Selva. A Portrait of Parvaneh Navaï

The Amazonian Angel

This filmic portrait is born of a double movement: the meeting of Lena Vandrey with our cinematographic universe, our meeting with her pictorial world, her space and her collection of processional figures and articulated dolls. Crossings of imaginations, of mythologies: the South, the origins, the search for a "greecity", the search for the magical potential of the image, the feminine one as "force in love". Crossings of plastic gestures: one on canvas support, the other on photographic and filmic support. We invited the artist to become herself body-painting, filmed painting. We have staged her texts, her paintings, her objects, her space. Attempt to reveal it as an embodiment of its own mythology.

Pulsar

"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.

Double Labyrinthe

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.

Sauro Bellini

He tells me that his name is Sauro Bellini, a Bellini descendant, that he is twenty-two years old, that he studies maths, that he does not like to be photographed, much less to be filmed. He tells me that he has nothing to do with cinema, that he actually hates cinema - too violent for him. I invite him to a projection of my portrait film Isa en automne, which screens at "Studio 43" the next day, "... then we'll talk about it again ...". He comes to the screening, he likes the movie, he says OK. The next afternoon at the Jardin des Plantes for the shoot, he comes. He is here before the hour. Few words exchanged, almost everything goes through the eyes. He gives himself to my camera. He concentrates and he abandons himself. He becomes Sauro Bellini, angel of Venice .

Hôtel Artemis

Portrait of Katerina in a hotel room by the sea. Her sunglasses reflect her body and Maria’ s camera in the mirror, thus revealing, albeit in a fragment, the relational principle of their cinema and of their double self-portraits. A constellation of stars crosses her skin. Everything is as blue as the sea and the universe. In this metamorphic alchemy, microcosm and macrocosm intertwine.

Portraits / Mirrors

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

La Torture

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.

Kha Uebertragung - Les embaumées

The film revolves around three notions: Kha = the etheric double according to ancient Egyptians. Perpetual specter in all respects resembling the physical body of a dead person. Uebertragung = transfer. Phenomenon by which an emotional state experienced for one object is extended to another by an association. Identification. Projection. Moving from one order of things to another. Embalming = filling a corpse with balsamic, desiccating and antiseptic substances to preserve them. Fill with a sweet smell. Perfume.

Myrto

Quasar

The macrocosm present in QUASAR is a non colonized outer space. A non science-fictionalized outer space. It is a space of fantasized stars and galaxies, black holes and light particles. It is a space of hypnotic contemplation and dissociation of the subject from the self. Immersion into macrocosmic vibrations, rotations, contractions, into slow and curved time patterns. Non linear, non climactic time. Outer-inner skies.

Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue

The film takes the Freudian concept of the uncanny generated by an inexplicable strangeness to expose the reappearance of the repressed feminine unconscious through splitting, doubling and mirroring the cinematic image to question the boundaries of the real. The late Maria Klonaris, who sadly passed away in the begining of 2014, with co-author Katerina Thomadaki, was responsible for some of the most radical womens' liberationist and transgender films and art ever created. Of Greek origin but based in Paris, Klonaris and Thomadaki were founders of the Cinema of the Body, a profound investigative practice into gender and bodily identity.

Myth-Historima

Angel Scan

Angel Scan. "Trip" – but without substances – except the substances created by the brain when energy awakes as a creative conscience, accompanied by an intense experience of "light" and "darkness". Hustle and bustle, bombing of atoms, dance of electric particles animated of an ultra fast movement.Invisible units of infra-atomic energy, forms/colours which are characterized by their irradiating heat and by their attraction strength as well as their potential of sound/ vibratory energy.

Arteria magna in dolore laterali

After the semantic body (Double Labyrinth) and the libidinal body (L'enfant qui a pissé des paillettes, Soma) we are dealing here with another theme: that of the painful body or, more precisely, the memory of the body in relation to pain lived.

Unheimlich III: The Mothers

After five years of intense work on identity, an alchemical quest for the depths, after nine films and films / actions where the actresses' gestures resounded against a black background which eliminated the environment to reveal the inside, taken outside: encounter of the inside with the outside. Journey back into memory. Crossing the Greek landscape in August. The seas. The ruins, remains of abandoned houses, homes with holes, pierced by the wind, inside crossed by the outside. Unheimlich: the disturbing strangeness. Activation of a memory of origins. Unheimlich: what should remain secret, hidden and which manifests itself. MHTRIS = mother's country.

Gardens of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite

This film is made from the soundtrack of the multimedia installation/environment Mystère I: Sleeping Hermaphrodite that we created for the XII Biennale de Paris in 1982. The idea of ​​creating a second work, purely cinematographic this time - here, from the same soundtrack, seemed particularly stimulating since it poses in depth the question of the complex relationships between sound and image in a non-narrative context. MK - KT, 1985