The Armed Eye – VALIE EXPORT in a Dialogue with the Film Avant-Garde (1984)

Overview

In her three-part series VALIE EXPORT takes a look at the themes of "staged space - staged time", "real movement - movable reality", and "structural film", a genre which no longer exists on public-service television. Using numerous examples from films prepared for the specific media, for example by Wojciek Bruszewski, Malcolm LeGrice, Sergey Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Kurt Kren, Yvonne Rainer, Anne Severson, Alfred Hitchcock, Linda Christanell, Gary Beydler and Marc Adrian, narrative and non-narrative forms of story-telling are examined and compared. Adrian appears in a live interview, and he attempts to explain the conditions of production, methods and Zeitgeist through his own work, including his first computer film, Random (1963). The advanced level of this film is also indicated by the high density of theoretical quotes from Christian Metz, Charles S. Peirce, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin and Ferdinand de Saussure.