Antoinetta Angelidi’s cinema is not easily classified into certain film genres or modes of filmmaking. Although most of her films do not follow the paradigm of classical narrative, labels as ‘experimental’ or ‘lyric film’ nevertheless do not adequately describe her work. Consequently, writing about Angelidi’s cinema is not an easy task; being unable to fit into pre-designed schemes of narrative and filmic comprehension, her films demand a new vocabulary capable of describing, analysing and portraying their deconstructive function. Especially in her debut film, Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), the absence of linear narrative, plot, main characters and even the slightest suspicion of a story development challenges the spectator’s perception of what a film is supposed to be and, at the same time, produces a constant feeling of knowing without understanding; of watching familiar visual (and audio) elements being transformed into weird, unknown riddles, ready to be solved.

In many of her essays and interviews, Angelidi refers to the process of ostranenie (‘defamiliarisation’) as an artistic technique which plays a central role in the filmmaking process. Based mostly upon Freudian theory and Russian formalism, the process is described by Angelidi as the transformation of the familiar into the uncanny as the base of an alternative poetics of cinema, where films are no longer simple audiovisual representations of linear stories but function as artistic articulations between the imaginary and the symbolic order. However, although the Freudian ‘uncanny’ and the formalist concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ are valuable guides for the exploration of Angelidi’s filmic universe, a closer look at the mechanism of the semiotic transformation realised through the defamiliarisation technique would highlight its central role in the meaning production process of Angelidi’s films.

In this chapter I will strongly focus on the Derridean concept of writing-under-erasure, according to which we should be able to gain a valuable insight into the usage and interaction of the semiotic elements in Angelidi’s films. According to Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967), writing-under-erasure is a method where a term is crossed out (like that) and its meaning is at the same time recalled and presented as an absence.