[ Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ]
The swastika is reincarnation, as if marking the beloved’s home to return to in the next lifetime. A hope, most certainly a need, to hold together the cosmic interdependency of two bodies locked in one mind. Indeed, it is a symbol of protection; blood on the doorpost to remain unharmed by the wrath of History. (Marketaki borrows Angelopoulos’ tautology of God and History, though their linkage in Greek dramaturgy can be traced all the way back to Aeschylus).
Τhe swastika is also evil. It is the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Holocaust, the urn of innocence left on the doorstep of a lover. And the continual trauma of History tears in new places, gives way to Metaxas’ dictatorship, the German occupation, the Colonels’ junta.
In the limitless ambiguity of Resnais and Cavani, Marketaki spools History around sex and gender, forbidden and enigmatic in its possibilities. Bodies here are dizzy, broken, exterior, they open up like a mouth for earth to speak of itself and its conditions. At times, the figures on screen echo Martha Graham's Lamentation; a stretching of the self from the inside negotiating sufficiency. Anna remembers being born and giving birth as the selfsame pain of spiralling creation. ‘No one is able to live,’ she says, ‘remembering their birth. Birth is pain. And I remember.’ Failing attempts of meontology on the scorched earth of European history. Marketaki is reaching out to the Heideggerian being, but her hands are met with Platonic mutilation. What she ultimately weaves, is Penelope’s shroud unraveling without fail down into the dark.