X LOVE SCENES

X LOVE SCENES is based on an ur-trope of cinema: the love scene, here restaged as an unresolved, traumatic, repetitive cycle.
An actress, a director and a script girl on a film set: the male lead is absent. He is replaced by a mark – a white chalk X on a black flag that becomes the actor’s stand-in. While the script girl reads his lines, the actress plays to an empty space. The character of the actress is based on the template of Giuliana from Michelangelo Antonioni’s (1964). Giuliana, now an actress, has devided herself into a number of sub-characters within the film-in-a-film. These represent versions of Bree from Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971) and of Hari from Solaris (Andrej Tarkowsky, 1972). The script girl refers to Nana from Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). Only the figure of the director has no film historial template.
Each of the five sequences tag basic coordinates of a love story – from the first meeting to the final parting – and are always dedicated to one character. The love scenes that are to be performed by the actress refer to their film templates and are rehearsed and shot in ever-new versions. X LOVE SCENES focuses on the interwoven fragments of figures as rhizomatic updates and identitary relay stations, which convey coded messages from a technologically staged comédie humaine. The ”other side” of the lover’s gaze is rendered as a view of the production aspect of the cinematographic apparatus as an imaginary hors-champ, simultaneousely a reverse shot of the desires and passion inscribed indelibly in the cinematic convention of the love scene, which here comes to nothing.
Constanze Ruhm

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