Valie Export Filmproduktion

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. 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 one-dimensional solutions

Judith is a maverick reporter who is also seeking a satisfying relationship with various men. She finds corruption and power-games everywhere.

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.

The subtitle of this merry performance is "An Action Text", indicating that the artist's introduction for the vaudeville number was an inflammatory impetus. Export provides precise instructions for the use of a wrapped box of chocolate-covered candy produced by the renowned Viennese company Hofbauer. However, she has not made an advertisement for them and their presentation, but instead, she extols the packqge and confection as a work of art. Severe degradation of the surviving tape further blurs our perceptions.

A densely symbolic video performance that became a scandal in 1977 when Staberl, one of Austria’s most infamous right-wing columnists, attacked Export as a violator of animal rights. Export won the ensuing court case with a beginner’s lesson in filmmaking for the judge and jury…

The starting point for this film is an eighteenth-century musical dice game attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A sequence of short, precomposed musical options are randomly selected through rolling dice and following a table of rules; these sequences are then patched together to create a new composition. Here we see one possible result of this chance procedure.