DESIRE is a non-chronological collage constructed from a corpus of materials drawn from the genre of melodrama. The work, grounded in the practice of decoupage, spans approximately three decades—from 1932 to 1958—and includes titles from the United States, Argentina, Great Britain, Finland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
Desire traces both a diachronic trajectory across time and a synchronic one within time, weaving a particular history of cinema along a temporal axis that is at once specific and archetypal. History itself, though continually shifting in its spatial and temporal configurations, appears to endlessly reproduce the same figures—interpreters who, beyond the specificity of their human and historical identities, seem fundamentally unchanged in gesture, modality, and essence. This recursive logic—an endless slipping and rising, ad infinitum—emerges in the film as a desperate attempt to escape a condition of human existence, here marked as specifically feminine, subjugated by the flow of time as a secularized and systematic machinery of power.
The film thus unfolds as an expression of impossibility ab ovo: the impossibility of a total liberation from the archive, understood as archè—sign, origin, and principle. Even when memory is reduced to ashes, the film’s figures wander along the threshold between presence and absence, suspended within the realm of desire.