WAVE 4: PROGRAM 6
Sunday, May 12 at 4:15 PM
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York, NY
Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality
Rea Walldén
88 min
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