ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis Marios Psaras (bio) Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis, editors, ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 238. 25 B&W images. Hardback £90.00. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis’s edited volume The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi is the latest addition to the esteemed ReFocus: The International Directors Series from Edinburgh University Press. The series is dedicated to both renowned and overlooked film directors from world cinema, and its subjects range from Andrei Tarkovsky to Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, and Lucrecia Martel. Antoinetta Angelidi’s work has been discussed and examined in a number of substantial Greek works, including her own essays and interviews and the eponymous publication accompanying a retrospective of her work at the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Theodoraki 2005). The present volume is, however, the first book-length study in English of Angelidi’s oeuvre, and it aims at establishing her within an illustrious lineup of international auteurs while also filling a gap in English-language literature on Greek cinema, which in recent years has mainly focused on the so-called Greek Weird Wave and its main representatives (e.g., Psaras 2016; Papanikolaou 2020; Falvey 2022). Through a fascinating anthology of meditative analyses and interpretations that bring a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to bear on Angelidi’s filmic—and other—work, the volume casts a spotlight on Greek cinema’s perhaps most idiosyncratic voice, one that has, in fact, largely influenced the subversive themes and forms of the Weird Wave. Such attention is only fair, given the rare complexity of the formal experimentation and thematic preoccupations found in Angelidi’s body of work. The book begins with a “Prolegomenon” by Penny Bouska, whose title alone anticipates the collection’s predilection for a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Angelidi’s oeuvre. In this concise yet dense introduction, Bouska collects rich biographical information from private conversations, interviews, and the filmmaker’s personal archives, shedding light on the events and people who influenced Angelidi to become a pioneer of political avant-garde cinema and visual arts in Greece. From her politically [End Page 310] engaged parents, to the turbulent sociopolitical context of her student years, to her self-exile—to avoid arrest by the Greek junta regime—to France, where she was able to study alongside Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, Angelidi’s formative years were characterized by an amalgam of theoretical, political, and artistic influences which established her as a unique artist and intellectual. Bouska pays attention to Angelidi’s theoretical work insofar as it illuminates the concepts that underlie her artistic output, especially her preoccupations with the formalist mechanism of defamiliarization, the psychical mechanism of the uncanny, and Freud’s psychoanalytic exegesis of dreams. The editors divide the book’s nine chapters into three main parts—“Feminism and the Avant-Garde,” “Concepts and Interpretations,” and “Means and Media”—according to their thematic focus and methodological approach. The first part focuses on the two key theoretical and aesthetic movements within which Angelidi’s work emerged and evolved—namely post-structural feminism and the avant-garde—and it examines the interrelation between the two in her practices and ideology. In the first chapter, “Weird Mothers: The Feminist Uncanniness of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Topos,” Angelidi’s daughter and long-term collaborator, Rea Wallden, identifies the avant-garde practice of uncanniness as strategic for Angelidi’s feminist politics. Wallden considers the filmmaker’s second feature, Topos (1985), as an exemplary case of Angelidi’s employment of uncanniness as a feminist avant-garde strategy, focusing on the figure of the uncanny mother and the ways in which it questions and restructures the temporal and spatial aspects of female subjectivity and representation. In the second chapter, “ ‘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 identifies the heterogenous avant-garde practices and antithetical traditions that inform Angelidi’s first feature, and which the experimental filmmaker masterfully combines through juxtaposition, synthesis, and...