‘The birds' delirium does not interest the trees’
A short film produced
by Iris Dittler and Nicolai Gütermann.
This film opens with a sequence shot using a Super 8 camera at the Josephinum (Museum of Medical History in Vienna), with a voice-over containing an excerpt from the opening text The Great Ephemeral Skin in Jean-François Lyotard’s work, Libidinal Economy. The following sequences are filmed on and off the grounds of a former women’s asylum. (Centre hospitalier psychiatrique Montperrin, Aix-en Provence, France) The gestures are anchored in reality, but through the insertion of caesurae, the resulting ensemble may be likened to a surrealist mental landscape, which in the last sequence, culminates in its most minimal and stripped down form, a wrapping in ribbon of the object, the body and the subject.
‘It [the immense membrane of the libidinal “body”] is made from the
most heterogeneous textures, bones, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged
atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, herbs, canvases to paint. All
these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a
Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is
one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the
contrary (…) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities, which when
it passes on the “first” turn will be cavities, but perhaps on the “second,”
lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor will know, in
the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (..) has not
got two sides, but only one, and therefore neither exterior or interior.’
Jean-François Lyotard, in Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain
Hamilton Grant. London: Continuum, 1993.
