Unadjusted, unassimilated, misfit. Experimental cinema is more than an artistic practice of expression, more than a technical method of cinema. It exceeds regulations and limitations, searching to renew cinematic language, being in a constant reconfiguration. It is a way of living and contemplating life. This is the distinctive and exceptional filmmaking that Antoinetta Anglelidi introduced to Greek cinema. One of the few women in a particularly male dominated area of film production, she managed to be acknowledged by the Greek public and screened at international film festivals and contemporary art museums, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Angelidi’s oeuvre has inspired the current volume to present, through a wide range of academic interpretations, the particularity of her methods and the mentality behind her experimentations in cinema.

Stella Theodoraki, another Greek experimental filmmaker, notes that Angelidi brought ‘that which was missing from Greek reality: the contact with a global artistic language of a different cinema’. Indeed, at the time of Angelidi’s return from Paris, New Greek Cinema was beginning to explore its artistic potential, with most of the Greek filmmakers being directly involved with political film. Apart from some exceptions, most of Angelidi’s colleagues were making narrative films with historical references, something that, during the seven-year period of military junta (1967–74), came to an abrupt halt, as rigid censorship and cultural repression was imposed by the authoritarian regime. After the fall of the dictatorship, and during a period called Metapolitefsi, artists ‘turned directly to political subjects and to taboo topics like the Greek civil war and its consequences’. Angelidi immerses herself in the current climate with a different approach. In accordance with Aglaia Mitropoulou’s definition of political cinema, which ‘is based on a concept and structured according to a certain political criterion’, she proposes an interpretation of Greek reality through feminist and Marxist views. In a totally personal and innovative style imbued with pictorial and literary elements, her cinema expands the very notion of political film. In Greece, orthodox Marxism had oriented filmmakers to interpret reality as narrowed down into economic factors and working-class issues.