In a collaboration that lasted for more than four decades, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki explored notions of femininity and the body. Their hypnotic and hieroglyphic film Double Labyrinthe recently received an DVD release from RE:VOIR.
by Laura Staab
Double Labyrinthe (Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, 1975-76)
Two circular labyrinths sit side-by-side, each with seven silver balls that roll around three inner rings and a central circle. As a hand rocks the wooden toy back and forth, back and forth, the fourteen shiny little spheres more often elude the centre than fall into it. So commences the hieroglyphic, hypnotic Double Labyrinthe (1975-76), recently released on DVD by RE:VOIR. In the film, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki each create a portrait of the other, transforming the camera into an intimate medium through which a reciprocal gaze between two women can take place.
Klonaris and Thomadaki met in the 1960s, when both were girls at the same school in Athens. It was the immediate blossoming of ‘a common vision’ and ‘an intense mental kinship’, the two remarked fifty years later. It was ‘an encounter for life’. [1] After emigrating to the fifth arrondissement of Paris in the mid-1970s, the duo continued to collaborate for four decades, until Klonaris’s death in 2014. Working in the interstices of film, installation, and performance, as well as writing theoretical texts, the artists exploded the theme of subjectivity into so many constellations to be explored without end.
Similarly fascinated by the shadowy sides of the self, Double Labyrinthe hints towards the three epic cycles that came afterwards: the Unheimlich (1977-82), the Hermaphrodite (1982-90) and the Angel (1985-2013). Although less well-known in Britain than in France, filmgoers here might be familiar with Klonaris and Thomadaki from the second instalment in the Unheimlich cycle, Astarti (1980), a restoration of which screened at the London Film Festival in 2019. Double Labyrinthe is similarly mythopoetic. Against a black background – inky anytime, anywhere – the fifty-minute film mobilises an archetypal dichotomy of femininity across the bodies of the two Greek women.
Maria first films Katerina, then Katerina films Maria. All that is alluring and luminous is associated with sylph-like Katerina and that which is dark and demonic is attached to lion-maned Maria. Among the things summoned for each portrait, Katerina’s materials tend to be white, translucent, or granular (cellophane and lace, powder and rice), while Maria’s materials tend to be black, opaque, reflective or refractive (leather gloves, mirror and tin foil, a glass of water). Katerina: daffodils and daisies. Maria: bloodied goat head, rubber stamps that mark, sharp metallic objects that jab and cut. Without a doubt, the film risks a reiteration of the simplistic binaries that carve women into two: active or passive, light or shadow, and so on. Even when a colour, for instance, echoes across the two portraits, it is distorted to carry opposite connotations. On the body of Katerina, red is seduction, a liquid that trickles from the mouth and trails between the breasts. In the hands of Maria, it is a thick string she wraps around her entire head – red changes to become the very colour of go away. Katerina: the part of menstruation when everything is arousing. Maria: when all you now want is to be alone and for your body to disappear.
Double Labyrinthe (Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, 1975-76)
Double Labyrinthe (Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, 1975-76)
On the RE:VOIR DVD, Double Labyrinthe is accompanied by three other portraits of a smaller scale (none more than six minutes) and a black-and-white film of the action performance La Torture (1976), in which Klonaris and Thomadaki dissected the violence of the 1967-74 Greek dictatorship as part of a performance group called COLLECTIF 010. Flash Passion (1970) is an early portrait of Katerina by Maria in Athens; between the opening images that move from sea to shore and the following ones of Katerina at a window and in a mirror, it is as if Maya Deren were all of a sudden alive and filming in Hellenic shades of gold and blue. 3.VII.1973 (1971) is a portrait by Katerina of her maternal grandmother, posthumously titled with the date of her death; in extreme close-ups, Katerina tenderly likens the wispy white hair and wrinkles of her foremother to floral-embossed fabrics, lilac and lace.
My favourite is Smoking (1975). Filmed around the time of Double Labyrinthe and against a black background again, this sensual portrait of Maria by Katerina feels like apocrypha to that text – a piece that would not fit. Smoking is not just what Maria does in the film but what she is. There is no inhale for her exhale, in no image does she drag on a cigarette. Smoke simply, magically, emanates from incarnadine lips. Across a series of close-ups that unfurl, pause and fade, that double and blur, Maria confronts camera, Katerina, and spectator across wafts of smoke, and also withdraws into those veils, eyes closed in bliss. Adrift from the dualism that underlies Double Labyrinthe, Maria is able to draw the diaphanous into her realm, and free to deliver a stare that is describable as ‘fuck-off’ and ‘come-hither’ all at once.
In the DVD booklet, Thomadaki collates fragments of writing on the films into a ‘mosaic essay’. Taken from texts by Klonaris and Thomadaki, as well as by theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Nicole Brenez, these fragments are published in French and English – most appearing in English for the first time. At the centre of the booklet lies an abbreviated version of the artists’ incantatory manifesto for un cinéma corporel, a cinema of the body, written in 1978. Set off by a ‘because’, each line reads as an instinctual, passionate response to the insistent voice of reason, its invisible but ubiquitous why.
Two earlier manifestos, from 1975, agitated for different, feminine forms of filmmaking and writing to break from capitalist, patriarchal forms of production and concomitant phallocentric imaginaries: one was, of course, Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; the second was Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa. When Rachel Blau DuPlessis said of manifestos that ‘the new time … is already here’, she spoke about the ways in which an ardent, breathless urgency typical of manifestos often results in the text itself touching or tracing utopia. [2] To whatever extent the new time of the feminine is tangible in Cixous’ and Mulvey’s manifestos, Double Labyrinthe and Smoking fulfil both Mulvey’s hopes for an alternative, artisanal cinema that ‘could conceive of a new language of desire’ and Cixous’ calls for writing ‘as women, towards women’. [3] Between these two films made in 1975, the new time being envisioned by Cixous and Mulvey is already here – realised to a dazzling degree.
That Klonaris and Thomadaki continued to make art with a double signature in the feminine for forty years is extraordinary. As much as authorship is a contested desire for feminists, life-long collaboration that bears the names of two women artists is so rare that I am awestruck at the very fact. And beyond that improbable reality, there are numerous other treasures to be found too.
[1] Marina Gržinić, ‘Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki – Dissident Subjectivities: The Filmmakers as Double Subject’ in Subjectivity, ed. Dominique Chateau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 191.
[2] Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘f-words: An Essay on the Essay’, American Literature 68/1 (March 1996): 35.
[3] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 / 3 (Autumn 1975): 8; Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ [1975], trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 / 4 (Summer 1976): 875.
Double Labyrinthe is available to buy on DVD from RE:VOIR.
Laura Staab is a writer based in London, with specialisms in art cinema, experimental film, and women’s filmmaking. See linktr.ee/laurastaab for links to other recent writing.