Refocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi - (Refocus: The International Directors) by Penny Bouska & Sotiris Petridis (Paperback)

About the Book

The first English-language book on the Greek Experimental Cinema director, Antoinetta Angelidi

Book Synopsis

Antoinetta Angelidi directed four full-length fiction films: Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), Topos (1985), The Hours: A Square Film (1995) and Thief or Reality (2001), which have been screened at international film festivals and contemporary art museums.
Angelidi's work has become synonymous with Greek Experimental Cinema, while her films and her theoretical writings have been the subject of numerous film courses, critical essays and retrospectives. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, comprise her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of different filmic elements which characterize her work are examined in depth in this edited collection dedicated to Antoinetta Angelidi's oeuvre.

From the Back Cover

Antoinetta Angelidi directed four full-length fiction films: Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), Topos (1985), The Hours: A Square Film (1995) and Thief or Reality (2001), which have been screened at international film festivals and contemporary art museums. Angelidi's work has become synonymous with Greek Experimental Cinema, while her films and her theoretical writings have been the subject of numerous film courses, critical essays and retrospectives. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, comprise her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of different filmic elements which characterize her work are examined in depth in this edited collection dedicated to Antoinetta Angelidi's oeuvre. Penny Bouska is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Sotiris Petridis is a Postdoc Researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Review Quotes

This insightful and thorough collection of essays introduces the iconoclastic work of feminist experimental filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi to the Anglophone world. Greek weird wave fans will discover a cinematic precursor. A very welcome contribution to the history of Greek and avant-garde cinema.

--Lydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores University

This is a long overdue tribute to one of contemporary Greece's most ambitious, complex and refined cinematographers. Antoinetta Angelidi's experimental and poetic films have been overlooked and somehow ignored due to the density of their vision, complexity of their visual optics and unique formal abstraction of their structure. We can now explore her films from various perspectives and incorporate them within the global poetic cinema alongside Maya Derren, Peggy Ahwesh, Agnes Varda, and the early David Lynch. The book reveals one of the most distinctive and manifold filmmakers of cinéma pur, whose works reimagine and recalibrate the realm of cinematic visuality.

--Vrasidas Karalis, University of Sydney

About the Author

Penny Bouska is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her doctoral thesis, The Uncanny: a psychoanalytical study in cinema (2016), awarded by Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), was made under the supervision of Antoinetta Angelidi. Her research areas include interdisciplinary studies on cinema and theory of psychoanalysis, applied aesthetics and experimental cinema. She directed a long length film Common Ground (2016) which was screened at 57th international film festival of Thessaloniki.

Sotiris Petridis is a Postdoc Researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies (Aristotle University). His research interests are film and television genres, horror and slasher films, screenwriting theory and practice, audiovisual rights and copyright laws, viral marketing, and the new ways of film and television promotion. He is a member of the European Film Academy and the Hellenic Film Academy.