Topos

A film by Antoinetta Angelidi

(1985)

SYNOPSIS

A parable on place and time. A game of metamorphoses. A passage after death, a second death. A woman gives birth and dies. At the moment of death, her face disintegrates and assumes the aspects of those who stand by her bed. Her body is torn by the conflicts of those who inhabit it and her voice dissolves into many voices and many roles.

Original (Greek) title:	Τόπος
English title:	Topos
Year of production:	1985
Country of production:	Greece
Duration:	80 min
Language:	Greek
Material:	35mm, colour
Aspect ratio:	1.66 [aspect ratio of the digitalisation FLAT 1.66]

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENTS

The film presents an expanded, in-between moment, where memories flow simultaneously, and their consistency has the arbitrariness and exactness of the sequence of a dream. The entire film is a filmed dream. Bodies drift in different rhythms, each has its own individual temporality, while the film records two 24-hour cycles, presenting successively events that may be 20 years or 40 days apart from each other.

Antoinetta Angelidi, August 1984

In unknown places one finds recognizable elements… Some paintings become references. Recognition of a world or its scattered elements that one already carries inside oneself but had not identified till then. So, one starts constructing a world in one’s image. Fragments or layers of the past – light, colours, placements, faces’ movements, stories – reassembled. Time negates itself and yet the film provides many elements of temporality. Many layers of past, many layers of civilisation. The past is there in many ways and yet it doesn’t exist. Space is naked, alive, creating sensations. The perspective of the film is not a person’s viewpoint; it is the space itself who sees. The film’s space is the body, it breathes, sees, listens, grieves, responds. A series of parallel narrations by different elements of image and sound are weaved and conversing with each other. Associations are induced. The film writes itself, it changes, advancing its own writing. The film is the transparency of a journey, both as the narration of an experience and as the narration of its own construction. Around the moment of the difficult passage, are gathered the desires of the people who constitute the different faces of the woman in trial. One is obliged to create the world anew / one tries repeatedly to enter the paintings, entire pieces come out of them / faces are devoured following the geometry of sensations. One becomes a turbulent field. The voice dissolves into many voices and roles. From the fragments, from the image pieces, a new universe is formed. When the mechanism of memory is amended, the universe remains empty.

Antoinetta Angelidi, September 1985

CREDITS

Film Direction, Art Direction:	Antoinetta Angelidi
Scenario:	Antoinetta Angelidi, Clairi Mitsotaki
Cinematography:	Stavros Hassapis
Sets:	Antoinetta Angelidi, Kostas Angelidakis
Costumes:	Lily Kendaka
Makeup:	Achilleas Charitos
Sound Design:	Antoinetta Angelidi, using Music by Georges Aperghis
Vocal improvisations:	Martine Viard
Voices:	Anita Santorineou
Cast:	Jany Gastaldi, Maya Liberopoulou, Anita Santorineou, Clairi Mirtseki, Stavros Tornes, Akis Davis, Eleni Dermetzi, Arieta Moutousi, Stefanos Kotsikos
Production:	Antoinetta Angelidi, Greek Film Centre

AWARDS/HONOURS

Special Jury Prize (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 1985)
Best Sound Track Award (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 1985)
Greek Film Critics Award (Thessaloniki Film Festival, 1985)
Hellenic Ministry of Culture Quality Award (1985)
One of the two Greek films chosen by the British journal Sight and Sound (volume 33, issue 3, April 2023) to be included in its list of “101 Hidden Gems – The Greatest Films You’ve Never Seen”.

SCREENINGS (the list is not exhaustive)

26th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (1985, competition)
14th Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Canada (1985, competition)
One of the two Greek films chosen by the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma to be included in “New Cinema Week”, 1st European Capital of Culture, Athens, Greece (1985)
The film was screened in theatres in Athens and Thessaloniki (1985) and several times since in national television.
39th Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland (1986)
5th Vancouver International Film Festival, Canada (1986)
“Images de femmes” programme, Panorama international du cinéma, Constantine, Algeria (1986)
8th European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, Germany (1988)
2nd Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium, Greece (1988)
Greek Month, Stockholm, Sweden (1990)
1st Exhibition of Experimental Cinema, Madrid, Spain (1991)
Included in “Cine-mythology – a retrospective presentation of Greek cinema” [50 ταινίες από την αρχή του ελληνικού κινηματογράφου] at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (1993)
Included in the Retrospective of Greek Cinema in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1995)
“Tribute to the film work of 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
2nd Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2005)
“Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 2nd Athens Animfest, Greece (2007)
“Tribute to Antoinetta Angelidi”, 8th Experimental Film Festival “Strange Screen”, Thessaloniki, Greece (2009)
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)
Included in the “Anthology of Greek Cinema”, Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium (2014)
“The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema”, Athens, Greece (2017)
“Film and Poetry” Festival and Symposium, in the frame of World Book Capital, Greek Film Archive, Athens, Greece (2018)
Included in the “Greek Queer Cinema” Tribute, 59th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (2018)
“The Modern as Experiment”, 10th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greek Film Archive, Greece (2019)
The film was screened for free in the Greek Film Archive e-platform during the COVID pandemic (2020)
“Patriarchy, Μatriarchy, #ΜeΤoo, 50/50, Cancel Culture and Greek Cinema”, organised by the Hellenic Film Academy, Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece (2022)
V E G G I E C L O U D Film Screenings, Los Angeles, U.S.A. (2023)
Klang:Pangea, Rome, Italy (2024)
“Cinema Regained” programme, 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2024)
“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 (when first screened)

“A poetical and iconoclastic film; an admirable composition of the poetry of image and the image of poetry. Dante, Dreyer, de Chirico, the Renaissance masters, theatricality and women’s cycle.”

Giorgos Bramos, Αυγή 2/10/1985

“It is difficult to recount the composite beauty of Antoinetta Angelidi’s film; it is like trying to confront, upon awaking, the traces of a nightmare.”

Andreas Tyros, Βήμα 6/10/1985

“TOPOS articulates, for the first time in Greece, through cinema, a breathtaking, complete and absolute, contemplative woman’s discourse… an exquisite achievement of unique and masterly avant-garde cinematic language.”

Maria Papadopoulou, Νέα 2/10/1985

“In sum, this film is a landmark as regards the development of avant-garde cinema in Greece.”

Ninos Fenek Michelidis, Ελευθεροτυπία 2/10/1985

“Angelidi’s more significant success in this wonderful film is the deep understanding of painters’ despair in their effort to capture time.”

Vassilis Rafaelidis, Έθνος 3/11/1985

“Everything molds a morphological perfection and a personal aesthetics.”

Yiannis Bakoyannopoulos, Καθημερινή 2/10/1985

“Images of insurmountable visual beauty compose a secret world.”

Lefteris Kypraios, Ελεύθερος Τύπος 2/10/1985

“The absolute attack of the most personal style… a source of strange and familiar enjoyment.”

Nikos Savvatis, Αντί 11/10/1985

“TOPOS has a unity of tone and imagery, which remain in the realm of pure nightmare. From the ethereal medieval maidens and bloodless virgins of Cranach to the unsettling abstractions of De Chirico, Angelidi traces the artist’s vision of woman…”

Yung, Variety 23/10/1985

“Films like Antoinetta Angelidi’s TOPOS signal the fact that many things are beginning to change under the Athenian sky.”

Umberto Rossi, Unitá 22/10/1985

“From birth to death, TOPOS displays an uncanny talent by new-comer Antoinetta Angelidi”

Dan Fainaru, Jerusalem Post Magazine 1/11/1985

“The uniqueness of this film is that it is neither static nor didactic, neither filmed theatre nor transfer of paintings on screen. One does not feel any intention to provoke or show-off, as is the case with Raoul Ruize and Jean-Luc Godard. Antoinetta Angelidi seems to succeed where others have failed.”

Jocelyne Poirier, Les Cahiers de la Femme spring/summer 1986