The Practice of Love

Director: Valie Export

1984 / 90min / DCP

Export’s third feature is a feminist upending of film noir conceits starring Adelheid Arndt as a journalist who uncovers a murderous conspiracy that, upon further investigation, may very well have a connection to her unhappy personal life. “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. Export makes use of techniques drawn from her earlier experimental cinema, video and conceptual photography to expand the possibilities of narrative feature filmmaking and to disintegrate some of its overdetermined conventions.” —Gary Indiana

Distributor: Sixpack Films

Part of Valie Export: Tap Touch Burn