A film by Antoinetta Angelidi

(1995)

SYNOPSIS

Memory as construction and as internal pulse. Spendo, on the edge of suicide, re-lives her life, re-constructs it and, finally, liberates herself. Sadness flows and fills the space. The hours co-exist and intertwine. The world: a flesh-eating mechanism. A descend begins, a rhythmic immersion into the depths of memory, where the evil appears in the form of good. Until memory no longer repeats itself; a new viewpoint sneaks in. The hours are noiselessly formed anew. Violent dependence is left in the past.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The film is defined by a conflict: on the one hand, the circularity of the hours, punctuating self-concentration; on the other, the ‘squareness’ of the logic of the unconscious, as appearing in dreams, which –along with my life– were the raw material for the film. The film’s narration is produced by the painful passage from entrapped temporal knots to a new flow, which reforms itself toward the end of the film, when the heroine manages to confront the net of guild that trapped her and accepts, finally, her own gaze. From the silence of muteness to the active tranquility of contemplation.

Antoinetta Angelidi

CREDITS

AWARDS

• Best Sets Award (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 1995)
• Best Costumes Award (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 1995)
• Hellenic Ministry of Culture Quality Award (1995)
• Hellenic Ministry of Culture Sets Award (1995)

SCREENINGS (the list is not exhaustive)

• 36th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (1995, competition)
• 12nd Festróia International Film Festival, Tróia, Portugal (1996, competition)
• 2nd Calcutta Film Festival (what is now the Kolkata International Film Festival), India (1996)
• “Greek Women Directors”, 5th “Days of Greek Cinema” Festival, Berlin, Germany (1997)
• The film was screened in theatres in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece (1995-6) and in Greek national television.
• It represented Greece along with seven other films in the National Film Theatre in London, U.K. (1998)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, University of Patras, Greece (2003)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 46th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (2005) Golden Alexander Award for lifelong achievement in cinema
• 3rd Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2006)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 2nd Athens Animfest, 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)
• 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece (2013)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 32nd Panorama of European Cinema, Athens, Greece (2019)
• “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)
• “Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 13th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2024)

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

• “A visit in the labyrinthine museum of an ever present past.”

Maria Katsounaki, Καθημερινή 7/11/1995

• “Through her dreams, nightmares and memories, a woman manages to find her own self; in a visually exciting, ground-breaking film.”

Ninos Fenek Michelidis, Ελευθεροτυπία 19/1/1996

• “The raw matter out of which THE HOURS are made are dreams, first of all. Then, it is silence; ‘a thick, secret silence’. And then, it is time: associative time in the beginning, then fluid time and, finally, salvational time. Angelidi dares the descent, the rhythmic immersion into the loci of hidden desires and torturing guilt; and she re-emerges successfully.”

Maria Katsounaki, Καθημερινή 19/1/1996

• “Shots of exquisite composition, where condescension leads to abstraction… Here the light is an element of narration, as it is in the Flemish masters… The narrativity of the film follows the inner logic of dreams, and that of the intermediate condition between sleep and wakefulness”.

Eleni Machaira, Επενδυτής 21/1/1996

• “Angelidi’s cinema concerns the fragmented subjectivity… THE HOURS constitute an anatomy of Memory, which is neither representational nor historiographical…”

Vassilis Mazomenos, “Time regained”, 1996

• “There are films that give the impression of creating their own, self-contained worlds… In THE HOURS, Angelidi ignores completely the logic of naturalistic representation of space and time, and proposes an absolutely personal view-point on memory and art. She chooses her spaces from the pool of her childhood, her married life and her experience of maternity; as well as from the arsenal of the great visual artists of our [the 20th] century, who changed the way we see facts, images and dreams. Despite everything being fragmental, there is an inner consistence and structure… The result is a game of brilliantly sensual images… This film is exemplary of the possibility cinema has of creating worlds so very intimate and yet far beyond banality… Here, every scene is by itself a whole world of sensations and meanings; so that one often needs to go back again and again in order to fully enjoy it.”

Chrysanthi Sotiropoulou, “Space Created”, 2001

TRAILER