ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi
Edited by Penny Bouska, Sotiris Petridis
The first English-language book on the Greek Experimental Cinema director, Antoinetta Angelidi
- Discusses diverse dimensions of Angelidi’s creativity, including installations and expos, as well as her innovative theories on cinema
- Engages with new analytical and theoretical perspectives on Angelidi’s films as artistic airings of an interdisciplinary discourse between cinema, philosophy, psychoanalysis and theories of literature
- Examines Antoinetta Angelidi's four full-length fiction films: Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), Topos (1985), The Hours: A Square Film (1995) and Thief or Reality (2001)
Angelidi’s work has become synonymous with Greek Experimental Cinema, while her films and her theoretical writings have been the subject of numerous film courses, critical essays and retrospectives. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, comprise her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of different filmic elements which characterize her work are examined in depth in this edited collection dedicated to Antoinetta Angelidi’s oeuvre.
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Prolegomenon
Penny Bouska
Part 1: Feminism and the Avant-Garde
1. Weird Mothers: The Feminist Uncanniness of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Topos - Rea Walldén
2. "Every Element in a Film Narrates": The Complex Language of Heterogeneity in Idées Fixes/Dies Irae as a (Feminist) Critique to the Practice of Methodological Categorisation in Avant-Garde Film History - Fil Ieropoulos
Part 2: Concepts and Interpretations
3. Thief or Reality: Visual Dialectics on Death Instincts - Penny Bouska
4. Childhood, Desire and identity in The Hours - Christina Adamou
5. Erased Ghost: The deriddean spectrality of Angelidi’s signs in Ιdées Fixes / Dies Irae - Ioannis Mazarakis
6. The cinematic sublime in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Thief or Reality - Evdokia Stefanopoulou
Part 3: Means and Media
7. From orchestrated noise to elaborated silence: The audiovisuality of Antoinetta Angelidi’s films - Electra Venaki
8. Dreyer, Magritte and Other Obsessions: Figural Invention in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Idées Fixes Dies Irae - Variations on the Same Theme - Kyriakos Dionysopoulos
9. Antoinetta Angelidi: The Visual Gaze - Calliope (Pepy) Rigopoulou
Interview with Antoinetta Angelidi
Giving Birth to Her Films: Wandering with Antoinetta Angelidi - Rea Walldén
Appendix: Visual material selected by Antoinetta Angelidi
This insightful and thorough collection of essays introduces the iconoclastic work of feminist experimental filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi to the Anglophone world. Greek weird wave fans will discover a cinematic precursor. A very welcome contribution to the history of Greek and avant-garde cinema.
This is a long overdue tribute to one of contemporary Greece’s most ambitious, complex and refined cinematographers. Antoinetta Angelidi’s experimental and poetic films have been overlooked and somehow ignored due to the density of their vision, complexity of their visual optics and unique formal abstraction of their structure. We can now explore her films from various perspectives and incorporate them within the global poetic cinema alongside Maya Derren, Peggy Ahwesh, Agnes Varda, and the early David Lynch. The book reveals one of the most distinctive and manifold filmmakers of cinéma pur, whose works reimagine and recalibrate the realm of cinematic visuality.
