Valley Fever (1979)

Valley Fever shares certain concerns with Beroes earlier film Recital Again she is interested in the locus of individual perception but is less concerned with emotion than with the bounds of human consciousness Like Recital the film is also highly structured and revolves around the reading of various texts It involves two characters a woman and a man who according to Beroes carry on a disjunctive conversation about the effects of illness on perception While the man reads from a scientific treatise on the syndrome of fever the woman chooses the words of MerleauPonty explaining her experience in phenomenological terms They show each other film footage in an attempt to visualiseexchange their perceptions But ultimately the film confirms their inability to see eye to eye In her choice of cinema as a medium of exchange within the film Beroes also points to the dilemma of the artist and the problematics of communicating ones singular vision to the larger world