GROUND GLASS AWARD

The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life.

THE MOTHER (fragment of a text by Angelidi, which accompanied the film at its first screenings): The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying.

THE DAUGHTER (fragment from the text by Walldén, which is spoken in the film): I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell. And I rest. Calmness. The touch. In my head the buzz stops. In her smell, I rest.

—Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén

I have been interested in three questions since the beginning: the importance of cinematic writing as juxtaposing dialogue of the elements of heterogeneity, the research of borderlines of cinematic representation, and the incorporation of the creator’s subjectivity in the film. This film addresses the issue of representation of women’s bodies in modern and contemporary art history: gender as construction and not as destiny. It is structured on two axes: on the one hand, the body representations and the body of representation; on the other, writing in situation and not on situations. It is composed as a synchronic and diachronic synthesis and subversion of images and sounds. The inversion of codes, as well as their juxtaposition, constitute the film’s central creative strategies and, therefore, the key for its interpretation. A succession of indirect references and games, subversively comment on aesthetic theories and specific artworks. Music is produced by the repetitive transformations of the sound of speech. The inversions of image and sound function narratively, reinscribing women’s bodies. —Antoinetta Angelidi

Reality robs you of your dreams and you have to rob it in order to dream. A darkly optimistic film. Three versions of just one day. Three characters trapped in parallel universes. The invasion of the Thief will unite them. Each point of view produces a different story: fate-randomness-free will. What do they have in common? Mortality.

"What I spent, I had. What I saved, I lost. What I gave, I have."

—Rea Walldén/Antoinetta Angelidi

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. The hours are noiselessly formed anew. —Antoinetta Angelidi

A filmed confession of Antoinetta Angelidi, who has been a pioneer of feminist avant-garde cinema in Greece since the 1970s; who is also my life-long creative collaborator, and my mother.

This film is for her a self-revelation, but also performance and direction of the self, as confessions always are. A dialogue with the camera, with me holding the camera, but also with herself and the world. Her testament. An intimate speech about art and life, rape and blindness, but also about human solidarity and the liberating experience of seeing the world anew.

It is also a film essay on her gaze. It nodes to her filmmaking techniques. It uses variations and uncanny connections, long shots and jump-cuts, revealing its construction and discreetly incorporating its own metalanguage. For much of the film, Angelidi’s body is immersed in darkness, her face and hands coming out of it as if entering unmediated inside our unconscious and dreams.

The film was shot without a crew in the confinement of our flat in Athens, in a single room, during the lock-down. It is about our inner space, at the most secret place of which one finds the Other.

—Rea Walldén

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.
—Antoinetta Angelidi

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