Antoinetta Angelidi’s Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977) occupies a particular place in the history of cinema, not only as it is one of the few examples of experimental/artist film by a Greek auteur in the 1970s, but also as its compositional sensibilities bridge tendencies that historically have been thought of as opposite or contradictory. It is a film that is both poetic and political, wildly visual but also textual, using structural/formal as well as personal/expressionist methodologies. As a member of the second phase (1974–84) of the editorial board of the magazine Synchronos Kinimatografos (Contemporary Cinema), but also having previously lived in Paris, Angelidi was aware of the innovations of the international filmic avant-garde and presumably the various polemics of film groups all over the world. Although Greece had no developed experimental film scene, Idées Fixes / Dies Irae is a film that was in dialogue with the experimental film innovations of its time and as Angelidi scholar Rea Walldén suggests, it is ‘radically avant-garde by any definition of the term’. The question of this definition is of particular interest to this chapter, although I will not deal with the notion of the ‘avant-garde’ in general, but rather with historical understandings of what avant-garde filmmaking is and more so the various methodological tendencies in the history of experimental cinema. I will argue that on top of its enormous value as a ‘milestone of Greek avant-garde cinema’, the film is a startling amalgam of filmic strategies that are not frequently combined, resulting in complex cinematic language, which in the words of Hamalidi, Nikolopoulou and Walldén ‘fully exploits the potentialities of cinematic heterogeneity’. I will conclude my case by discussing the film as an example of a feminist work by a female auteur in the male-dominated history of experimental film6 and consider the possibility of a different herstory of experimental cinema.

Manifestos have been extremely common in the history of experimental cinema. The very birth of the medium coincides with an era in which new manifestos about the purpose of art came to prominence almost every few years (Futurism/1909, Cubism/1912, Vorticism/1914, Dada/1916, Surrealism/1924, and so on).