A film by Antoinetta Angelidi

(1975)

Two shots with actors are framed by the etching “Action” from the series A Glove, and the painting Giant Days by René Magritte.

As sonic substratum, co-exist parallelly fragments from the Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx and from a handbook of the French language for beginners, as well as the conjugation in French of the verbs I am, I have, I possess, I fly. It is the first time that Angelidi uses the counter-point of multiple visual and audial texts, a technique that she will develop further later. The film is lost.

DESCRIPTION – DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

There were two photographs, one in the beginning and one in the end, and in the middle two shots with actors. In the first of them, a man entered from the bottom left-hand corner of the frame and exited from the top right-hand corner of the frame, having walked on the word L’histoiréctite (the written-story), like a moving point on the screen. In the second one, there was the close-up of the face of a woman (her forehead and jaw were not visible) while simultaneously three sounds were heard: (1) a child’s voice conjugating the verbs to be, to have, to possess, to throw away, in the present, past, and future tenses, (2) a French lesson for beginners, “this is Father, this is Mother, this is the child, this is the dog” intoned by the voice of the Master, and (3) the discontinuous sound of the woman reading the 3^rd και 8^rd Thseses on Feuerbach.

In this way, I realized for the first time the compositional possibilities of layering different sounds. And then, on the final image of the film, which was Les jours gigantesques ((The Titanic Days)by Magritte, which is a woman who pushes away a man who is inside her and thus pushes away her own self, the sound was simultaneously verbs and the intonation of typical family relations (“I am Father. I am sitting in the armchair. I am reading the newspaper. This is Mother. She is knitting. This is my daughter. She is playing with a doll. This is my son. He is playing with a train”); and the combination was interesting. While each of these sounds wasn’t critical, their combination gained a terribly critical dimension.

Antoinetta Angelidi, journal Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος 17/18 1978

CREDIT