Adapted from a story by Marguerite Duras.

Text Performed by JD Trow.

Cinematography by Nancy Schiesari and Jeffrey Skoller.

"THE MALADY OF DEATH is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras's story of the same name - her text comprises the voice-over - which is a particular reading of the story in which word and image, in a complex interplay, explore male sexuality. The processes of reading are revealed to be complicated, poetic and political, as an unspecified narrator names and describes 'the malady' and tells of a man and woman's sexual encounters. The male 'you' is multiplied, depicted by many men, each photographed nude, variously fragmented and abstracted, studied and distanced. The 'she' the 'difference,' is literally absent from the image but present metaphorically, 'possessed' but not known. While societal connections between possessing sexuality, economically, and by force are explored in relation to male sexuality, the implication of the act of looking permeate all these discourses. The erotic depiction of the male body for both the camera and the viewer, the displaced and disembodied representation of the woman, and the structured alternation of image and black - at times like an eye opening and closing, but also suggestive of what culturally can and cannot be imagined - create a viewer who cannot easily possess the story, but who must rather read and reread." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive