Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked

A story of obsessive passion directed and filmed by Chris Petit. 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.