This chapter is an approach to Antoinetta Angelidi’s work in general, and Topos in particular, through the interpretive concept of uncanniness, viewed as a feminist avant-garde strategy. It maintains that Angelidi’s Topos exemplifies both avant-garde and feminist filmmaking, constituting an argument for their close interconnection, while it also traces the distinctiveness of Angelidi’s poetics. The figure of the uncanny mother is used as a multifaced simile for an unconventional structuring of women’s subjectivity, which resists and refutes patriarchal tropes. The chapter starts by mapping possible relations between filmmaking strategies and feminist politics, as these were investigated by the second-wave feminist film theorists. This leads to the question of the films’ situating of the subject, and furthermore, their play with the subject’s very constitution. The chapter then proceeds to decode Angelidi’s cinematic poetics, as described in her own texts, focusing on the articulation between a strategic uncanniness and her feminist politics. The rest of the chapter analyses Angelidi’s 1985 film Topos, as the turning point in her work, where her poetics of feminist uncanniness reaches its full maturity in her distinctive style. The film is approached in its questioning and renewing of gender subjectivity and representation, as both deep and surface structures, in their spatial and temporal aspects. I argue that Angelidi’s Topos is a feminist manifesto, even more than her outspoken Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977) or her autobiographical The Hours (1995). Topos opens up new topoi for women’s subjectivities.

THE POLITICAL POETICS OF WEIRD MOTHERS

Antoinetta Angelidi’s films give a unique answer to the question of the connection between avant-garde filmmaking strategies and feminist politics. The historical (almost) simultaneity of the second avant-gardes in the arts with the second wave of the feminist movement meant that this question has been posed and answered many times, in many ways, in the 1970s and 1980s, by feminist film theorists and feminist avant-garde filmmakers.