Topos (35mm)

Antoinetta Angelidi

80 min

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