topos
veggie cloud,
thursday, july 27, 2023
Topos (1985, Dir: Antoinetta Angelidi, 85min)
Veggie Cloud | Los Angeles premiere
Virtual Q&A with Angelidi and her daughter / film professor Rea Wallden, moderated by Emile Fegté.
Applying philosophers Hélène Cixous' écriture feminine and Luce Irigaray's sexual difference —proposals to forge pathways outside of literature and psychoanalysis' masculine sub-structures—Antoinetta Angelidi's Topos invites viewers to ask: when the eyes on women are women, how do death, birth, and sex find configurations outside the hold of received meaning? Feminist and avant-garde filmmaking both have their genesis in the spirit of revolution, and Topos (Land) is Greece's post-dictatorial molotov. Uncanny symbols shift out of time, aimed to ignite the image-bound unconscious. The spectral tableaux call to mind Paradjanov's Color of Pomegranates as if filtered through Marion Woodman's writings on the feminine psyche. But where Paradjanov uses poetic imagery to speak to a felt past, Angelidi explodes the poetics of the past. Who are the women of Balthus, Cranach, Pierro Della Francisca, or Paolo Ucello when liberated from their pygmalion frame? In Angelidis' painterly vision, the diorama's shift; light blossoms into acousmatic sound, or a snake’s biblical invitation. Upon its release in 1985, the film screened at the Pompidou, MoMA, the Locarno Film Festival, and was recognized by Cahiers du Cinéma, but somehow skipped Los Angeles.
Many thanks to Courtney Stephens and Kate Wolf of Veggie Cloud.
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