A film by Antoinetta Angelidi

(1977)

SYNOPSIS / DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I have been interested in three questions since the beginning: the importance of cinematic writing as juxtaposing dialogue of the elements of heterogeneity, the research of borderlines of cinematic representation, and the incorporation of the creator’s subjectivity in the film. This film addresses the issue of representation of women’s bodies in modern and contemporary art history: gender as construction and not as destiny. It is structured on two axes: on the one hand, the body representations and the body of representation; on the other, writing in situation and not on situations. It is composed as a synchronic and diachronic synthesis and subversion of images and sounds. The inversion of codes, as well as their juxtaposition, constitute the film’s central creative strategies and, therefore, the key for its interpretation. A succession of indirect references and games, subversively comment on aesthetic theories and specific artworks. Music is produced by the repetitive transformations of the sound of speech. The inversions of image and sound function narratively, reinscribing women’s bodies.

Antoinetta Angelidi

CREDITS

AWARDS

• Best New Director Award (“Counter-Festival”, Thessaloniki 1977)
• Greek Film Critics Award (“Counter Festival”, Thessaloniki 1977)

SCREENINGS (the list is not exhaustive)

• Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1977), by Noël Burch’s recommendation
• Festival of Thonon-les-Bains, France (1977, competition)
• “Counter-Festival”, Thessaloniki, Greece (1977, competition)
• 7th International Festival of 16mm Films, Montreal, Canada (1978, competition)
• 4th Young Auteurs’ Meeting, Athens, Greece (1978)
• Greek Film Week, National Spanish Film Archives, Madrid / Barcelona, Spain (1978)
• 1st Week of the Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος Journal, Athens, Greece (1978)
• Experimental Film Week, Delft, Netherlands (1979)
• Women Film Week, Cyprus (1981)
• 1st Greek Experimental Film Week, Thessaloniki, Greece (1981)
• Women Film Festival, Götenborg, Sweden (1981)
• 10th “Cinéma different”, Hyères, France (1983, competition)
• “International Experimental Film Show”, London Film Makers Co-Op, United Kingdom (1986)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 46th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (2005); Golden Alexander Award for lifelong achievement in cinema
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 2nd Athens Animfest, Greece (2007)
• “European Women Filmmakers”, 4th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2007)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 8th Experimental Film Festival “Strange Screen”, Thessaloniki, Greece (2009)
• “Antoinetta Angelidi: An Avant-Garde Filmmaker in New Greek Cinema”, 5th Audiovisual Arts Festival, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (2011)
• “Stranger in a Strange Land”, ReMap 3, Athens, Greece (2011)
• Extracts from the film were incorporated in Angelidi’s installation Stitches Without Thread, 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (2012)
• “Tribute: Greek Film Avant-Garde”, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (2013)
• Extracts from the film were incorporated in the installation Organic Games II, The Symptom Project 4, Amfissa, Greece (2013)
• “HELL AS Pavilion”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013)
• 21st Athens International Film Festival, special screening, Greece (2015)
• “The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema”, Athens, Greece (2017)
• “Motherland, I See You”, 62nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (2021)
• “Greece-France: Cinema Dialogues”, Greek Film Archive, Athens, Greece (2021)
• Angelidi’s live performance-entrance in her film IDÉES FIXES / DIES IRAE, LALA queer art commune, Athens, Greece (2022)
• “Antoinetta Angelidi in New York”, tribute on the occasion of Angelidi’s reception of 2024 Ground Glass Award for outstanding contribution to experimental media, Prismatic Ground Festival, Anthology Film Archives, New York, U.S.A. (2024)
• “Lightbox” screenings, Toronto International Film Festival, Canada (2024)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 13th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2024)

The “visual score” of the film was published in the journals Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος (1978, Νο 17/18) and Cahier Critiques de la litterature (No 1/2, 1979). It was also exhibited in the Greek Film Archive, as part of the exhibition “Dirty Humanism” (2011).

CRITICAL ACCLAIM (when first screened)

• “A provocation for some, this film bears witness of a rare mastery in the use of space and duration, as only the Americans, such as Ken Jacobs or Ernie Gehr, have given us an example.”
  

Louis Marcorelles, “Un défi du cinéma grec au pouvoir conservateur” [A Defiance of Greek Cinema to Conservative Power], Le Monde, 3 November 1977

• “What have I watched speechless out of admiration? A fiction of raw materials, structured on duration, on the rendering of the magnificence of duration. …The genius of this film: the emancipation of the signifier …This film does not borrow; it makes its references unrecognisably new. … As grand-father Barthes said, it ‘fragments the old text of culture, of science, of literature, disseminating its traces according to non-recognisable formulas, in the same way that one transforms a stolen product’. This process becomes [in the film] the ground on which is inscribed the adventure of women’s bodies, of their representations, of their gestated violence, of the dead-ends of the representation of the specificity of this violence.”

Christos Vacalopoulos,
“So that the Days of Wrath become Obsessive Ideas – or the Wonderful Variations of Antoinetta Angelidi”, Χρονικό 1978

TRAILER