Valie Export, you can be forgiven for not knowing, has been a self-named, feminist, proto-punk photographer-filmmaker-artist occupying the more confrontalionist realms of the Austrian art world since the '60s. (Her birth name was Waltraud Lehner.) Her work, which has often involved simply displaying her partially-clothed body to strangers in socially inappropriate settings, has mostly been completely involved in addressing and dismantling public media ideas of feminine identity and sexual objectification. These were and still are common themes for ambitious, angry woman artists, even if the "work" that results is most often one-dimensional and so pedantic that observing it is not unlike being barked at in grade school by a steel-ruler-brandishing nun. Export's films, thank goodness, are more interesting - in cinema, even the sternest, most socially involved artist is forced to be a bit of a fabulist, to conjure some kind of alternate world, to invent fictions, to create images.

Invisible Adversaries (1977) is the only sample of Export's film work available here, and it is actually a weird, restless, beguilingly offbeat bit of dreamwork, in which an Export avatar - a beautiful photographer (Susanne Widl) obessed with sexual imagery and how it conflicts with a woman's ideas of self - happens to be generally paranoid and compulsively worried about an impending alien takeover. It begins with a kind of pirate radio broadcast about the aliens ("the new Caesars") and their threatening neo-fascist regime, during which Export sails her camera out a bedroom window and over the oblivious Viennese rooftops (which are, sorry, more evocative of past centuries than of the tumultuous 1960s "now" or the near-future). Export's heroine is disconnected from the first - her mirror reflection moves independently, and her art-process daily life frequently erupts (for us, anyway) into montages of nude images and classical paintings juxtaposed with modern consumerist garbage.

Much of the film is taken up with the heroine's philosophically-charged relationship with her boyfriend (Export's partner Peter Weibel); the two bicker and rant at each other in grand, gender-gap blasts of disgust. But one of the film's most arresting sequences simply has the heroine sleeping in her bed, and above her on the wall, a mysterious Cronenborgian mini-movie is screened, a dream made palpable, of the woman walking through an often deserted Vienna in a pair of white ice skates, their odd clinking the only sound in the city. In another, life-size black-&-white photos of people are situated in public places like a kind of reverse trompe l'oeil, confronting the heroine with colorless, unmoving ghost figures in an otherwise "normal" city square. Export is working here in the post-Godard zeitgeist, of course, and so the film is riven with abrupt cutaways (sliced sausage!), obvious satiric equations, broad farce (in which men are univerally loud-mouthed oafs), explosions of news footage from the era's various civil wars and colonial battles, and rambling monologues meant to reveal society's masculine hypocrises and/or narcissism. Export is no mean narcissist herself, and so her relentlessly one-sided film definitely, pot-like, calls the kettle black.

It's the kind of free-for-all, experimental film in which the heroine - who may be in fact going mad - opens her refrigerator to find a squirming infant laying inside. While the quasi-surrealism and wacky sight gags often feel arbitrary, it's all actually readable as Export's Freudian efforts to manifest her single-minded sociopolitical agenda. (The baby's a commodity, get it? Or a domestic burden? Or what's for dinner?) Later in the film Widl's testy madwoman videotapes the sexy writer Monika Helfer reading her own societal indictment out loud, and then they both watch feminist filmmaker Helke Sander recite her own monologue. But the real complaints become thankfully scrambled with Widl's psychological disaffection (she describes what sounds like Capgras syndrome to a therapist, worrying that everyone she knows is a double) and her dread of "the Hyksos," which in history were the Asiatic people that conquered part of Egypt in 16th century B.C., but here are the unseen alien interlopers.

Vaguely Pynchonian in these details, Invisible Adversaries is nonetheless not a post-New Wave film you'd look to for a complete, cohesive cinematic experience - it's an unsafe, volatile mix of chemicals, an unstable gout of ideas, bitter feelings, lopsided politics, visual invention, sexual anxiety and pure feminist ire. As such it's emblematic of its day and age in ways that polished, beloved entertainments can never be. And that day and age is fascinating: the European '70s, after the tumults of the '60s and not yet tamped down by the return to conservatism in the '80s, as Germany and Italy were haunted by rampaging local terrorism, and the industrialized societies maintained a holding pattern, dithering in anticipation of what could possibly come after Vietnam and the array of other oppressive involvements American and European forces engaged in all over the globe and at home. Deeply indulgent and imperfect, Export's film still reverbs like an unearthed heiroglyph only partially translated.

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by Michael Atkinson