opinion regarding the film has been overwhelmingly positive. The Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who in 1981 included the film in his list of the ten best films commercially released in the United States during that year, more recently wrote that the film is one of the richest avantgarde features of the 1970s and praised its winning combination of sexual frankness and visual wit, while another critic, Dennis Schwartz, wrote that the films beauty is derived from its sexual frankness and playfully drawn out intimate relationship scenes, witty use of photography, and its originality as it breaks free of conventional unities of body, space and time. Export skillfully edits montage and integrates video, still photography, and performance art with elements from Cubism, Surrealism, Dada and avantgarde cinema. Artforum noted in November 1980 that watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for onedimensional solutions and it was called one of the most original films in this years exposition and a tour de force of cinematic invention grounded in the directors fresh and intelligent sensibility, characteristically selfreferential. Her visual resources include mirrors, still photography, video, dance, and films within the film, all employed with a bold and surprising inventiveness by the catalogue notes of the 1978 Los Angeles International Film Exposition. Similarly, critic Alison Butler wrote that the film is a witty and visually brilliant essay on gender and experience, culture and environment and program notes used by the San Francisco Cinematheque during a screening quote critic Amy Taubin as opining that the film makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing in life and in art and critic Steve Anker underscoring that it is an important crossover film combining av
Source: Wikipedia