76 minutes
October 2006
5060033835791
DVD R0 (PAL)
Download (MP4 SD)

Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked

“My favorite feature-length experimental video by Chris Petit.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“Unusual, challenging and thought-provoking; positive and encouraging qualities in these increasingly dumbed-down days.” DVD Outsider

A story of obsessive passion directed and filmed by Chris Petit and based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, Unrequited Love is a dazzling digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities.

It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist. Their methods duplicate: both are irrational and targeted.

Stalking operates on the borders between normal love and pathological fantasy and wants nothing better than to move in and close the gap. Stalking is radical, stalking is anti-bourgeois; stalking is the black economy of the heart. Stalking is an externalised form of self-destruction, as fanciful as any Hollywood confection, without the possibility of a happy ending. Stalking is the erotic impulse pushed to the point of principle, narrowing the distance between love and death, leaving no room for manoeuvre. Stalkers are the fundamentalists of love.

Unrequited Love is a love story in long shot. A world lacking any reverse angle because its story is defined by absence.  At its heart is the lurking assumption of false intimacy. A black valentine.

The DVD includes an extended interview with the director, Chris Petit, and author and cast member Gregory Dart.