“Valie Export's third feature is an anti-romance in which the heroine, oscillating between two relationships, gradually discovers that both are impossible, not because the subjective processes of ‘love' are defective, but because the objective, social matrix in which both her lovers operate is corrupt, immoral, murderous: in this film, the male world and its power structures cancel the possibility of love beyond the matter of sexuality, that is, the objectification of love.
“The Practice of Love shows Judith, a journalist, piecing together the clues of a crime story--a mysterious death in the subway station near St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna--which implicate first one of her lovers, then the other. Her investigation is a metaphor for the social facts that surround and permeate all so-called personal relationships in contemporary society, and...the film's point of view often shifts from Judith's own to an omniscient one enclosing it.... Everywhere in the world of the film, images are being registered, watched, compiled into vast data systems--a passive record of all lives, everywhere....
“As in Invisible Adversaries and Menschenfrauen, Valie Export here makes use of techniques drawn from her early experimental cinema, video, and conceptual photography to expand the possibilities of narrative feature filmmaking and to disintegrate some of its overdetermined conventions. Export uses narrative times as a flexible material in the fluid manner of Godard or Rivette....” Gary Indiana