Syntagma (1983) VALIE EXPORT

In the 18-minute film Syntagma, VALIE EXPORT links the results of her decades of research in the field of expanded cinema, video, and photography to her performances. Her exploration of progressive film techniques is evident both in her multi-media films and examination of the female body. Syntagma centers on a woman and her body, in which she encounters herself as a doppelgänger. Her living image appears in mirrors, in the urban environment, as a frozen reproduction of her body in photos and through temporal and spatial duplication. Using a split-screen technique, the motifs are divided in two. These double views express both unity and difference, thus visually confirming VALIE EXPORT’s ‘Multiple Body Theory,’ according to which a single body may belong to diverse systems of representation. In Syntagma, the female body is shown in a split-self experience, in search of its own identity. 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. Export has broken away from any notion of unity - either body, space, or time - into the fragmented world of doubling and difference that is caught in representation.