BIO-GRAPHIA, 97’

Greece 1975

Directed by Thanasis Rentzis

Screenplay: Thanasis Rentzis

Original Source for Screenplay: Chumez Chumy

Director of Photography: Angelos Chatziandreou, Christos Magkos

Editing: Thanasis Rentzis

Sound Engineer: Dimitris Lazaridis

Musical Composition: Stamatis Spanoudakis

Assistant Director: Gkaii Angeli

Special Effects: Angelos Chatziandreou

Cameraman: Angelos Chatziandreou

Production: FILMOGRAM

Producer: Christos Magkos, Thanasis Rentzis

Narrator: Giorgos Kyritsis

Title Language - dialogues: Greek

BIO-GRAPHIA is a film somewhere between Animation and Expanded Cinema. It is an experimental film par excellence, based on a collage of gravures by Chumy Chumez. The color has been specially processed, and the method used is introduced for the first time in cinema, with the simultaneous use of a unique frame, whose dimensions are 1:2.75 (the maximum rate ever used). The film itself takes the form of a Lamposcope projection - a kind of a projector of painted glass slides from the 19th century, through which a narration of the historical and mythical subject of the time and the world it refers to is reestablished. Homo Universalis gradually becomes Homo Industrialis, and in the integration of his cultural coordinates, he reformulates the classical myths (to urban) and places them within the new historical framework, which, in turn, reproduces and differentiates them. The myths of the film, as they are articulated (and characterized), constitute a continuous polyptych in the form of an unfolding panorama, through which the “cultural subconscious” of the now-lost urban world emerges. It is nothing but the florescence of fossils; with their fleeting glimmer, they leave a sensation of the world they came from, a world that has had its glance –through the past –turned to the future, and which experienced every moment (through repetition) as unrepeatable and a cause for the next one. The idea of a different future (in many ways) from the present was the most dominant, which is why great importance was given to the means of transformation (namely, to the technique), which, in the end, replaced, or is identified with, the concept of fate itself. Under acquired cultural characteristics there is always a subconscious layer, the sediments of past culture, mythologies and beliefs, which he keeps unchanged. It is a primarily modernistic and post-modernistic undertaking, since the optics of the present becomes the vehicle for the survival of the memory of the past. The film is called BIO-GRAPHY (written this way intentionally to both join and separate the two elements), because it concerns both the BIO (way of life) and GRAPHY (way of representation) of the world to which it refers.

Awards - Distinctions:

3^rdAWARD FOR BEST FILM, 16^th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 1975

AUDIENCE AWARD, 16^th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 1975