November 7, 2024
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7:00 pm
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9:00 pm
The program “Many Different Histories” presents two films: Acropolis (2001/2004) by Greek visual artist and documentary filmmaker Eva Stefani and Notes Remembered and Found (2024) by Cypriot artist/filmmaker Maria Anastassiou. The two films use the archive and the materiality of analogue film to critically examine pillars of Greek and Greek Cypriot national identity and collective memory. Through women’s voices, writings, experiences and bodies, the filmmakers negotiate questions not of a singular continuous history, but of “many different histories”, who tells them, how their repetitions and iterations change perceived perceptions of the past and what they might transfer to generations to come. Followed by a conversation with film curator Gareth Evans and director Maria Anastassiou.
Acropolis (2001/2004) explores the significance of Greece’s national symbol, the Acropolis, in the creation of national identity and collective memory. The film draws a parallel between the Parthenon (the “temple of the virgins,” as is the meaning of the monument’s ancient name) and the female body; intertwining super 8 found footage with archive material from state rituals and official celebrations set on the foothills of the sacred rock, worn-out images from 1960s stag films and well-preserved newsreels and medical films, field recordings and sound bites from radio broadcasts, bourgeois songs, or even the recording of the national anthem, the artist stitches the pieces of this unsettling collage with a confessional, first-person voice-over of an old soul that tries to reclaim her story.
Notes: Remembered and Found (2024) presents four generations of women—Anastassiou’s infant daughter is also present in the film—circling around, approximating, interrupting, and reconfiguring the origin story of the family’s displacement during the war in Cyprus 1974. This grappling with the past is both an act of reciting (repeating from memory) and re-siting (resituating) of inherited narratives, the iterations of which constitute the shared vocabulary of a cross-generational language invested in the existentially important goal of mediating and preserving the family’s history. The film thus attempts to document the act of archiving; to mediate the act of mediation; but it does so in a way that openly resists the conventional archive’s aggressive demand for mystification and the often-unbearable weight it places on the shoulders of the postmemory generation. (Argyro Nicolaou).
