Katerina Thomadaki

Professor Anatole Lacoste is having a meeting with one of the agents of doctor Brain at a Jackson Pollock exhibition at Centre Pompidou. Meanwhile, Deborah is about to take a bath when burglar Torlim Novak breaks into her house. Everything seems to be normal when the computer at the control station spots an anomaly in the way history functions. But how does one stop the film?

All of history, that of Christ or any other, permeates the world, leaves its mark, modifying and informing history, and all that the human reproduces and creates. The best way for historical interpretation or literary adaptation is to move as far as possible from literal interpretation. That is, it is a contemporary and personal interpretation. The story of Christ is an archetypal story. It has modified and informed a morality and a vision of the human being in the West, it must be taken for what it is and what it has become: matter.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Reel 1 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

SMOKING is a brief portrait of Maria Klonaris composed of seven shots. Katerina Thomadaki completed it in 2016, two years after Maria Klonaris' passing, from rushes shot in 1975 at the time of the filming of DOUBLE LABYRINTHE. The Greek word that appears at the beginning of the film, μετείκασμα, signifies "meta-image" and refers to retinal persistence.

With this film-manifesto, the two artists invent what they called the Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), they present themselves as a "double auteur femme" and they lay the foundations of the radical critical and esthetical positions of their work to come. Double Labyrinthe has a mirror structure based on their "mutual gaze": in the first part Katerina performs while filmed by Maria and in the second part Maria performs filmed by Katerina.

In 1976, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki direct with the Collectif 010 in La Cartoucherie in Vincennes a 48-hour action, Torture, which is recorded on tape by Jean Roualdès. In 2012, after the digitization of the original video tapes by the Bibliothèque Nationale of France for the Klonaris/Thomadaki Archive, the two artists proceed to a reinterpretation of this document, highlighting the characteristics of the 1/2-inch video format. This video is a trace of a public performance, where bodies, even under constraint, blinded and gagged, manifest their protest power against coercion. This performance against torture is one of the first examples of the art of the body theorized by the two artists.

"Pulsar" belongs to "The Angel Cycle" ("Le Cycle de l´Ange"). In this cycle of works we create bonds between the human body and astronomical bodies. Maria Klonaris´ improvised performance is a negative dance which lies between pleasure and catastrophe, a black and blue body language which grapples with the white of the screen and the luminous suddenness of a firework display.