~ Filmmaker: Afroditi Bitzouni ~

Θρήνος/Lament by Miltos Sachtouris

A 2018 film animated and directed by Afroditi Bitzouni with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani, featuring the voice of the Greek poet Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) and an English translation by Danai Daska in subtitles. Here’s Bitzouni’s description:

Θρήνος (Lament) is a short animated film based on the poem, that was crafted by Miltos Sachtouris and was included in the collection ΣΦΡΑΓΙΔΑ ή Η ΟΓΔΟΗ ΣΕΛΗΝΗ. 

This short animated piece aspires to narrate a transition from the present world to a better one. The story line includes incidents that are strongly related to war and lead to the end of the present; recreating a future imaginary world. That way, we emphasize on the diachronic character of the poem.

The visual part is composed of an illustrated sequence inspired by the poem and crafted with textures from books and old images. Words are translated into characters and abstract environments floating into blank or vivid colors, reflecting the poem’s rhythm and creating a storyline. The various materials are connected through motion events that separate the poem in two main sections; the section referring to the present and the one referring to the future.

The sound is composed using recordings of flute, foley and analog synthesizers that were later digitally processed. Through this method we attempt to provide a backbone to the poet’s narration, amplifying the textural motion of the video. 

Aiming to combine the existed material with alternative and contemporary mediums, we invite the audience to preserve and experience the poem through multiple senses.

Θρήνος/Lament (click through and scroll down for the text of the poem in Greek and English)

We’ve shared two of Bitzouni’s other animations over the years, but missed some good ones. Catch up on them all on Vimeo.

Transmission by Chris Sakellaridis

A gorgeous animation by Afroditi Bitzouni accompanies a recitation by the Anglo-Greek poet Chris Sakellaridis. The echo effect makes it a bit hard to understand at first, but the text is included at the end of a review at The Creators Project, which begins:

Animated paper cutouts a la Henri Matisse come together to form a visual representation of a poem influenced by the Greek mythological character Orpheus. In Transmission, illustrator and animator Afroditi Bitzouni interprets Chris Sakellaridis’s poem of the same name through a form of collage animation. The seamless fluidity of Bitzouni’s animation resembles the work of Matt Smithson in his Decoding the Mind video. Taking cues from a chilling score by John Davidson, Bitzouni creates fragmented landscapes and abstract humanoids from scraps of colored paper. The majority of the cut outs are grain layer construction paper while others look like they were taken from a magazine or book.

The film is part of the 3361 Orpheus project,

an experimental performance, that combines poetry, music, animation, dance and opera. Ιt draws inspiration from a range of retellings and adaptations of Orpheus’s myth.

The performance’s concept is based on a triptych. The dismemberment and subsequent journey of Orpheus’s head from the river Evros to the island to Lesvos and the creation of his Oracle near the Petrified Forest. The spatial, disembodied, satellite voice coming from the constellation Lyra, where the lyre was placed after his death. The fate of Orpheus’s limbs, buried near Mount Olympus.

The main characters in the narrative are Hermes, in his capacity as psychopomp and transporter of dead souls; Eurydice, recounting her own experience, in the form of shade and dryad, as well as memory; and Orpheus with his lyre, which is seen as a fourth character, a creature alive with its own vital energy.

This is Bitzouni’s second appearance at Moving Poems. Back in 2014 I shared her animation of Night by Tasos Livaditis, a video from Tin House magazine’s late, lamented videos section, Tin House Reels.

Night by Tasos Livaditis

First, a translation by Manolis Aligizakis included in the Vimeo description:

There is a door in the night that only the blind see,
darkness makes the animals hear better,
and him, staggered, not from being drunk,
but from his futile effort to climb
up to the tower we once lost.

And now for the rest of the description:

An animated interpretation of the Greek poet Tasos Livaditis’s “Night,” Afroditi Bitzouni conceived her video “when my laptop was broken.” “At that time,” she explains, “there was nothing better to do other than flipping the pages of my fairytales and reading my favorite poems. I was reading [the poem ‘Night,’] every night for months. The illustrations [in my video] were based on a drawing I had done on the bottom of the poem in the book.”

[…]

Afroditi Bitzouni is a member of Indyvisuals Design Collective. She studied Product and Systems Design Engineering at The University of the Aegean, as well as Animation at The Glasgow School of Art. Her work has appeared in the Athens Video Art Festival, LPM (Live Performers Meeting), the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, and other venues.

The sound was produced by DJ Enthro of Psyclinic Tactix.

There isn’t much about Livaditis on the web in English, but I found this blog post helpful.

Tasos Livaditis (Athens, 1922-1988) was a Greek poet. Livaditis studied law at Athens University, but soon his gift for creating poetry was discovered. He had a strong political commitment in the political left movement, and because of that he was condemned, led to exile and has been kept in prison from 1947 till 1951, among others on the island of torture Makronisos, together with Yannis Ritsos, Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Katrakis.

In 1946 the journal Elefthera Grammata published a first article . In 1952 his first volume of poems appeared battle on the edge of the night. Between 1954 and 1980 he worked as a literary critic for the newspaper Avgi. Some of his books were banned in the 1950s because of their seditious content.

Tasos Livaditis got a number of national and international awards for his poetry and was considered one of the outstanding Greek poets of the last century.

The video was uploaded by Tin House, a well-regarded print literary magazine with a growing online component, including a weekly series called Tin House Reels, where this video was featured on January 9th. Tin House Reels features “videos by artists who are forming interesting new relationships between images and words,” and is open to video submissions (though for some reason only of work that has not previously appeared on the web).