overview
Pioneers of French feminist cinematic avant-garde, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki began their rebellious and most innovative exploration of the female body and identity, going by the evocative name of Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), in 1975 with the film-manifesto Double Labyrinthe.
The two artists film one another in a series of portraits aiming at the visualisation of the subconscious through mysterious rituals, calling upon Ancient Greek and Egyptian archetypes. This mesmeric and purely feminine representation, exclusively filtered by the female gaze, not only deeply destabilises the dominant female depiction in the film medium, but also goes on to subvert the relationship between “filmer” and filmed.
As a consequence, the viewer herself – or himself – is invited to a radically unusual kind of engagement with the images. Double Labyrinthe demands to let us, the audience, be carried and transformed by its hypnotic and ritualistic series of unconventional portraits.