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Relevant passages:
Söke Dinkla «Virtual Narrations
From the crisis of storytelling to new narration as mental potentiality»
Runa Islam
«The Gaze of Orpheus»
The film opens with the image of a young woman’s head seen from behind. At a steady pace the head turns towards the viewer. Shortly before we encounter the penetrating gaze for a second, the speed of the movement increases almost imperceptibly.
In the work by Runa Islam, the essential elements of the «Orpheus and Eurydice» myth are reversed. [Here] the woman (=Eurydice?) turns to face the viewer (=Orpheus?). Like in the myth, at the moment of the gaze she falls back into the shadowy underworld, but only to pass from the blackness of the projection surface as an endless, female passageway for the viewer, entangled in the mechanical construction of a cinematically-reproducible longing.
In «The Gaze of Orpheus» even another motif is at work: the classic film motif of the gaze darted over the shoulder, the expression of expected danger, often used when protagonists know with certainty to vanish from the ‹scene› the next moment. Once again suspended in an endlessly-repeated state of expectation that reaches into eternity, the viewer remains in the vacuum of an unsolved yet possible story.
(Excerpt from the text by Hans D. Christ, for the exhibition «dialogues & stories», hartware, Dortmund 2001.)
