Unheimlich III: The Mothers

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.

Astarti, the Greek name for Ishtar, is an archetype of a deep, nocturnal feminine that emerges from subterranean darkness. We experience an embodied cinematic experience realised through a sensuous aesthetic as we are invited to enter a strange and uncertain world of inner depths and hypnotising effects. There, we encounter three women actantes, embodied by the artists, who play mythic and magical female figures such as Medusa and Salome. They metamorphose, dance and enter trances where the body vibrates into transformation. Figures reveal themselves out of silence which is both the moment of creation and an eternal reality. The film itself actualises that which is inactual and gives form to blackness through a poetics of intimacy and an ethics of interpersonal relationships, which is founded in the artists’ own double authorship.

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

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" 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.

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.

Flash Passion is one of the very first films that the two artists made in Athens when they took up the super-8 camera and extended their theatre practice towards cinema. Here, Maria Klonaris looks at/films Katerina Thomadaki.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.