Chapter 7 - From Orchestrated Noise to Elaborated Silence: The Audiovisuality of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
Summary
In her four feature films, between 1977 and 2001, Antoinetta Angelidi’s sonic practices, surpassing the common film sound production workflow of narrative Greek films during that period, explored subversive sound-based narratives and proposed new forms of audiovisuality.
Angelidi’s daring decisions, even from her first mono feature film, propose an immersive audiovisual experience, where the audio-spectator consciously or unconsciously follows the seemingly parallel flows of two bifurcated worlds, that of the visual and that of the sound, to reach a perception of all the cinematic elements as a whole. Many parallel tracks – voices, sounds, music, moving images and written texts – are intertwined (horizontally and vertically in the editing timeline) in a tight and at the same time open structure. Angelidi’s filming approach, along with that of her contemporaries in the avant-garde film world, disrupts the canonical hierarchy between a) visual, b) voice, c) music, and d) all other ‘sounds’, revealing, in that way, her films’ audiovisuality.
Composed of four feature films, Angelidi’s oeuvre, traversed the monophonic period, and the digital soundtrack era.
Angelidi directed her first feature film, Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (60 min, France-Greece, Black/White, 16mm/16mm, mono), in Paris in 1977, edited in moviola, with magnetic sound and optical sound for the final print. Her second film, Topos (85 min, Greece, Colour, 35mm/35mm, mono) was produced in Greece in 1985, edited in moviola, with magnetic sound and optical sound for the final print. Her third film, The Hours – A Square Film (85 min, Greece, Colour, 35mm/35mm) was also produced in Greece, in 1995, edited in moviola, with final prints in Dolby SR. Her fourth film, Thief or Reality – Three Versions (83 min, Greece, Colour, 35mm/35mm, Dolby Digital), produced in Greece in 2001, is the only one edited on AVID, with final prints in Dolby Digital. The sound composition before the final mix in Dolby of the two last films was held by and finalised at Studio 19 in Athens, (headed by Kostas Bokos and Vasilis Kountouris) in a completely digital form before being printed in the 35mm optical prints.
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- ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi , pp. 143 - 163Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022