Antoinetta Angelidi’s cinema has been characterised as non-narrative, poetic, or visual. Indeed, her unique visual style and imagery often eludes classification, thus exemplifying a central aspect of the experimental film. Experimental or avant-garde cinema is a kind of non-conformist type of filmmaking that ‘challenge[s] normal notions of what a movie can show and how it can show it’, constantly subverting and reconfiguring the cinematic language. Avant-garde cinema has also been associated with a politically enabling artistic practice that unsettles conventions and questions taken-for-granted values and structures. Angelidi’s cinema exemplifies such definitions of the avant-garde or experimental, since her films constantly re-invent the cinematic language by using signifiers and codes in unexpected ways that challenge traditional ideas, and are usually inspired by the poetic strangeness of dreams. The director describes her film poetics as a

As evident from the above statement, the dream-mechanism, defamiliarisation and the uncanny are central aspects of Angelidi’s radical poetics. However, as the director stresses, the concept of the uncanny does not refer to themes, as in the case of horror films, but rather to a structure: ‘the entire film partakes of a structure of strangeness, thus producing the defamiliarizing effect of revealing the world in a novel way’. Despite the unquestionable centrality of the uncanny in Angelidi’s work, I would like to suggest another related concept that can describe her cinema: the sublime.

The sublime and the uncanny are associated, since the latter has been described as ‘the aesthetic outgrowth of the Burkean sublime, a domesticated version of absolute terror’. The sublime is ‘a response to a shock of imaginative expansion, a complex recoil and recuperation of self-consciousness coping with phenomena suddenly perceived to be too great to be comprehended’. Similar to the uncanny, the sublime in Angelidi’s cinema does not refer to themes, as for example in the case of fantastic films where the sublime is associated with the representation of spectacular vistas or extraordinary phenomena.