Angst
Short animated movie.
Related Works
A documentary about Lazaretto, the desert islet near the city of Corfu that functioned for centuries as a quarantine station as well as a place of execution for political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. The identity of the place is approached through fragmentary testimonies and original sources.
Where do memories go when they are lost? Are they still where we left them, if we don’t recall them? In this room, as private and irrevocable as our memory, objects animate a series of scenarios. A memory floods the room, another struggles to disclose itself, another one leaks back and forth in time. The idea of the ‘other’ hovers between what has already passed and what is reminisced every time. We never recollect events and spaces as such. We always enliven recollections in our own way. Through constant evocations that seek to perpetuate the existence of the ‘room’, memories converse with space and time, as well as with a part of ourselves. Either as past, forgetfulness or loss, they always contain something that is already gone.
It’s Monday, the 13th of December 1943, the small town of Kalavryta is set on fire by the occupation army of Nazi Germany while the entire male population is being gathered on a nearby hill and shot dead. This war crime will go down in history, along with the massacre of Acqui Division, as the largest mass killing in Greece during WWII. Three men who witnessed these events as kids, locked up with the rest women, children and elderly people in Kalavryta’s primary school, recall this traumatic experience.
The quarantine's experience time has functioned as a humanized time. Its previous social barbarity was imprisoned in the familiar cage of my soul and became my creation time. Each day was my friend, an eternal circular and dynamic present, a consciousness without conflicts. It was like an eternity that is experienced differently every moment. An unprecedented form of stillness gripped me and perpetuated in many abstract fragments which finally formed the new texture of my existence, in this peculiar isolation. I became from the carcass of time I was before, its qualitative disintegration… Reality was distorted and experienced illusively. The time from the alienation that was before, was transformed and became the cover for the scratched truth of myself. This kind of time my conscience had dreamed to live.
The research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) focuses in four different elements of Angelopoulos’s style and provides new information using and analysing the data from semi-structured interviews. This research documentary is part of Dr. Iakovos Panagopoulos practice based Phd research in the University of Central Lancashire with the title: “Reshaping Contemporary Greek Cinema Through a Re-evaluation of the Historical and Political Perspective of Theo Angelopoulos's Work”(Panagopoulos, 2019).
An experimental workshop was realized at the Corfu Archaeological Museum, on May 2019. The workshop was designed within the frames of interdisciplinary learning and participatory art, based on Maker culture and STEAM education, willing to highlight the importance of arts and technology in learning. The participants, children and adolescents 11 to 15 years old, were initially guided to an important archaic find at the Archaeological museum of Corfu, a pediment depicting ancient Greek goddess Artemis-Gorgo, and got acquainted with the myth surrounding it. In two groups the participants made
1. electronic circuits which produced sounds via photo resistor and conductive paint and
2. conductive drawings inspired by the archaic pediment imagery.
The two groups combined their work to create interactive installations were circuits and sensors were used to “read” the tonal variations and line elements of the pencil drawings. Documentation indicates the childrens’ immersion into the experience.
Moments that meet and compose new ones through clips of a few seconds. Their common point is the associative thinking during their creation and the sense of the surrealistic-dreamlike mood.
Τhis piece refers to a suffocating relationship between a father and a son. This oppressive relationship is expressed by the father’s obsessive calls to the son to come and eat his food warm. The son lives in an imperative rhythm of breakfast/lunch/dinner with few getaways because his father never stops calling him, while having a piercing voice. The father lives in a rhythm of constant orthostatic food production. A very elastic son, a very rigid father. A piece of wood, also rigid, who attracts the son. She had been washed by the sea. The highest boiling temperature is at sea-level. Splashing and seething became one. Apnea and immersion in his father’s pot, which is the symbol of his influence, eventually are leading to his release. He tightened so tight on her that for the first time he was stabilised. They were swept away from the waves and while floating they turned into furniture.
Zoe is a 25 year-old student, living in Corfu island, Greece with her only friend and roommate Anne. Waking up late an afternoon Zoe realises that her friend is missing and she goes out at night alone in search of her. The strangely empty and quiet town, a series of bizzare events and the sense that she's been followed gives her the realization that something strange is going on and her eager to find her friend grows stronger.
At that time she comes across a dark human figure that wants to capture her. Trying to escape, Zoe ends up in a white room with nothing but a mirror inside.
As she walks closer to the mirror she sees that someone is trapped inside a room. Thinking that it's her friend Anne she reaches and goes through the mirror into that other room.
As she sits down next to the other person, thinking that she is Anne, she realizes it's her own self. In a desperate and decisive moment she tries to save her double, only to realize that her double can not cross to the other side of the mirror. Realizing that there's no way out the double lets go of Zoes hand.
Zoe wakes up in her room in the morning, gets dressed and goes for a walk by the sea in the now fully alive and noisy town. As she stands and stares at the waves she meets a girl named Anne sitting nearby. After the two girls meet they sit by the sea talking.
