The oeuvre of Antoinetta Angelidi shows that the art of cinema can be something more complex than a traditionally filmed narrative and that, despite the fact that we are living in a time when cultural products are put on par with public relations, there are still artists who resist and persist in their personal style.

We would classify Angelidi -who appeared with the film Idees Fixes - Dies Irae (Variations on the Same Theme) in 1977 -among the filmmakers who emerged in the seventies with films that were "different", from an aesthetic viewpoint, and who proposed "another" kind of narrative. In Variations, Angelidi creatively activates her knowledge of the history of the cinematic image and connects it to a global artistic language of an alternative, poetic cinema, while still preserving the peculiarities of her own tradition and, especially, her personal concerns.

This different way of handling the narrative becomes even more specific and more personal in her subsequent films (Topos, The Hours. A Square Film,Thief or Reality), in which the relationship with the past is part of a singular narrative body and the reversal of established schemata converges towards a compact narrative which establishes itself and creates the language of an inner quest.

The temporal relation between image and sound in Angelidi's films and their interlinked continuity are, at the same time, the fabric and the theme of the narrative. Silence becomes the background for meditation; the silence of introspection. The themes of death, love, play, and the effort to show that which is hidden or ineffable, all define her works.

Her relationship to painting is especially interesting. The paintings featured in her films are a living, organic body, "the first place through which I had the good fortune to feel the concentration of the things that give sustenance to our life," in her own words. Her films are poetic comments on human fate and they demand a careful but fearless gaze on the part of the viewer; a gaze which allows for the generation of rich senses and which will not be afraid when the darker aspects of the self are stirred up.

She was born in Athens in 1950. She has been painting forever. She studied Architecture at the National Technical University in Athens, Film Directing and Editing at the Institut Des Hautes Edutes Cinematographiques (I.D.H.E.C) in Paris, and Film Theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where she was taught by Christian Metz. She teaches Film at the University of Thessaly.

Stella Theodoraki