A film by Antoinetta Angelidi

(1976)

SYNOPSIS

Water and fire – motherhood.

A multiple collage of moving and static images, inspired by the Surrealist novel-collage Une semaine de bonté[A Week of Kindness] by Max Ernst. The film takes its title from the second chapter of the novel: L’eau [Water]. Fragments of the etchings-collages by Ernst, from the chapters “water” and “fire”, are composed into new collages, on which the camera travels or stands still. The camera enters in the nineth etching from “water”, and travels on the reclined woman and the voyeur. The women-dragons from “fire” are entangled into new compositions.

Inside a collage where the two elements clash, a frame opens, in which a milk bottle moves vertically and rhythmically, up-and-down, feeding an invisible baby. Orgasm or violation? A rhythmical and terrifying nursery rhyme, composed by Angelidi, is heard during the feeding. The film was initially part of an omnibus collective film, where it functioned as a dream-sequence. It is lost.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

During my first pregnancy, I started remembering my own childhood, and thinking for the first time about motherhood and what I wanted to do differently.

I composed the “visual score” of the film in the clinic, where I was because of a pregnancy complication.

The films L’eau, and L’histoirécrite, were my first efforts in the counter-punctual use of cinematic heterogeneity, as well as in the incorporation of material from my childhood, which have since characterized my work. They are also my only films where I film paintings – although in L’eau I cut them in pieces and arrange them in new compositions first. In the rest of my films, my relationship with painting is based on a multiple deconstruction and transformation of the elements of paintings, which are re-directed into new images, in space.

I have never filmed two-dimensional paintings since.

Antoinetta Angelidi 2024

CREDIT