Cinema of the Body: Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, February 12 at 7pm for a rare screening of four films by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki: three short works made between 1970 and 2016, and their foundational feature Double Labyrinthe (1975–1976).

Known in Greece for their drawings and illustrations, stage productions, and writing on theatre, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki became active in France from the mid-1970s, where they introduced their concept of “cinema of the body” (cinéma corporel). Influenced by the body art movement of the period, their practice treats the body as a medium of expression and articulation. Across years of collaboration, they developed a number of feminist and subversive Super 8 films on the relationship between camera and body, on sexuality and the unconscious, and on androgynous and gender-fluid identities. Placing themselves on both sides of the camera, they made performance and role-switching their basic methods. Double Labyrinthe brings their approach into focus as a self-portrait structured through a reciprocal gaze between the two artists. Here, they push against the classic subject/object and see/be seen dichotomies, insisting on what they call “a double female authorship.”

Films

Maria Klonaris, Flash Passion (1970, 2 minutes)
Flash Passion is one of the first films the duo made in Athens after taking up the Super 8 camera to extend their theater practice into cinema. In this poetic miniature, Klonaris films Thomadaki in a series of fleeting images – from sunlight on Aegean Sea waves to the reflection of Thomadaki’s face in a mirror – exploring the act of looking at her collaborator on film.

Katerina Thomadaki, 3.VII.1973 (1971, 6 minutes)
Titled after the date of her grandmother’s death, 3.VII.1973 is Thomadaki’s intimate Super 8 portrait of her maternal grandmother. The film dwells in extreme close-ups of the elderly woman’s wispy white hair and softly creased skin, which Thomadaki tenderly interweaves with shots of floral-patterned fabrics – merging body and memory in a delicate play of texture and light.

Katerina Thomadaki, Smoking (1976–2016, 4 minutes)
Smoking is a brief portrait of Maria Klonaris that Thomadaki filmed in 1975 during the making of Double Labyrintheand completed in 2016, two years after Klonaris’s passing. In this sensual study, smoke mysteriously emanates from Klonaris’s red-painted lips as she faces the camera in lingering close-ups. Filmed against a dark backdrop, her figure alternately emerges from and recedes into wafting veils of smoke, her gaze at once defiant and inviting. (The Greek word appearing at the beginning, μετείκασμα, signifies “afterimage,” alluding to the retinal persistence of vision.)

Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, Double Labyrinthe (1975–1976, 55 minutes)
Double Labyrinthe is the duo’s first major film and the inaugural installment of their Tétralogie corporelle (1975–79). Envisioned as a “double self-portrait” on film, it consists of a cycle of twelve ritualistic actions structured in two halves: first Klonaris films Thomadaki performing before the camera, then Thomadaki films Klonaris. Through this mirrored framework based on their “mutual gaze,” the two artists become both filmmakers and performers, crafting an intimate play of observation and embodiment “at the opposite end of the male gaze.” Shot on Super 8 in high-contrast chiaroscuro and presented without spoken dialogue or music, the film unfolds like a mythic ceremony of liberation, laying the groundwork for Klonaris and Thomadaki’s subsequent explorations of gender, myth, and subjectivity in moving-image art.
The screening is organized in collaboration with Re:Voir.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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