This filmic portrait is born of a double movement: the meeting of Lena Vandrey with our cinematographic universe, our meeting with her pictorial world, her space and her collection of processional figures and articulated dolls. Crossings of imaginations, of mythologies: the South, the origins, the search for a “greecity”, the search for the magical potential of the image, the feminine one as “force in love”. Crossings of plastic gestures: one on canvas support, the other on photographic and filmic support. We invited the artist to become herself body-painting, filmed painting. We have staged her texts, her paintings, her objects, her space. Attempt to reveal it as an embodiment of its own mythology. ×

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.