COMEDY

The Malady of Death is Skoller’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s story of the same name, a particular reading of the story in which word and image 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.