A History of Greek Cinema PDF

A
HISTORY
GREEK
CINEMA
A
HISTORY
GREEK
CINEMA
Vrasidas Karalis
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
© Vrasidas Karalis, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karales, Vrasidas, A history of Greek cinema / Vrasidas Karalis
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8090-2
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xxii
Chapter One: Early Greek Cinema: 1905–1945

Constructing the Cinematic Gaze 1
Production Begins 7
Organization and Challenges 15
Developing Film Culture 27
The Collapse 31
Greek Cinema Reborn 33
An Assessment 39
Chapter Two: Constructing a Visual

Language: 1945–1960
Rebuilding the Industry and Reconnecting with the Audience 44
Production Begins Again 50
Discovering Reality in the 1950s 56
The Wonderful Years of Masterpieces 63
The Proliferation of Films 79
Chapter Three: Glory and Demise: 1960–1970

The New Decade 88
The Revenge of History: 1960–1965 104
Towards the New Greek Cinema 107
v
vi Contents
The Solitary Case of Takis Kanellopoulos 114

Commercial Successes and Contested Aesthetics 117
The Rise of Urban Melodramas and Musicals 128
Under the Eyes of the Dictators 137
Chapter Four: The Formalist Moment: The

Inward Gaze and the New Greek Cinema
(1970–1981)
Self-reflexivity and the Cinematic Eye:
New Greek Cinema (1970–1974) 143
A New Discourse about Film Culture 158
The Rise of Soft Porn 163
The Fall of the Junta 168
1974 and the Great Transition 170
1975: The Year of the Masterpiece 176
1975–1981: Uneasy Days of Freedom 180
Chapter Five: The 1980s: Hope and

Disenchantment
The Socialist Government and the Promise of Change 193
New Films for the New Regime and the Death of
New Greek Cinema 198
A Poet’s Interlude: Stavros Tornes 213
Towards the Bankruptcy of an Era: 1986–1991 215
1986–1994: The Limbo Years 217
Towards a Transnational Greek Cinema: 1991–1995 228
Contents vii
Chapter Six: The Polyphony of the

Decentered Gaze: The Other as Cultural
Hero (1995–2010)
General Themes and Trends 239
Entering the New Millennium: the Context 245
New Iconographies and Stylistic Challenges 247
The First Years of the New Century 259
2005–2010: Social Collapse and Cinematic Renewal 265
The Horrible Language of Numbers 275
After the Future 282
Recapitulation 285
Notes 289
Bibliography 294
Index 299
Preface
I
This book is intended a s a narr ative HISTORY of Greek cinema
from its inception almost a century ago to the present day. It delineates the
development, problems, trends, and personalities, as well as the main films,
in chronological order; attempting in the process to highlight commonalities
and incongruities, similarities and differences, continuities and ruptures.
As a narrative history, the book is not concerned with trying to follow
the complex structural or ideological threads of a more or less anarchic
industry; although it does attempt to construct an “intelligible” account of
what happened. It also avoids structuring the narrative around particular
issues, such as the questions of identity that have become extremely voguish
during the last 30 years in discussions about all things Greek. The creation
of specific cinematic works or groups of works has always been underpinned
by a complex interplay of many factors; consequently, there can be no single
way of interpreting such a multifaceted and unpredictable cultural activity
without limiting its semantic complexity.
The history here refers to such issues to the degree that they have had an
impact on the experience of watching films in the country. It deals primarily
with the perceptual experiences that films create for their viewers and,
therefore, focuses on their formal analysis and their historical contextual-
ization. It approaches movies as cultural artifacts and as specific responses to
wider questions and problems—artifacts that are articulated through visual
means at specific moments in time and as singular problematizations of
social realities.
Probably, this book should have been written 30 years ago when
the construction of a grand narrative was still feasible within the area of
film studies. Since such a narrative is absent, we try to formulate it today
while simultaneously identifying the structural asymmetries, ideological
irregularities, and heterogeneous incongruities hidden beneath the thrust
of a linear exposition. The book thus needs a companion volume that would
explore the history of Greek cinema through the prism of specific genres,
periods, and formalist questions as well from the point of specific analytic
approaches, like feminism, subaltern studies, Hollywood hegemony studies,
postcolonial and queer readings.
viii
Preface ix
Until such a volume is prepared, we focus here on the realities that

defined cinematic experience as lived history at a macro-historical level, in
an attempt to delineate a history of emotions in Greek society. At the most
elementary level, however, our main purpose is to illustrate the political,
aesthetic, and technical difficulties that film-makers confronted in order to
make films in Greece, and from there to discuss the wider problems they
faced and explain the solutions they formulated.
II
The history of Greek cinema is a rather obscure and unexamined affair. Greek
cinema emerged slowly and then collapsed. For several years it struggled to
reinvent itself as it dealt with the uncertainties of a colossal national defeat
in 1922; then, while in the process of recovering, it produced its first mature
works, then broke down completely and almost vanished. For a short time
before the Second World War, it resurfaced outside Greece, in Turkey and
Egypt. During the War, it re-established its distribution and technological
infrastructure and after 1944 flourished wildly, despite the indifference and
hostility of its most formidable enemy, the Greek state. It was then continu-
ously muzzled by strict censorship and government interference. In brief
periods of moderate liberalization it proliferated beyond its own financial
viability, showing the keen interest of audiences in watching Greek films,
even of the most questionable quality.
Yet under the strict surveillance of the 1967 dictatorship, Greek cinema
produced some of its greatest achievements. After 1974, it exploded with
a creative energy that sustained it for a decade, during which it was suffo-
catingly embraced by the government, until the euphoria of state-funded
freedom meant it lost touch with its audience and—under the bureaucratic
organization of the state—vanished almost totally.
In the mid-1990s, young film-makers severed their ties with the recent
past and began to construct novel cultural representations, creating a
renewed connection with the estranged public, through new iconographic
motifs and formal “investigations” which continue today.
Throughout the last ten decades, production has generally been uneven.
From a total of about 4,000 surviving movies, most are of a generic nature,
characterized by a lack of experimentation with the medium and an
avoidance of direct depiction of the stark realities surrounding the screen.
Yet these realities have always been present through the mere recording of
the cityscape, the depopulated countryside, and the psychology of characters
in specific moments of history.
No modernist experimentation with form and storyline or radical
breakdown of narrative and image can be found in Greek cinema until
very late in its development. We cannot find a single theoretical work of
x Preface
reflection on the experience of watching movies until the early 1970s, nor a
sociological approach to the act of going to the cinema itself, which was and
continues to be a major event of collective socialization and a rite of passage
for adolescents.
Most Greek films were made for the immediate consumption of local
audiences and with commercial success in mind. The majority were slapstick
comedies, boulevard skits, dramas of passion, sentimental war movies,
colorful musicals, and patriotic melodramas. They still remain the most
successful products of the industry—through their remakes and reincarna-
tions. Few movies (almost always financial failures) raised questions about
history, class, gender, identity or cultural memory in ways that would make
them interesting to audiences outside the country. Some of these films inter-
rogated the structure of Greek society and the power arrangements within
the nation state against the backdrop of oppressive political censorship,
heavy taxation, and controlled distribution. The films were mainly “political”
in the sense that they produced an oppositional way of looking at established
perceptions of reality, of framing the real and of representing conditions of
Greek society at particular moments in history.
During most of its history, cinema, both as an industry and as a culture,
developed in opposition to the institutions of the Greek state and its policies.
Successive governments saw cinema as an enemy of the state and enacted
strict censorship laws to control the ideas and forms that film-makers created
in their attempts to construct a cinematic representation of Greek reality.
Consequently, most people involved in the production of films, even those
with conservative ideology, expressed opposition—explicit or implicit—
to the dominant official ideology of the state as it was imposed through
education, army, police, news media, and the Christian Orthodox Church.
Such oppositional aesthetics were brought to the fore in periods of
historical crises and at times of political unrest, as, for example, after the
Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the Civil War of 1946 to 1949, and during
the military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974. Until the state became the main
sponsor of the industry in the late 1970s, film-making was made possible
only through the persistent vision and moral strength of certain excep-
tional cinematographers, who managed to construct and consolidate an
iconographic idiom capable of depicting the Greek experience in a formally
coherent visual language (despite the absence of sufficient production
funding and well-equipped studios). Throughout the ten decades of its
existence, Greek cinema would struggle to construct a visual metaphor that,
within the modes of its specific historical consciousness, would heighten the
understanding of reality and offer an opening into the realm of the possible,
and occasionally even the utopian.
The interplay, rather than the antagonism, between commercial and
art-house movies, between film industry and film culture, has been the
Preface xi
other battleground for the development of cinema in Greece—a country

that joined the club of “developed” European countries in the late 1970s
and the European Union in 1981. The development of Greek cinema has
always been intimately associated with deep infrastructural problems in
technology, material culture, and scientific know-how. For many decades,
all film equipment had to be imported while exorbitant production costs
never allowed for the democratization of the medium by giving access to
new professionals. Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s did technological
progress offer the opportunity for more people to get involved in the
industry and to make their mark.
Even after the major technological problem was solved, however, the
question of the audience was immediately posed. As a small market with
limited investment capital, Greece could neither sustain a developed and
organized system of film production with international distribution and
appeal nor, even more importantly, attract international funding through
co-productions, something that would have given a wider scope to Greek
films. Greek cinema could not even attract foreign actors (as could, for
instance, Italian and more recently Spanish cinema) who would have
given an international appeal to local films. Almost all Greek movies were
made for domestic consumption, addressing local problems within the
parameters of specific historical circumstances. This contextual specificity of
these movies is both what redeems them and what marginalises them.
Initially, Greek movie audiences were largely comprised of villagers who
had moved to urban centers but who had maintained their rural mentality—
cinema was introduced to Greece when urban culture was at its infancy and
when populous cities such as Athens were still made up of distinct neigh-
borhoods, or, as in Thessaloniki, of a mosaic of different groups. The mass
of urban population was increased after 1922 with the influx of Anatolian
refugees. After the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, mass
migration towards urban centres completely transformed the demography
of cities, thus creating the conditions for an urban and industrial culture.
Only in the 1970s did the first generation with a truly urban upbringing and
educated under a uniform education system become the target audience of
film-makers.
During the transition to the new urban mindset, the nouveaux riches
of the lower middle class—the petit bourgeois—were the main viewers of
Greek films. Consequently, their intellectual pretensions, “crass” sense of
humor, and ideological fantasies shaped the dominant forms of represen-
tation for the largest part of film production. The tension between popular
and creative cinema has always been and continues to be strong in Greek
films, even though postmodernism has declared a convergence of high and
popular artistic traditions through hybrid genres of representation based on
the pastiche, the parodic and the interstitial.
xii Preface
Even in current times, with the permeation of everyday life by digital

technology and the democratization of the film medium by the handheld
camera, there is a distinct and almost deep cultural reluctance to proceed
with a creative synthesis of both modes of production. For a prolonged
period, the gap between the auteur and the director of popular movies only
widened: a “good” movie remained a private vision while a “successful” one
was considered a marketable generic commodity. Indeed, middle-ground
movies attempting a synthesis of artistic risk and wide audience response
were mostly absent.
Because of the medium’s immense social effectiveness in a society
tormented by political and institutional instability, the Greek state functioned
either as the main sponsor of or the main obstacle to its development from its
very inception. For decades, heavy taxation on the production of movies, a
lack of protectionism, and the imposition of strict political control hindered
the development of cinema as an independent and self-sufficient industry.
From the late 1970s until the end of the 1980s, government took a
friendlier, and ultimately more patronizing, approach to cinema. For almost
20 years, government seems to have functioned as the main or sole sponsor
of all movies produced in the country—and the movies were spectacular
failures with audiences, creating an unbridgeable gap between viewers and
directors and finally, between filmgoers and the films themselves. It was a
period that confirmed Paul Rotha’s adage that “the movie was rampant; the
film was dormant!”
After 1985, most Greek movies lost their commercial edge and became
art-house films made exclusively for festivals and specialized venues. The old
films, brimming with dazzling vivacity, passionate drama, and vernacular
drollness, were either rejected or forgotten. A certain brand of elitism
hijacked the dominant discourse of evaluating films, expressing through
impenetrable and opaque idioms preconceived theories of vision, ideology,
and film-making. Marxist, semiotic, and psychoanalytic approaches were
used not for elucidating the submerged content of these “commercially
successful” films but to exclude them from discussion and to isolate them
in the oblivion of overspecialized academic studies. The obvious was the
message, during this period of ideological frenzy, coinciding with Socialist
Party rule. This state of affairs, however, could not have lasted for very long;
the audiences simply disappeared and the system was no longer sustainable.
Finally, the inevitable dominance of television gave the ultimate coup de
grâce to the dying film industry.
In the early 1990s, the practice of co-sponsorship came into operation.
More recently, the practice of multiple sponsorships came into effect de facto
and is still trying to find its institutional and legal framework within the state.
During the last 20 years, international funding has been available, either
through the European Union or through consortia with other European
Preface xiii
or American companies, and has essentially liberated production from its

imposed or self-imposed tutelage to the Greek state or the Greek media.
The misadventure is not over yet, however. The ongoing financial
meltdown has imposed heavy restrictions on new and emerging directors. In
the early 1990s, such directors, after a traumatic act of emancipation, cut the
umbilical cord with the great names of the auteur tradition, thereby recon-
figuring a new visual idiom to depict a completely changed and radically
reformed society. As Greece finds itself on the brink of financial collapse
in 2011, many film-makers struggle hard to secure funding for their films
and channels for their promotion—and the situation is still too fluid for any
predictions to be made about the final outcome.
III
During its century of life, Greek cinema has managed to produce both inter-
esting and commercially viable works, some of which are of international
significance and deserving of closer study. Unfortunately, few are known
outside Greece and, on many occasions, Greek cinephiles, for various
reasons. Still fewer studies have been dedicated to the exploration of its
historical trajectory. Many articles, especially in electronic journals, have
dealt mainly with specific Greek directors, the impact of their work, or more
generally with the aesthetics of Greek cinematography.
In English, there is only one brief history of Greek cinema—The
Contemporary Greek Cinema by Mel Schuster—which was published in
1979 and which focuses on the New Greek Cinema as it was developing
then. This history does not offer a thorough analysis of the presuppositions
and historical circumstances underpinning the medium before that period.
Although we must recognize the pioneering character of Schuster’s work, it
is important to note that its historical scope gives a rather limited under-
standing of the evolution of cinema as an artistic and social medium in
Greece. We must also mention the brief but extremely accurate observations
by Mirella Georgiadou, in Peter Cowie’s A Concise History of Cinema (1971).
Also important for mapping out approaches and new perspectives on
Greek cinema is the special issue of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies,
edited by Professor Stratos E. Constantinidis in 2000. A number of its
contributors analyse different periods and important films, presenting a
sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the problems of Greek cinema
both as cinematic art and as social text.
Dan Georgakas’ “Thumbnail History” of Greek cinema, as also his
reviews of Greek movies in the journal Cineaste, is another valuable contri-
bution to the discussion of Greek cinema history. With an international
experience in mind, Georgakas evaluates Greek cinema in its interaction
with society, industry, technology, audience, and, finally, in the context of
xiv Preface
its specific contribution to the representation of Greek historical experience.

Furthermore, he detects thematic threads and technical analogies that
give to Greek movies artistic and ideological continuity in both style and
storytelling.
Recent studies by Lydia Papadimitriou have shed more light on a
specific genre of Greek cinema: the musical, exploring it as a cultural
product and emblem of specific social ideologies that was disseminated at
particular historical moments.
In Greek, the multi-volume History of Greek Cinema by Yannis Soldatos
is invaluable because of its impressive command of the primary sources,
hard-to-find reviews, and innumerable references, which bring together the
most important discussions on the topic, showing the persistent themes that
have dominated the production and appreciation of film in Greece. Soldatos’
history is a continuous labour of love, which, despite the somewhat intrusive
passion of its writer, is of permanent importance. 100 Years of Greek and
Foreign Cinema by Ninos Fenek-Mikelidis represents a more personal vision
of Greek cinema by one of its most important reviewers. Also of particular
interest is Marinos Kousoumidis’ Illustrated History of Greek Cinema, which
ends in 1981 but which contains accurate information and a selection
of crucial primary sources. The monumental two-volume edition Greek
Cinema by Angelos Rouvas and Hristos Stathakopoulos is a solid and inval-
uable source of historical information. Finally, Aglaia Mitropoulou’s Greek
Cinema, in spite of its very personal approach by one of the pioneers of film
history, is extremely valuable for the detailed information it gives on many
film-makers and the background of their work as well as for its aesthetic
appraisals.
Of all the Greek directors, the most popular among scholars has
been Theo Angelopoulos, and the superb studies dedicated to him by
Andrew Horton in particular, contain deep insights into the work of a
film-maker whose significance has exceeded the limits of national cinema.
Unfortunately, no studies in English have been made of other important
Greek directors such as Michael Cacoyannis or Nikos Koundouros, or even
of contemporaries who deserve international attention like Constantine
Giannaris.
Other brief histories in English, available mainly on the internet, are
equally interesting, and indicative of specific approaches to the historical
development of a peripheral European cinema. (The anonymous compiler
of ‘History of Cinema in Greece’ at filmbirth.com should be commended for
its succinctness and accuracy.) A serious shortcoming of histories written in
Greek is that they tend to focus on detailed references to people and events
of local interest, so the big picture of the evolution of cinema as art and social
testimony is usually lost under particular circumstances and individual
references, and sometimes even behind personal antipathy and bias.
Preface xv
For this book, I have endeavored to sift through material that is vast
and still critically unexplored in order to present what reaches out, beyond
the circumstantial or the episodic, to become (within the specificity of
its historical situation) a symbol of a general trend, marking patterns of
collective response. I have tried to locate the films that have directly or
indirectly influenced the cultural and psychological topography of the
country and to provide a brief commentary on their specific “social” value
and formal structure—even when these movies were neither commer-
cially successful nor seen by wide audiences. Given that this is a general
survey, I have avoided detailed “cultural readings” based on the premises of
academic film studies, as such approaches need to concentrate on specific
movies, genres or individuals and through their very specificity to under-
stand the wider cultural debates and political agendas that dominated the
Greek public sphere in different moments of history. Having said this, there
are also many occasions where I examine films’ implications, especially
regarding gender, class, and cultural memory. I also try to emphasize the
importance of foreigners, such as the founder of Greek cinema Josef Hepp,
of women directors like Maria Plyta and of commercial directors like
Yannis Dalianidis, who have been either forgotten or ignored. Finally, I have
attempted to minimize my overall references, as most of these are in Greek
and the bibliography in English quite limited.
The issue of periodization is important. My initial intention was to
divide the material into four periods: from the beginnings to 1944 with the
liberation from German occupation, when the industry was reorganized and
had established its own modes of production and exhibition; from 1945 to
1970 and the release of Theo Angelopoulos’ Reconstruction (1970), which
reorientated cinematic practices, created new audiences and reinvented
cinematic representation, marking the end of the Old Greek Cinema and the
beginning of the New; from 1970 to 1995 when Angelopoulos released his
monumental Balkan epic Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) as the breaking point of the
Greek national cinema; and from 1995 to 2011, when a distinct new way of
production, tentatively called the New Greek Current, started to emerge and
produce its first works, which gained international recognition.
In the end, however, I chose to break the history down decade by
decade after 1945, as the immense number of films and the extensive debates
surrounding them would have created an imbalance in narrative flow. This
final arrangement accepts the establishment of the Thessaloniki Film Festival
in 1960 and the election of the first Socialist Government in 1981 as equally
important turning points in the history of Greek cinema. These two events
reoriented production and promotion practices in the country and gave
to this narrative the necessary temporal markers for a balanced chartering
of the wider reconfigurations that occurred in film culture and the social
realities surrounding them.
xvi Preface
Furthermore, since 1995 a wide variety of genres, diversified approaches

and filmic representations has been made possible through the depiction
not simply of the foreign immigrant, but also through the discovery of
the perennial other that had existed within Greek society since its very
establishment: the marginalized group, the religious other, the outcast,
and the displaced or dissociative individual. During the last 20 years, new
“cultural heroes,” such as the immigrant, the transvestite, and the mascu-
linized feminine, have found representation—portrayals that indicate a deep
crisis in the traditional values pertaining to masculinity, the vexed issue of
“Greekness,” and women’s self-articulation.
Certainly, we have to define what we mean exactly by “national Greek
cinema.” As this history argues, Greek cinema and images about Greece were
made by Greeks and non-Greeks alike; starting with the patriarch of local
cinema, the Hungarian Josef Hepp and continuing after the war with the
English Walter Lassally and the Italian Giovanni Varriano, it would be fairer
to talk about the history of cinema in Greece instead of Greek cinema simply.
The heterogeneity of the cinematic endeavor in the country provides a better
understanding of the collective efforts to construct a local visual idiom and
to create the perceptual strategies that connect it with the dominant tradi-
tions worldwide. Greek cinema was and still is a point of convergence, a
space of colliding idioms, as expressed by Hollywood and European tradi-
tions. Being both at the same time, Greek audiences and critics alike love to
hate Hollywood and hate to love European auteurism. Such a fundamental
ambivalence can be seen throughout the development of Greek cinema,
creating an emotional and intellectual tension which gives a distinct energy
and power to many Greek films.
On the other hand, “Greek cinema” and the expectations of interna-
tional audiences were not determined by films made solely by directors
of Greek origin or, indeed, for Greek audiences. The most internationally
successful movies that defined the cinematic representation of Greece for
public consumption were made by the American philhellene Jules Dassin.
His Never on Sunday (1960) was particularly responsible for establishing the
dominant international image of Greek cinema, a topic that deserves further
exploration and discussion in separate studies. Even Michael Cacoyannis’
celebrated Zorba the Greek (1964) cannot really be seen as a purely “Greek
movie.” The director notwithstanding, it is essentially an American movie,
with an American production and distribution company, performed in
English and with the international audience as its target.
The main focus of this exploration is to foreground the cinematic works,
the personalities and some of the discussions that critically reflected on
how reality could or could not be depicted by the camera. It also addresses
the question of whose reality is being depicted and for whom, since
movie-making is a social event and an act of public intervention, involving
Preface xvii
not isolated individuals but groups of people and mechanisms of indus-

trial production—on many occasions, government-sponsored initiatives
involving state apparatuses. Historical context is everywhere and sheds light
on the production of each film. In this overview I try to outline the questions
regarding history, cultural memory, and historical conscience implicitly
depicted in each film by suggesting some provisional explanations about
them within the wider context of local intellectual history and the history of
ideas in Europe.
IV
Existing histories of Greek cinema, especially in Greek, tend to give a
catalogue of titles in historical sequence. Yet, despite this concern with
historical particulars, most fail to study the historicity of each movie within
the cultural and aesthetic context of the intellectual milieu that produced it.
Within their specific context, most movies are sites of cultural politics since
they give form to the various historical contestations that dominate cultural
or political debates. In some, the density of the filmic text is so complex that
the films can be seen as indications not simply of a looming social crisis but
as spaces of an unfolding visual crisis, as is clear for example between 1965
and 1967 and after 1984/85.
In the most important films of Greek cinema, one can see precisely
how negotiable the limits are between cinema as an artistic activity and
cinema as a social institution. Many movies were made with both political
and aesthetic concerns incorporated into their structure; and as the medium
gained confidence in the late 1950s, an implicit dialogue commenced
between the film-makers themselves in an attempt to consolidate a distinct
cinematic idiom. It still remains to be discussed (though not in this book),
if there is a distinctly Greek cinematic language or cinema that has never
achieved full self-awareness and articulation. It is said that the most
important film producer, Filopimin Finos, preferred to make a “good
imitation of a Hollywood movie” rather than to produce a “bad Greek film.”
Contemporary globalization brings such a dilemma to the fore again.
Moreover, the intellectual establishment of the country had an ambiv-
alent attitude towards the medium itself. Despite its popular appeal, many
intellectuals were extremely reluctant, if not unwilling, to accept its artistic
value—only in the late 1950s did intellectuals begin to articulate a positive
appreciation of cinema, and always with many reservations. Cinema is one
of the main arts of capitalist modernity and, as such, has presupposed on
many occasions a radical break with the established practices of the past in
terms of aesthetics, historical awareness, and self-articulation.
Throughout its history, Greek culture has been a bookish tradition
based on the word and the printed page rather than on the image and the
xviii Preface
visual modality of perceiving reality. Many important intellectual Western

texts were written in Greek and because of them (and the mythologies
around their meanings), the Greek language is of cultural value and signifi-
cance, something that has been emphasized by the ideology of the state.
Language has been the most singularly important thread of continuity in
Greek history from antiquity to today. The establishment of the Greek nation
state in 1828 was based on the continuing memory that such privileged texts
offered to the citizens of the new civil society who, after being socialized
by the educational system, articulated their self-perception in terms of
linguistic continuity with the culture of Homer, fifth-century Athens, and
the Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods.
Being Greek meant speaking Greek through a peculiar strategy of nation
building, which was based on linguistic nationalism, consecrated by religious
ceremonies or folkloric rituals and fiercely disseminated by the education
system. However, cinema privileges the image and, even more so, the flowing
images of the ephemeral and the temporary. The transition from a culture of
the book to a culture of images, from a reading society to the society of the
spectacle gives an extremely important anthropological content to cinematic
art in Greece—something that could perhaps be extended to other countries of
Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, such as Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and
Turkey, or the Arab countries, which seem to have faced analogous cultural
dilemmas regarding their past, identity, and contemporary physiognomy.
This survey also addresses briefly some peculiarities of Greek cinema.
For example, despite the internationally accepted image of Greece as the
locus of an ancient Greek culture, Greek cinema has rarely dealt with its
nation’s ancient past. We don’t have modern Greek cinematic representations
of classical Greece. The main concern of most Greek movies has been the
political question in contemporary Greek society. And the political question,
of course, is associated with the history of the country and the ways in which
Greek society dealt in times of war and peace with its own self-perception
and cultural memory.
The most important postulate for Greek film-makers has been the
attempt to construct, invent, or compile an optical language that could
visually articulate Greek society either as a coherent unity or as a palimpsest
consisting of gaps, missing pages, and individual silences. Indeed, it took
Greek film-makers a prolonged period of almost 30 years to piece together
the morphemes for a visual grammar appropriate and equivalent to the
complexities of Greek society. The transition from a non-perspectival
culture—a culture outside the visual tradition of Western European art—
to the modern visual regimes, based on space, volume, light, and shadow,
generated not only technological but also stylistic problems.
In the early years, cinema was a succession of tableaux vivants or a
series of family portraits. Only after 1936 can we clearly see that Greek
Preface xix
cinematographers had abandoned the one-dimensional space of Byzantine

iconography and had started exploring the potentialities of spatial depth,
formal volume, and multiple stage arrangements. In the 1950s, a group
of creative directors established an imaginative dialogue between the
camera and the human form, thereby consolidating the visual language that
permeates Greek cinematic representations to this day.
It also took decades—not until after 1960—and many individual efforts
and personal struggles for the Greek state to develop an interest in the
industry, an interest undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that the ideological
influence of cinema had by that stage become undeniable and its social
impact uncontested. Cinema as an industry has served Greece as no other
industry. For example, Cacoyannis’ Zorba the Greek has been the single most
important trademark for exports, a “national” symbol that has instigated the
local cultural industry through tourism and established “Greece” as a special
place in the cultural imagination of the world.
Cultural contextualization is crucial for the understanding of the devel-
opment of Greek cinema. We must study the internal dialogue among
directors, directors of photography, script writers, producers, actors, and,
finally, of the audience itself in order to form a complete picture of the
central physiognomy of Greek cinema. Some movies have generated more
interest than others: as cultural artifacts, popular and generic movies are
much more relevant to an understanding of the dominant taste, horizon
of expectations, and collective pursuits than movies made by the singular
vision or exclusive fascination of a particular individual.
The old debate between genre and auteur is something that can be
detected in Greece, as in many other cinematic traditions. When certain
movies were screened, they elicited equally problematic emotions and
reactions in their audience. Such films were either popular “soapies” based
on the charisma of superstars such as Aliki Vouyouklaki, or works that
expressed the artistic and political concerns of directors such as Nikos
Koundouros, Takis Kanellopoulos, Theo Angelopoulos, Tonia Marketaki,
and Stavros Tornes.
The problem of representing the unstable realities of Greek society
has been the pivotal point of departure for this account. Its main purpose
is to explore and discuss the representation strategies established by a
number of directors in order to depict the Greek experience and its cultural
memory since the introduction of cinema into the country. We want to
discuss the movies and artists who defined public taste, while at the same
time connecting certain films with international trends, movements, and
questions. Overall, this book focuses on films in which the depiction of
Greek reality has assumed a special and even “irregular” form in an attempt
to construct a visual pattern for the Greek experience—such films, regardless
of their commercial success or failure, stand out by themselves.
xx Preface
This survey also briefly deals with the representations of “others” in

Greek cinema (Roma, Jews, Americans, British, Turks, and so on), and
finally examines movies that depict forms of sexual otherness and social
marginalization as symbols of diversification and pluralism. While such
movies were extremely rare in early periods of Greek cinema, they have
proliferated recently as Greek society moves towards a more multinational
and multicultural demography. Such films also chronicle the fluid and
unstable realities that have emerged since 1991 and the influx of refugees
from Balkan and Eastern European countries.
On some occasions, I have attempted an anthropological conceptual-
ization of Greek cinema, especially in relation to the modes of representation
and the types of image it established in order to depict a society in constant
fluidity and instability. Within such a society the issue of individual
characterization has always remained crucial.With the exception of Theo
Angelopoulos, who avoided any psychologization of individual existence,
most film-makers tried to construct human types affected by the instability
of their surrounding society, but have mostly failed in creating complete and
believable characters. While commercial cinema depicted the stereotypical,
conformist and adjustable “common man,” art cinema grappled with the
psychological complexities and existential dilemmas of the internal exile
and the social outcast, an enterprise that made such movies introspective,
opaque, and, occasionally, self-indulgent.
In its development, Greek cinema had to deal with the problem of
constructing a visual language that would unlock the mystery of the human
form and situate it within its historical local realities. The solution to this
problem took decades to formulate and came about only after the creative
imagination had succeeded in liberating itself from the traumas of historical
experience. One can see the whole history of cinema in Greece as a visual
antidote for the confusion and anxiety caused by such traumas; an attempt
to bring balance and closure to the symptoms of post-traumatic helplessness
that dominated a society in constant crisis over its present and future
position in history.
V
Inevitably, in writing this history I have had to choose films which did not
simply define Greek cinema history but which could also be of interest
to an international audience. I have tried not to see Greek cinema as a
battleground between commercial and art films but to present the formal
complementarity of both modes of production. I have endeavored to talk
about the merits and the problems that each genre depicts within its own
context and, wherever possible, in reference to the artistic quest of their
makers. There are chapters on what is called New Greek Cinema, as well as
Preface xxi
chapters on propaganda, soft porn, or bad melodrama. They all illustrate the
panorama of Greek film production and present through their own “gaze”
different aspects of Greek history, culture, and society.
Moreover, the fact that many “artistic” film-makers were involved in
the production of commercial, popular culture films shows the implicit
symbiotic relationship between high and popular culture and the invisible
pathways of their convergence. In most cases, unfortunately, we do not have
good digital copies of films produced between 1910 and 1980 (although
recently a digitalization project has been inaugurated by the Greek Film
Centre, EKK, and has been funded by the European Union and independent
distributors). Still, many good films exist in bad prints and it would be of
great assistance to the future historian of Greek cinema if the important task
of digitalization were to be completed. Many films of the early period are
considered lost; however, as recent research shows, many Greek films made
between 1911 and 1945 have lain forgotten somewhere in the film archives
of Berlin, Paris, London, and Moscow—for various reasons in each case.
Let us hope that young researchers will try to salvage these lost treasures
and reveal to contemporary viewers the difficulties that early Greek film-
makers confronted and so acclimatize the main art of modernity to the
structures and mentalities of a traditional society on the periphery of
Europe.
A note on the transliteration of names and titles

I followed the simplest phonetic transcription of Greek names as they
are pronounced in the language: Yorgos instead of George (but Yeorgios
for the archaic form of the name), Yannis instead of John. The translated
titles of films in English are taken from Dimitris Koliodimos, The Greek
Filmography: 1914 through 1996. I indicate wherever there is a difference of
opinion. When a particular form of name has already been used in English
(Theo Angelopoulos for example) I maintain that form.
All translations from Greek are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Sometimes, there are discrepant release dates for films. The screening
season in Greece starts in October, so a film can be shown in the theaters
in the following year, even if it was produced in the previous year. In most
cases, I have followed the date given by Rouvas and Stathakopoulos, while in
others I use the year of release.
Acknowledgments
I a m deeply indebted to m any people for their assistance in the

fruition of this project. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to
my students of the Modern Greek Department at the University of Sydney
for their personal response, unbiased approach, and “random” comments,
which helped me to form a truly contemporary view, free of the allure of
history and the sentimentalism of childhood experiences. Many thanks are
also owed to my colleagues in the department: Dr. Anthony Dracopoulos
for our inspiring and challenging conversations and Dr. Panayota Nazou for
her encouragement and relentless criticism. A thank you must also go to my
colleague in the European Cinema course, Professor Judith Keene, for her
sensitivity and critical gaze. I am also indebted to my other colleagues at the
University: Michelle Royer, Laleen Jayamanne, and Richard Smith, whose
presence and ideas helped me to form my own approach to cinema.
I am thankful to my friend Takis Katsabanis who insisted on being critical
but always with love, since this is “our tradition.” To my sister Emily for her
inspiring fighting spirit and my friend Ourania Lampsidou for her uncom-
promised modernity. Finally, to my friend and partner Robert Meader whose
dislike of Theo Angelopoulos and the “auteur” tradition gave me a reality check.
The support and encouragement from particular individuals who made
a substantial contribution to the study of Greek cinema enabled me to access
material and sources that were very hard to find; Nikos Theodosiou with his out-of-
print studies on the beginnings of Greek cinema and the culture surrounding the
experience of going to the movies. My colleague Lydia Papadimitriou provided
me with extremely helpful commentary after having read a draft of the first
chapter. George Mitropoulos kindly sent to me from Greece books that are hard
to obtain in the Antipodes. Dan Georgakas has been the single inspiring force
behind the whole project, since the study of his work and political thinking gave
me the capacity and strength to be lucid and unambiguous.
I also feel a deep sense of gratitude to the anonymous seller of DVDs
in a small shop in Piraeus who in two days found for me the rarest Greek
movies, especially films made between 1930 and 1960, which I could not find
in the most advanced research centers.
There are no words to express my gratitude to Mr. Charles Humblet the
educational designer of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University
of Sydney. Without his technical assistance there would have been no photo-
graphs in this book, which, as we know, make every book worth reading.
xxii
Acknowledgments xxiii
My colleague Cathy Cassis with her linguistic sensitivity edited the text
so that it has a smooth narrative flow and a seamless structure of sentence.
Cathy gave the text its necessary stylistic unity and expressive precision which
in my own world of confused bilingualism never really exists.
Finally, I am thankful to the editor of Continuum, Katie Gallof, who
embraced the project with enthusiasm and humor from its very inception.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my brother Nicholas who died
unexpectedly several days after we were reconnected by an unexpected
discussion on the significance of going to James Bond movies together.
Vrasidas Karalis,
University of Sydney,
July 2011
Chapter One
❦❦
Early Greek Cinema: 1905–1945
Constructing the Cinematic Gaze

On November 29 , 1896 , Athenians paid a hefty price to attend the first
ever screenings of moving pictures on Greek soil. The screenings took place
nine months after the Lumière brothers officially patented their invention in
Paris. At a central street in Athens and at a humble venue especially modified
for the occasion, a strange inscription read: Cinematofotographe Edison. An
anonymous reviewer wrote in the newspaper The City (To Asty):
Carriages are travelling, horses are running, the sea is quietly moving, the
wind is blowing, clothes are waving, trains are departing, Ms Loie Fuller
is shaking and twisting like a colourful snake her paradoxical, unique
and famous clothes, so that one thinks that they have before them living
human beings, faces enlivened by blood, bodies pulsating with muscles.
The illusion of life, in all its endless manifestations, parades in front of us.
When it becomes possible to have a series of Greek images, of Athenian
scenes and landscapes, the cintematofotograph will then excel, becoming an
even more enjoyable spectacle. However, even as it stands, it presents one
of the most astonishing inventions of science, one of the most fascinating
discoveries; it is worth being watched by everybody and, certainly, they will
all watch it and immerse themselves in its consummate phantasmagorias.1
Every day for a month, 16 screenings were offered until Alexandre Promio,
the representative of the Lumière brothers, took the projector and the short
films to Constantinople. All famous early films made by the Lumières
were screened: L’ Arrivée d’un Train, La Sortie des Usines Lumière, Lyon les
Cordeliers, Le goûter de bébé, and others. Despite their immense success, no
special interest in film was shown in the Greek capital for over four years.
Adverse and disastrous circumstances at the beginning of the following year
quashed any curiosity or entrepreneurial interest in further exploring or
1
2 A History of Greek Cinema
making use of the new invention. (The first screenings were organized in
Thessaloniki, then under Ottoman rule, in July 1897; and, in July 1900, the
first regular screenings were shown at the famous Orpheus theater on the
thriving commercial island of Syros.)
Indeed, the new art of cinema was the casualty of the political and social
upheavals of Greek history. In order to establish itself and consolidate its
presence, the medium needed political stability, social cohesion, and, of course,
peace with other countries: essentially the preconditions for the establishment
of technological infrastructure and the development of a sophisticated studio
system that would allow for the emergence of film culture. Such pre-
conditions were absent from Greek history until 1950. Prolonged periods of
warfare (1912–1922), political instability (1922–1928 and 1932–1936), dicta-
torships, failed coups, and ultimately the German occupation followed by the
Civil War (1946–1949) deferred for almost 50 years the smooth incorporation
of the technological infrastructure and the conceptual framework that cinema
as an industry and as an art needs to flourish.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the nation state of Greece had
a total population of about 2,500,000 people; another 3,000,000 Greeks
lived outside the national borders, mainly in the Ottoman Empire, Russia
and Egypt. Athens, the capital city, had an unremarkable population of
130,000 and competed with other established centers of Greek civili-
zation, such as Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria, for cultural and
financial domination.2 The Greek economy was predominantly agricultural,
although in the last decades of the century several programs of international
investment were in place and the presence of the working class had become
noticeable in the political and ideological debates of the country.
In April 1896, Greece organized the first Olympic Games of the modern
era. The success of the Games raised the hopes of the Greek people and the
political establishment on many levels. However, by the end of 1897 the
country experienced the effects of a humiliating bankruptcy, first announced
in 1893 by the Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis (1832–1896) with one
of the most memorable phrases of Greek political vocabulary: “Regretfully,
we are bankrupt!” The bankruptcy was a long process and was the painful
outcome of a combination of intense borrowing for infrastructure works, the
systemic corruption of a state based on political clientelism, the organization
of the Olympic Games, and, finally, of a humiliating military defeat by the
Ottoman Empire in the so-called Black 1897 War.
Nonetheless, against all odds, the movement for a social and political
renaissance began during the first decade of the new century, when the country
was forced to confront the dilemmas of modernity and proceed with its indus-
trialization process, its rising working-class movement, and its unresolved
territorial disputes with the collapsing Ottoman Empire (mainly in Crete and
Macedonia). Programs of reform were gradually implemented by different
Early Greek Cinema: 1905–1945 3
governments, starting in 1900 and culminating in the Goudi Uprising of 1908

when rebellious but ineffective officers demanded political concessions from
the rather indolent and indifferent King George I of the Hellenes.
In this political and social climate, the Psychoule Brothers from the city
of Volos, Thessaly, introduced the first projection machine to Athens in 1899
at the Varieté theater behind what is today the site of the Old Parliament,
screening short films, which they later took to the countryside. In 1900, other
entrepreneurs, especially those from Smyrna or Alexandria, like Cleanthis
Zahos and Apostolos Kontaratos, imported new projectors and installed
them at the cafés surrounding Constitution Square between the Palace and
the Parliament. Fierce competition broke out between the café proprietors
for the premiere screening of the most recent French and Italian productions.
The first movies, however, started being regularly screened at the indus-
trial port of Piraeus by the Smyrnian businessman Yannis Synodinos. The
initial session consisted of Edison’s The Battle of Mafeking and one of the great
commercial successes of the day, Georges Méliès’ Cinderella. Other movies
directed by Ferdinand Zecca and produced by Charles Pathé, such as Histoire d’un
crime and Les Victimes de l’alcoolisme, became popular. Thanks to Pathé’s entre-
preneurship, the tradition of Pathé-Journal with newsreels of actual events was to
become the enduring legacy of early French cinema to Greek cinematography.
After 1904, many cafés imported their own projectors, and the desire
of their proprietors to attract greater audiences to their establishments only
intensified the antagonism between them. A number of newsreels were taken
during the Greek-Turkish war of 1897 by Frederic Villiers (1852–1922) and
by Méliès himself (1861–1938)—these have to be the earliest film recordings
on Greek territory3. An unknown American cameraman first filmed Athens
in 1904. Later in the same year, an enigmatic French cameraman, named
Leon (or Leons), who worked for Gaumont, Pathé’s great competitor, came
to Athens to cover the mid-Olympiad of 1906 and filmed the games. His
films were among the first existing visual records made on Greek territory.
In 1907, an unknown cameraman made the first Greek journal, filming
The Celebration of King George I. In 1908, a successful businessman from
Smyrna, Evangelos Mavrodimakis, began to offer regular screenings of
movies in the center of Athens, which had only just been supplied with
electricity. On the central Stadiou Street he established the first movie
theater, naming it the Theater of the World; he is considered to be the father
of the Greek cinema venue.
In these early days, each session usually consisted of a screening of
eight short films, accompanied by a pianist, with improvised melodies, but
later, whole orchestras were added together with popular singers. In early
1911, the first permanent cinema, Olympia (to be renamed later Capitole),
was built in Piraeus by Yannis Synodinos, thereby inaugurating the material
infrastructure for the expansion of cinema on Greek territory.
It was not, however, until 1911/12, after the city of Athens was fully supplied
with electricity, that three grand cinemas were specifically built to cater for the
needs of the new art and its growing audience (Attikon, Pallas and Splendid). But
open-air screenings retained their appeal for Athenian audiences, continuing
the tradition of the open-air performances of the shadow theater of Karagiozis,
which was for many decades the most popular form of public entertainment. In
1913, one of the most historic, almost legendary, cinemas opened in Athens, the
Rosi-Clair, which was to screen the most popular films over a period of 50 years
and which was finally closed down in 1969, under changed circumstances.
In subsequent years, the famous Pantheon theater was established at the
center of the city for the middle class, while the more humble Panorama was
opened in a less-auspicious suburb for the underclass. By 1920, a network
of six cinemas existed in the capital, together with open-air screenings that
continued to be offered by a considerable number of cafés. Throughout the
country, with the annexation of the city of Thessalonica in 1912 and the rest
of Macedonia and the Aegean islands, an overall number of 80 cinemas were
in operation by the end of the decade.
During this period, due to the increasing demand for technological
support, many foreigners were invited to Athens as cameramen, mainte-
nance technicians, and projectionists. Some chose to stay. Among them, the
German-Hungarian Josef Hepp (Giozef Chep, 1887–1968) worked relent-
lessly for decades to consolidate the new art form and should be recognized
as one of the most prominent film-makers in the history of Greek cinema.
Hepp was a man of artistic brilliance with a superb sense of style for mise-en-
scène, and his contribution is worthy of closer study. He arrived in Greece in
early 1910, after an invitation from King George and bearing the conferred
title of “Royal photographer and cinematographer.” His first film was the
short journal From the Life of the Little Princes, which he shot in early 1911
with the King’s very many children and grandchildren. He later recollected:
When I arrived in Greece, I fell in love with its lucid colors, its blue skies,
the unembellished lines of its landscapes, but mostly with its people, their
customs and way of living. I filmed them and I was the first who made
images to represent Greece in other countries.4
Meanwhile, in 1905 in Macedonia, the brothers Yannakis (Ioannis) (1878–

1954) and Miltiadis (1882–1964) Manaki recorded rural scenes from the life
of ordinary villagers.5 They made a number of reels, which established the
genre of ethnographic documentary in the Balkans, despite their disputed
political agenda. Macedonia was a contested area that still belonged to the
collapsing Ottoman Empire, but Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria aspired to
annex it to their national territories.
The Manaki brothers produced films that depicted the ethnic diversity
of the region as well as the strange in-between minorities that had escaped
the attention of the political rivals. These included work on the Aromanian
Vlachs, Macedonian Slavs and the Romas. Christos Christodoulou has
observed that, “The Manaki Brothers . . . recorded the Balkans at some of
their most critical historical moments with both touching impartiality and a
sense of documentary precision.”6 Within their work, films of special signifi-
cance as the earliest visual records of an ethnographic nature from the region
include Customs and Traditions of Macedonia (1906), The Visit of Sultan
Mehmet V to Thessaloniki and Monastiri (1911), Turkish Prisoners (1912),
Refugees (1916), and The Bombardment of Monastiri (1916).
These early short reels are still very close to photographs; they are
indeed moving pictures, and their photographic stillness can be detected in
the decades to come as their enduring artistic legacy to Greek cinema. Miltos
Manakis had some interesting ideas regarding photography:
Photography is in essence an art form. We are artists/technicians of a sort,
comparable to the painters of the past. They were not the only ones who
could give beauty to what they painted; we do the same thing with our
photographs. A good photograph depends on the play of light . . . And this
is something only an artist can do, someone who knows what is attractive,
divine and aesthetic . . .7
Manaki brothers, The Abvella Weavers (1905/6).

Greek Film Archive Collection.
Indeed, one can readily discern the continuity between still photographs and
the cinematic representations in Greece and the Balkans at the time. Local
artistic practices were based on the great, long, and venerable Byzantine
tradition of religious iconography. The visual language of perspective
that had dominated European painting since the Italian Renaissance was
totally absent from the cultural optics of the country and, certainly, of the
whole of Eastern Europe. The new tradition of painting, dominant in the
late nineteenth century, was predominantly imported (it was even named
the “Munich School”), and was still struggling to find its specific Greek
expression and style. (It is interesting, however, that in his pioneer essay on
cinema, Vachel Lindsay refers to the paintings of the main representative
of the Munich School, Nickolas Gyzis, when he talks about “mood” in the
cinematic image of Mary Pickford.)8
The face in Byzantine icons and frescos is self-illuminated, without
shades or shadows; and space is depicted symbolically not “realistically” or
“naturalistically.” That which interests the Byzantine tradition more is not
the story but the “organization of space” and how the viewer experiences
its “psychic content.” Its point of view is located within the iconographic
space and through the special pictorial practice called “inverse perspective,”
according to which the image and each of its components gaze at the viewer
and not the viewer at the image.9
Similarly, the camera works with the interplay between light and dark,
and with space, in a realistic, photographic sense by juxtaposing patterns,
shapes, and forms in order to generate emotions through visual contrasts.
The struggle to create depth, to explore natural space, and to understand
perspective as the contrast between grades of black and white are visible
throughout the early period of Greek cinema and were to be resolved only
after the Second World War. Because of its specific iconographic sources
and the prevailing visual cultures formed by shadow theater or folk painting,
Greek cinema could not embark on the production of large historical epics
as in Italy by Enrico Guazzone or Giovanni Pastrone. From its very begin-
nings, it focused on small-scale productions whose principal objective was
to supplant the existing modes and genres of popular entertainment.
The documentaries of the Maniaki Brothers do not belong to a single
national cinema. They constitute the “primary foundational texts” of the
whole cinematography that was to evolve with the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire after the First World War. The lives of the two brothers are equally
telling. One died poor and unknown in Thessalonica in 1954, while the
other was celebrated as a national hero in Yugoslavia, with each of them
opting for a different motherland, a different identity, and a different
culture.10
In 1910/11, after the first recording camera was imported into the
country, a number of short films on the lives of insects and reptiles were
made by Harilaos Mavrodimakis, the first scientific documentaries to be

produced in Greece. In 1912, Josef Hepp made two more short films on the
life of the royal family, during the period of great optimism that followed
the election of the new dynamic Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who
was to play a crucial role in the development of cinema in the country,
especially after 1928. Meanwhile, foreign films were extremely successful.
Among them were The Crowning of the Tsar, Faust, The Life and Passion
of Jesus Christ made by Louis Lumière; The Great Train Robbery by Edwin
S. Porter; and Cinderella, The Dreyfus Affair and Journey to the Moon
by Georges Méliès. These were so popular that they soon inspired local
productions.
Production Begins
In 1910, the first production company, Athene Films, made a number of
slapstick comedies, which focused on the body of Spyros Dimitrakopoulos,
aka, Spyridion, the owner of the company. His movies were filmed by
imported technicians and were directed by the Italian Filippo Martelli.
Spyridion modeled his acting on the American Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
and his film Ben’s Kid (1909), which Spyridion had watched in Paris. His
cameraman was Erich Bumbach from Germany who was also to play a
crucial role in the early period of Greek cinema.
Spyridion himself was the scriptwriter, actor, producer and distributor.
Spyridion, Quo Vadis (1911); Spyridion, Baby (1912); and Spyridion,
Chameleon (1912) were comic skits based on the physical peculiarities of
the actor, and his resemblance to the American comedian. They gained wide
popularity throughout the country, since by then the number of cinemas had
proliferated in many major cities, such as Piraeus, Patras, Volos, and Pyrgos.
Unfortunately, none of these movies survive except in stills.
Dimitrakopoulos himself was extremely aware of what he called the
“demands of the screen.” In a sense, he was the pioneer of screen acting and
managed to avoid one of the main disadvantages of most actors in the early
period of Greek cinema: theatricality. In an interview in 1924, he recollected:
I watched all movies and studied carefully the movements of screen actors,
analyzing them, understanding their psychology and trying to find what I
was missing, in order to add it. I also studied the ways in which directors
arrange things on the screen and only when I became assured that I could
pose in front of the camera, did I star in Quo Vadis and my other films.11
During these early years, Josef Hepp was the dominant figure, having by
then become the Palace’s favorite cinematographer and, at the same time,
the highest-paid professional in the country. He documented the Balkan
Wars (1912–1913), the entrance of the Greek army into Thessalonica,
and the defeat of the Bulgarian army. Meanwhile, he mentored his first
student, Gabriel Loggos (1885–?), who would later make the earliest existing
documentary on the criminal world of Athens by hiding the camera in
places where the underworld people met—this was also the first attempt at
creative script-free film-making.
In 1914/15, the folk-costume rural drama Golfo was produced by
Costas Behatoros in collaboration with Filippo Martelli, as the first
feature film made in the country. Golfo, at 79 minutes, was a costly
production (100,000 drachmas, an immense amount for the time)
and inaugurated the characteristic genre of bucolic fustanella dramas,
which maintained its appeal for many decades through its idealization
of rural space and the pre-urban time of communal village innocence.
Its story was derived from a popular love idyll in traditional rhyming
verse written for the theater by Spyridon Peresiadis in 1893. However,
beyond the ethnographic appeal of the story’s setting, were the themes
of forced marriage and the position of women in society, especially poor
women, and always according to the prevailing patriarchal imaginary. Its
tragic conclusion, although somewhat primitive, was quite an emphatic
critique of class distinctions and masculine mentality, as it ends with the
implied message that every man has sacrificed a woman for his position
and success. Stylistically, because of Martelli, it was very close to Italian
films of the period, particularly those before the historical epics, which
revolved around folk heroes.
The actors were all from the theater, with the most prominent among
them being Virginia Diamante (1896–1948) and Olympia Damaskou
(1878–?), and it seems that their very theatricality contributed to the film’s
failure at the box office. Despite this failure, as Dan Georgakas has noted,
“the storyline continually intrigued Greek film-makers. A 1932 remake
would be the first Greek talking picture. In 1955, there would be three more
remakes, one being extremely successful and in 1974, Angelopoulos would
feature the play as a central theme in The Travelling Players.”12 Behatoros left
for Paris in 1916 and was lost to Greek cinema, as it seems was his fortune,
after the failure of the film. Unfortunately, as early as 1931 the film was
considered lost.
The political unrest of the period, starting with the Balkan Wars and
culminating in the tragic National Division (1916–1917), created a precarious
environment for the consolidation of the new art form. In 1915, the first
attempt to adapt a novel to cinema came with Constantinos Hristomanos’ The
Wax Doll (I Kerenia Koukla) by Mihael Glytsos, the second feature film in the
country; despite the money invested in the film, it had no commercial success
and received vitriolic reviews. However, it is worth pointing out that these early
feature films established a gendered visual discourse and took the feminine
predicament as the foundation of cinematic language. Golfo was set in the
village and The Wax Doll in the city, but in both cases the feminine presence
was used as a gendered category, which, irrespective of space, embodied the
socio-cultural tensions that prevailed in the public domain of the country.
Screen adaptations of literary works caused quite a stir in the circles of
an intelligentsia that privileged the culture of the word as the focal element
of Greek tradition. On the basis of this film, a prominent intellectual of
the period, Fotos Politis (1890–1934), denounced the new art as “a real
plague, an artless wound, a superficial spectacle, not different from that of
horse racing, which alienates people from the emotions of genuine art.”13
Politis changed his verdict much later, in the early 1930s, when sound was
introduced and he saw cinema as potentially the “eighth art,” equal, if not
superior, to theater.
In 1916/17, Josef Hepp, with the financial assistance of supporters like
Yorgos Prokopiou, established Asty Films but never completed their planned
movie on The Passion of Jesus (O Aniforos tou Golgotha). Hepp introduced
an important innovation then by devising a mechanism of his own to
introduce inserts in Greek during a screening. He also managed to film one
of the most notorious events in Greek history, the official “Anathema” of the
Greek Orthodox Church against Prime Minister Venizelos in December
1916—this was the first political film ever made in the country and tainted
Hepp’s reputation. The documentary was indeed just as extraordinary as the
event itself—it didn’t escape the attention and reproach of the prominent
British ethnographer Sir James George Frazer who saw in it “the indestruct-
ibility of superstition.” “In Europe,” he concluded, “such mummeries only
contribute to the public hilarity, and bring the Church which parades them
into contempt.”14
One year later, Dimos Vratsanos and Josef Hepp produced another
drama, directed by Martelli, The Fate of Maroula (or, The Dowry of Annoula).
Soon after, another company, the Anglo-Hellenic Company, which was
established for the production and distribution of films owned by wealthy
Greeks from Cape Town, South Africa, bought Hepp’s company following
its huge financial losses. Yet their plans to build proper studios never
materialized: the political instability of the period influenced Greek cinema
production system in deeply adverse ways and compelled film-makers to
make movies only in the open air and to shoot only on location.
Meanwhile, Hepp’s films were confiscated and he was subsequently exiled
to the islands of Skyros and Icaria for political reasons. (The government
accused him of being a staunch royalist and pro-German, which he was.) His
treatment prefigured what was to happen to other film-makers in the future.
After King Constantine was deposed by French and British intervention in
1916/17, Greece, under the leadership of Eleftherios Venizelos, participated
in the last phase of the First World War with the Allies; the war effort on
many fronts was intense and film production ceased for two or three years,
with the existing cameras used exclusively to record battles in Asia Minor,
mainly, as we will see, by the Gaziadis brothers, whose father, Anastasios,
was one of the greatest pioneers of art photography in the country.15
For its participation, Greece was rewarded at the Peace Conference in
Paris (1919) with territorial gains in eastern Thrace and the area around
Smyrna in Asia Minor. After the Conference, the pro-Western Prime
Minister Venizelos proceeded with two controversial moves: first, he sent
Greek troops to Smyrna, and second, he declared elections in order to
renew his mandate by the people. Despite the celebrations after the landing
of the Greek army in Smyrna, it soon became apparent that the situation
was more complex than anticipated, with many international powers and
interests involved. At the same time, the influence of Turkish nationalism
and its charismatic leader Mustafa Kemal had been simplistically and fatally
underestimated.
Furthermore, in an extraordinary twist of history, Venizelos lost the
September 1920 election. Consequently, the Western Allies abandoned
Greece’s new royalist government which had sided with the Germans during
the war and which had now restored the deposed King Constantine to
power. After that, all Greek military involvement in Asia Minor was unsus-
tainable and was indeed to end with a major catastrophe in August 1922.
Smyrna—a city with a substantial Greek population for centuries—and
the entire Asia Minor coastline were evacuated by all its Greek inhabitants in
a forced exchange of populations that culminated in hundreds of thousands
of casualties and more than 1,800,000 refugees. These displaced people
flooded Greece and created a massive social problem that was to dominate
the socio-political landscape of the country for many decades.
Psychologically, the Asia Minor Catastrophe still remains the most
traumatic event in modern Greek history. Its presence can be felt either
implicitly or explicitly as the anxiety substratum of most Greek films, indeed
of all cultural production, to this day. The fear of expulsion and of losing
contact with one’s historic origins, imagined or real, can be detected in
most Greek movies, and in most art forms of mainstream production, as a
deep-seated anxiety, expressed on many occasions through a panic-stricken
affirmation of national and personal identity. The only thing that remained
intact after such great loss was the “unchanged” essence of “Greekness,”
associated either with “racial” and “cultural” continuity or, in other instances,
with the spirit of resistance and rebellion.
Thematically, however, it was a trauma that was not effectively confronted
and healed in the public arena for almost half a century; and consequently
it caused a prolonged crisis of individual identity, confusion in cultural
orientation, and finally, distrust towards the political system responsible for
it. Even today, in order to affirm Greek identity and address the need for
legitimacy and justification in contemporary adverse realities, most public
intellectuals revert to pre-Greek state notions, such as the “purity” of the

Orthodox faith, the “authenticity” of pre-modern life in the villages, or the
glory of classical Greece.
It is undeniable that the whole political establishment of the country
was involved in the erroneous planning and the delusory execution of the
Asia Minor campaign. Yet no one from either the political powers that
had supported the campaign or from the high military officers was ever
held accountable for the Catastrophe. Six officials, among them the former
prime minister, Dimitrios Younaris, and five of his ministers, were executed
under the fabricated accusation of “national treason,” as scapegoats for the
monumental disaster—an act that only exacerbated the public feeling that
the ruling elite was covering up the whole affair. (It is interesting that in
2009, when one of the descendants of the executed officials requested a
re-examination of the trial, the Supreme Court declared all six innocent
in closed-door proceedings—to ensure that state secrets would still not be
revealed 80 years later!)
During this period of crisis and collapse, many important film-makers,
like Yorgos Prokopiou (1876–1940) and Gabriel Loggos, were filming the
Asia Minor campaign (and their reels remain unique visual testimonies of
the war effort; these were to be used quite extensively by successive genera-
tions of Greek cinematographers as parts of their films or documentaries).
Nonetheless, several films were made during the ensuing period of chaos.
A personality of special significance also emerged, Dimos Vratsanos (1873–
1944). Vratsanos was one of the associates who had helped Hepp to establish
Asty Films; and by 1920 he was the first intellectual to take cinema seriously,
establishing a private school for cinema acting. Meanwhile, the first Greek film
reviews were published in Illustrated (Eikonografimeni), a journal founded by
Vratsanos in 1904 and which was published sporadically until 1936.
Furthermore, Vratsanos was the producer and Hepp the director of the
hilarious comedy Villar in the Women’s Baths of Faliron (O Bilar sta Ginaikeia
Loutra tou Falirou, 1920), which introduced Villar as the most successful
comedian of the day. (His real name was Nikolas Sfakianos or Sfakianakis.)
Twenty-six whole minutes from his second film The Adventures of Villar
(Oi Peripeteies tou Bilar, 1926) have survived and were restored recently,
making it the first Greek feature film to exist almost in its entirety. Villar
was influenced by the American musicals of the period but more obviously
by the “King of Comedy,” Mack Sennett, and especially by his productions
involving chase gags and bathing beauties—and he faithfully followed
Sennett’s axiom: “We have no scenario . . . the chase is the essence of our
comedy.” Yet, as he was running up and down central Athens, his film offered
a distinct depiction of the city, its main roads, people and landscape. Also,
its subtle humor and its attempt to create a “comedy of manners” make this
early film worth watching to this day.
Another comedian of the period, Michael Michael of Michael (1895–

1944), also became very popular; his unscripted and director-less films
earned him the nickname of the Greek Charlie Chaplin, and his personality
gave rise to the first form of “media star” in the country. Between 1923 and
1925, he released five movies with Hepp as his principal cameraman—very
few scenes survive from The Wedding of Michael and Concetta (O Gamos tou
Mihail kai tis Kontsetas, 1923), Michael is Completely Broke (O Mihail den
Ehei Psila, 1923) and Michael’s Dream (To Oneiro tou Mihail, 1923).
The commercial success of these films also helped to establish the career
of another important comedian in this early period, Ahilleas Madras (1875–
1966), whose movies, despite their shortcomings, can be seen as major social
documents in a changing society, as well as filmic texts within a new under-
standing of cinema as cultural industry. A cosmopolitan wanderer, Madras
made a number of interesting movies in a heroic attempt to tell a continuous
story while desperately struggling with the camera in new angles, frame devices
and perspectives. Most of his films have no script, no stable sets, and feature
actors who could not act—with Madras the most prominent among them.
His documentary The Refugees of the War (Oi Prosfyges tou Polemou,
1920/21), however, was immensely successful in the Greek diaspora of the
United States and brought him considerable profits, which he used to fund
Michael Michael, The Marriage of Michael and

Concetta (1923). Greek Film Archive Collection.
such films as The Gypsy Girl of Athens (I Tsiggana tis Athinas, 1922), Maria
Pentagiotissa (1928/29) and The Wizard of Athens (O Magos tis Athinas, 1931).
They were failed, sometimes ridiculous, but bold and creative experiments
with the medium. Maria Pentagiotissa, which survives in two versions (silent
and talking), is an extraordinary film that is totally inaccurate, completely
improbable and, despite its dramatically patriotic nature, extremely funny. It
was aptly advertised as: “Maria Pentagiotissa is not a colossus! Not a 42mm
Canon! Not a super–colossus! Not the miracle of the century! Not a super-
production! Not the first Greek movie! Not a Superfilm! Not an experiment!
It is LOCAL STUFF!” The scene in which Maria, the Greek Calamity Jane,
is fighting against the enemies of the nation up in rugged mountains and in
spectacularly high heels, has been parodied endlessly by subsequent comedians.
In the talking version, Madras impersonates the priest who christens Maria,
reading the archaic liturgical texts with a perfect French accent!
Madras’ last movie, The Wizard of Athens, which was a re-edited version
of his first, showed a distinct search for continuous parallel storylines with
many improbable twists and turns, and is deserving of closer study. Despite
Ahilleas Madras, Maria Pentagiotissa (1928/9). Greek

Film Archive Collection.
the fact that it was called a “masterpiece of bad cinema,”16 Madras’ attempt to
add color to the movie shot by shot, to introduce double exposure or a form
of primitive montage, and to constantly rework its plot in three different
versions make it a strange bricolage experiment on stereotypes and clichés,
a euphoric attempt at a carnivalesque comic treatment of a melodramatic
motif. Despite their shortcomings, Madras’ films are interesting because
they were constantly reworked by him in a way that makes the existing
filmic text a palimpsest of different layers of stories, added progressively over
each other, as the director improved his skills in representation, script and
technical know-how.
In 1923, Hepp released his poignant documentary The Exchange of
Captives in Asia Minor, one of the most tragic documents of the Asia Minor
Catastrophe. In the same year, Michael Dorizas, a visiting Greek-American
professor from Philadelphia, produced his pioneering short documentary
Meteora about the monasteries perched on tall rocks in the center of Greece. In
1924/25, Dimos Vratsanos filmed the sumptuous melodrama The Reject Child
of Destiny (Tis Moiras to Apopaidi), which became so successful in Athens (it
Ahilleas Madras, The Magician of Athens (1931). Greek

was screened by itself for two consecutive weeks at the Splendid cinema) that
it was soon exported to Greek communities in Egypt and the United States.
By then, other cities, such as Patras and Thessaloniki, had set up
their own studios and produced movies such as the Revolution of 1821 (I
Epanastasis tou 1821, 1926). Other cities followed. Three comedies were
made in the city of Drama in Greek Macedonia. In 1927, the strange attempt
to acclimatize Charlie Chaplin in Greece continued with Anastasios Kefalas’
Charlie Chaplin, Arch Bandit in Arachova (O Sarlo Arhilistis stin Arahova).
The film starred Kimon Spathopoulos, (1903–1989), who had just arrived
from Paris, and highlighted the fact that a creative dialogue between
local industry and the Hollywood tradition had already been established.
Stathopoulos would later become one of the most important make-up artists
for many Greek movies until the 1980s.
Organization and Challenges

A turning point in the history of early Greek cinema came in 1927 with the
establishment of Dag Films, the first systematized production company. Dag
Films was founded by the Gaziadis brothers, who carried on the tradition of
their father Anastasios, one of the most brilliant and innovative artistic photog-
raphers of the previous decades. Initially, the company made documentaries
and journals as it had been doing since 1923; it also functioned as a distri-
bution agency for imported films. In 1927, the Gaziadis brothers decided to
transform it into a production company for feature films. In 1928, Dag Films
established its own cinema school in order to mentor new actors and directors.
The brothers’ background in photojournalism gave a distinct character
to their films, making them moving images with strong black and white
contrasts, and some brownish with deep-blue nuances. The austere photo-
graphic immobility of the camera itself remained initially but as the brothers
gained experience in filming, it became possible to dispense with it entirely
and to transform the camera eye into an active and meaningful participant
in the cinematic experience.
The Gaziadis brothers, Dimitris (1897–1961), Kostas (1899–1970) and
Mihalis (1905–?) became the D. W. Griffiths of Greece in their attempt to
establish a distinctly “national” cinematic style of storytelling through a
unified stylistic presentation. Dimitris usually served as director of their
films, Mihalis as cinematographer, and Kostas as editor. The brothers
thought that their desired “national” style of film-making could be achieved
by intercutting clips of documentaries into the storyline of the film, which
was shot on location. In their persistent attempts to construct a grand
visual narrative for the nation, they favored prolonged shots of the Greek
landscape, having as their main opponent the strong and anti-cinematic
glare of the sun, which hindered the depiction of inner conflicts and implied
emotions; instead, actors had to pantomime their role in order to make its
feelings understood by the audience.
Dimitris Gaziadis’ unrealized master work The Greek Miracle (To Elliniko
Thauma, 1922) was envisaged as immortalizing the recapture of Asia Minor,
although using an all-Russian cast. The film was never completed, except in
fragmented reels from the actual battles, which Gaziadis himself had filmed,
especially the battles at the Sangarios River and in the city of Smyrna shortly
before its disastrous fire.17 The devastating defeat of the Greek army forced him
to substitute triumphalist narratives and national myths of military and patriotic
glory with short and private folk stories of consolation, in an effort to compensate
for the trauma of actual events and the death of the “Great Idea” of restoring
imperial Byzantium which had dominated Greek politics for a long period.
Dag Films’ first foray towards a systematic production was The Delphic
Celebrations (Oi Delfikes Eortes, 1927), a pioneering cinematic effort to film
ancient Greek tragedy in its natural space and on location. The celebrations were
organized by the renowned poet Angelos Sikelianos and his wealthy American
wife Eva Palmer and attracted international attention as the first attempt after
antiquity to revive tragedy in its traditional environment. The filming was made
in collaboration with the brilliant director of photography Dimitris Meravidis
(1895–?), who had studied with the Lumière brothers in Paris.
Despite their meagre technical means, Meravidis and Gaziadis managed
to move the camera horizontally and to create visual effects similar to those
on ancient Greek vases—one-dimensional figures in stylized gestures moving
in linear sequence and foregrounding the character of ancient tragedy as
sacred initiation. Their camera moved between deep-focus photography, long-
medium shots and close-ups, alternating with shots of the depthless landscape
and stressing the timelessness of tragic performance, the ritualistic slowness of
the chorus, and the expressionless neutrality of the dramatic mask.
Dimitris Gaziadis had worked with Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang in
Germany while his brother Mihalis had worked in Hollywood with Lubitsch
Gaziadis and Meravidis, The Delphic Celebrations (1927).

and Griffith. In Dimitris’ most important works, we can clearly see both the
influence of German expressionism and the allure of American narrative
cinema in a successful fusion. The brothers tried to produce feature films
with a continuous narrative story while using the camera to establish a
single directorial point of view. Between 1927 and 1929 they produced three
movies with uneven results and their final failure determined the fate of early
Greek cinema and of silent movies in the country.
Love and Waves (Eros kai Kymata, 1928) was a huge commercial success
with 40,000 tickets sold in Athens alone. It was released in January 1928
and its unprecedented appeal raised hopes that good local productions were
possible. Despite the negative response by critics, with this film Gaziadis intro-
duced the visual grammar for popular movies that was to become dominant
(especially in melodramas) for many decades. Importantantly for the period,
Gaziadis used slow motion for the first time in order to enhance the emotive
response of the audience. His second film, The Harbor of Tears (To Limani ton
Dakrion, 1929) introduced actors who were to dominate the screen for the
next 30 years. Both movies were honest, but essentially inadequate attempts
to create continuous narrative cinema. The linear sequence of visual images
in the second film was somehow slowed down. This slowness was deliberate,
a means of concealing gaps in the script or disguising the extreme theat-
ricality of the actors. The scenes followed the pattern of still photographs;
they simply moved in succession since the actors remained still in front of
a fixed camera. Furthermore, the actors were crammed together in the very
confined space of a small studio, thus restricting their movement and making
their performances self-conscious. Yet some spectacular shots by Gaziadis,
especially of a storm around a lighthouse, were commended strongly by
critics and were subsequently imitated by other cinematographers.
The Harbor of Tears was about the Athenian underworld of smugglers,
drug dealers, addicts, and petty thieves. It too was an immediate commercial
success. The camera followed a number of characters without really creating
a central story or identifying main protagonists. The critic Iris Skarabaiou
pointed out that the movie was “a doubtful mixture of many episodes, and
that confuses the plot asking for a deus ex machina to offer a favorable and
yet improbable solution.”18 The movie also introduced a new representation
of figures of the urban underworld as antiheroes, as victims of a social
order beyond their grasp and control—a theme that was to dominate the
melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s.
In his next movie Astero (1929), Dimitris Gaziadis added dramatic
intensity to the movement of the camera and made the audience “come into
the movie itself.” For the first time, the camera seemed to change angle and
follow the action, inviting the viewer to engage in a dialogue with what was
happening on the screen. In this film, the camera empathizes with the actors
and draws the viewer into the frame as an active participant rather than an
indiscreet observer of an irrelevant story. Gaziadis seems to have understood

that the camera is not simply the eye of the director, but the eye of the viewer.
So, he moves along a horizontal axis, but in an ingenious and inventive way.
There is an excellent scene where the camera rests on the head of a dog as
it is barking over the dead body of its master: the camera rotates around
the mountainous landscape, giving the audience the immediate sensation
of an endless immensity of space and the human helplessness within it.
The landscape acts as a megaphone to amplify the dog’s barking, as though
nature is echoing the pain of human tragedy.
In another scene, Gaziadis depicts the madness of Astero by shaking
the camera and producing blurry, unstable, and indistinguishable pictures.
Astero also introduced a new plot device—the happy ending—as the emotional
closure to a story. Gaziadis’ movie consolidated the visual syntax and the
framing devices that were to become an integral part of plot and representation
in subsequent Greek cinema, especially in the genre of melodrama. The film
could have been the first masterpiece of Greek cinema if Gaziadis had managed
to work effectively with his actors: while the landscape and the story evoke an
Dimitris Gaziadis, Astero (1929). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
atmosphere of love and betrayal, most of the characters over-act and undermine
the director’s attempts to create a distinct psychological aura around them.
Also, Gaziadis avoided confronting or criticizing the patriarchal morality
or the dominant conventions surrounding the representation of women. Set
in the “innocent” landscape of a traditional village, which formed an organic
continuity with the natural landscape, the film idealized an already lost way
of living. Nevertheless, through the nostalgic recreation of an innocence lost
and an authenticity sought after by the urban masses, Gaziadis implicitly
criticized roles and institutions, which after the Asia Minor Catastrophe,
had lost their legitimacy and moral authority. Greek “authentic” life was
not a matter for the present but a thing of the past: Astero can be seen as
a narrative of consolation set against the background of cities filled with
refugees living in abject poverty. At the same time, Gaziadis constructed a
gendered discourse for the nation, representing women as the most solid and
steadfast core of moral probity, endurance, and stability.
On this film, Gaziadis collaborated with Pavlos Nirvanas (1886–1937),
one of the most well-known public intellectuals and popular writers of the
period. Nirvanas wrote the scripts for both Astero and The Storm. In an inter-
esting article which pointed out the urgent quest for good scripts, he noted
that as screenwriter he had to obey conventions, write platitudes and satisfy
the expectations of the audience by producing a movie “full of Greekness”:
If it was successful, we would be able to prove that Greece was capable
of establishing its own cinematic art and consequently a very significant
national industry . . . Among so many concessions and compromises, I also
had to deal with an art that follows convention, and my constant concern
from the beginning till the end was: how the characters in the cine-drama
were to be Greek, to feel Greek, to behave Greek, to speak Greek, even to
fall in love—the great barrier of the screen—in a Greek way. Moreover, in
moving within the environment of rural people, how was I to avoid the
vulgarity into which there was always the danger of falling? I wanted to avoid
vulgarity not by ennobling, through false devices, characters and situations,
but by revealing in the depths of their souls genuine nobility, the same Greek
nobility that found its most brilliant manifestation in our folk songs.19
Nirvanas’ testimony highlights another aspect of this project regarding

the noble villager; its origins can be located in the cultural fantasies of the
Athenian urban elite with respect to the countryside and its inhabitants.
After the destruction of other cultural centers, Athens imposed a hegemonic
view of Greek rural lands as a single homogeneous space with distinct
ethical values, endurance, obedience, and respect for tradition by becoming
the site which evaluated and privileged its “authentic” character.
During Astero’s screening, songs were played on a gramophone in order
to enhance the film’s emotional impact. Its achievement was extraordinary;
80,000 people saw it in the first week after its release. It was also screened
regularly afterwards with such enormous success that a remake with sound
was attempted in 1944.20 Although Gaziadis introduced the Hollywood
practice of emotional empathy with the characters, he avoided introducing
the star system that had started to dominate the studio system in the United
States and which had to wait until the 1950s to be consolidated.
Gaziadis achieved a more artistic effect with The Storm (I Bora, 1930).
With occasional stylistic boldness reminiscent of German expressionism,
he employed fading shots, intense close-ups, and soft focus to create an
atmosphere of psychological tension and collective anxiety. In this strange
film, he also entwined reels of the war in Asia Minor with scenes of a
gripping human drama in order to reconstruct states of mind and to provide
a continuous narrative sequence. But the film remained fragmented. Iris
Skarabaiou notes that the actual reels were irrelevant to the story and were
there simply because there was no script—which was only partly true. She
also points out that, “the nightmare of the first shot” terrified most of the
actors and so the film remained incomplete and disconnected.21
With Gaziadis’ movies, modern urban melodrama was born in Greece,
while at the same time the predicament of refugees, of the poor and the
dispossessed received its first visual representation. Despite technical diffi-
culties, the Gaziadis brothers established the tradition in Greek cinema of
intermingling actual events with fictional ones. After the failure of their
artistic projects in 1932, however, the brothers produced only documen-
taries on current events, and here their camera recorded some of the most
critical events of the 1930s.
The success of the first organized film company gave birth to a competitor,
Olympia Films (while Ahilleas Madras had established his own production
company, Ajax Films, and another company Hellas Films appeared in 1930
with more being added during the 1930s, such as Nilo Films, Acropol Films,
Astro Films, Foivos Films). The advent of talking pictures sparked intense
competition between Dag Films and Olympia Films.
Olympia Films produced its first film, Away from the World (Makria
apo ton Kosmo, 1929), with the German cinematographer Erich Bumbach
exploring the landscapes of Corfu and Mount Athos (unable as all companies
were at the time to build their own studios). It was with this company that
Josef Hepp made his first attempts to devise his own sound recording
system, producing two short films in the process with a system of his own
invention.
Meanwhile, the challenges of the absence of organized studios and of
confronting the rise of talking pictures were exacerbated by the policies
adapted by the Greek state against the new medium. The historical context
of this rivalry is very important to the development of cinema in Greece.
The Asia Minor Catastrophe had been followed by the declaration of the
First Greek Republic in April 1924. The Republic, supported by liberal

army officers and ambitious generals, did not last long. One of them,
General Pangalos, introduced the first legislation restricting the freedom of
film-makers.
Beginning in 1927, every kind of filming of public events required special
permission from the police; furthermore, permission was not granted unless
there was a detailed account of how the material was to be used. At the same
time, the first strict rules about public conduct at the cinema were passed
by the national legislature. Specific guidelines were introduced regarding
behavior, dress codes, and the exclusion of minors. The age limit was
determined to be 15 (rather than 18 or 21 as in other European countries),
especially as the legislation stipulated “if the screened films were depicting
criminal or erotic representations with provocative scenes . . .”
The suspicion towards the new medium was expressed through public
denouncements on the grounds of its promoting criminality, corruption,
promiscuity, and immorality. In 1930, legislation defined as “proper” all
those films “that have as their content the elevation of virtues, family values,
love, maternal affection, and which inspire activity, positive spirit, kindness,
and courage.” One of the main elements in police character profiling for
petty criminals at that time was that, “during the interrogation it was
revealed that the suspect was frequenting popular cinemas.” Such suspicions
were also extended to the film-makers themselves, imposing upon them
strict instructions about the “moral content” of their work, while at the same
time allowing a police officer to inspect behavior at the movie theater during
the screening.
The Greek state, in utter confusion regarding the nature of the new
medium, decided to impose strict “bureaucratic control on all movies, thus
paving the way for the imposition of censorship,” as Eliza-Anna Delveroudi
has convincingly argued.22 Fully cognizant at least of the popular appeal
of cinema, the state regarded it as an industry that could generate easy
revenue. Almost 60 percent of the cost of each ticket was state tax; from the
remaining, an almost equal amount was retained by the distributor or the
cinema owner. In the end, a meagre 15 percent was left to be divided among
the producer, director, actors, and all others engaged in making the films. In
1927, there was a strike at all the cinemas of Athens in protest against the
lack of protection for local film productions and the heavy taxation of local
movies.
Meanwhile, by 1928, 16 cinemas were operating in Athens alone with
another 15 open-air venues during summer. Most of the films screened
(between 200 and 300 each year) were imported from Hollywood, Germany,
France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Austria. Despite the absence of a serious
film culture and discussion of the medium, among the most commercially
successful films (between 1928 and 1932) were Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1928) and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship

Potemkin (1925). Yet local production was dwindling, and the introduction
of sound would affect it profoundly. In 1929/30, five local films were made;
in 1930, twelve; in 1932, six; in 1932, five; and only one in 1933.
Eleftherios Venizelos was re-elected Prime Minister in 1928 and for the
next four years he managed to establish a relatively stable and prosperous
society. It was the first period in Greek history when the public sphere was
finally consolidated and the social question started becoming dominant,
further intensified in the conflict between the rival political ideologies of
fascism and communism. Venizelos, a center-right liberal, reduced taxes on
local movies to 10 percent and offered the industry its first assistance from
the state.
This new legislation enabled Dag Films and the other companies to
produce the first mature works of Greek cinema we have seen. The tax
reforms of Venizelos were fated to be repealed in 1934, however, when the
Greek economy succumbed to the consequences of the Great Depression,
and Venizelos relinquished power in mid-1932. In the meantime, Venizelos
had already introduced the first anti-communist laws in 1929, which estab-
lished a new form of censorship in all the arts.
Generally speaking, the movies produced by Dag Films promoted a
“project of cohesive nationhood,” as their ultimate purpose was to construct
an “authentically local” cinematic language. In 1929 Dimitris Gaziadis
stated:
In order for a film with a genuine local character to be successfully placed
internationally it must appear impeccable. And this is equally improbable
and feasible. It needs nature, which is landscape, sea, and antiquities in
order to create the impression of authentic Greek images.23
The quest for “authentic Greek images” was also becoming prevalent with the
literary generation of the 1930s as a cultural project of self-reinvention after
the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In many ways, such a quest was in its essence
a defense mechanism to counterbalance the traumas of the previous decade
through an anxious attempt to discover what had remained unscathed by
the national disaster.
Such a quest, which can be seen in all movies produced by Gaziadis,
naturally led to Josef Hepp’s first attempts to introduce sound to film-
making, since the authenticity of Greek images could only be emphasized
by the use of the Greek language. The invasion of the “talking pictures”
in October 1929 with David Butler’s musical Fox Follies of 1929, however,
proved to be a major factor in the demise of early Greek cinema.
Dag Films had already imported recording technology or used gramo-
phone discs during screenings. Dimitris Gaziadis’ The Apaches of Athens
(Oi Apahides ton Athinon, 1930) and Kiss Me Maritsa (Filise Me, Maritsa,
1930), based on an operetta and a musical comedy respectively, managed

to synchronize sound and image through gramophone discs and were very
successful commercially. They also confirmed as the first female “star” of
Greek cinema Mary Sagiannou, who became a legendary figure, the Greek
Greta Garbo, during her short life (1909–1943).
It was the new company Hellas Films who produced the first really
synchronized movie, Lagiarni (1930) by Ioannis Loumos, which gained
international acclaim. The movie had to be sent to German studios for post
production since there was no sound technology in Greece. In the same year,
the otherwise unknown Tetos Demetriadis produced at Universal Studios
in the United States the first truly talking Greek movie. Unfortunately lost,
The Fist of the Cripple (I Grothia tou Sakati, 1930), a movie which addressed
social exclusion and marginalization was a discouraging failure at the box
office. Another locally produced talking movie was the bucolic fustanella
drama The Shepherdess’ Lover (O Agapitikos tis Voskopoulas, 1932), directed
by Dimitris Tsakiris. The film was hybrid, both talking and with intertitles,
and was commercially one of the most successful films of the period. The
dubbing took place in Berlin and introduced a practice which would last for
almost ten years. The cost of its production locally and then of exporting
it to Germany was high, so the choice of the story was obvious: the new
technology was expensive and any financial investment had to be retrieved
by producing a movie with an immediate and certain commercial success
through well-known popular folk stories and songs.
Such bucolic dramas became immediate money-makers for producers
and cinema owners and they remained popular for many decades to come.
One of their attractions was that they used the vernacular, demotic Greek
language that was understood by a mostly illiterate audience. Franklin L.
Hess has argued that this fustanella drama gave through its sound a new
“ethnological turn in Greek cinema” and that “the film attempts to negotiate
a compromise between demoticism’s interiority [the use of vernacular as a
cultural project] and the outward orientation of cinema as a medium and to
define Greek film as a national cinema alongside other national cinemas.”24
As the state was using an archaic and, to a certain degree, incomprehensible
language, cinema became the first form of collective entertainment through
which the vernacular gained legitimacy and acceptance.
The transition to the new technology, however, did not take place
without resistance. One of the most prominent public intellectuals of the
period Pavlos Nirvanas, who wrote the script for Gaziadis’ The Storm and
Astero and who had a persistent interest in cinema, declared in frustration:
The characters in [silent] films not only talk but they talk in a special way.
First, they don’t say nonsense, as do for example characters in the theater.
Further, they never babble on about useless issues, they don’t exhibit stupid
wit, don’t make gross jokes, and don’t shout out stupidities under the
pretense of philosophizing. And yet, they communicate with each other
perfectly . . . Watch two lovers on the screen: you think that they speak the
language of angels never heard before by human ears. When the screen
takes on the responsibility of informing us in writing about what they
say to each other, the viewer is taken over by disgust. For this reason, the
worse a movie is the more written text it presents us with. The best movie
is the one which contains the fewest possible written expressions and lets us
communicate without mediation with its heroes. [Emphasis added.]25
Nirvanas and many other intellectuals believed that the addition of sound
would diminish the predominance of visual images and reduce their script
to another form of theatrical performance. But the transition to talking
technology was irreversible. The silent period in Greek cinema ended with a
number of important films that reflected the new tendencies in both the art
and industry of cinema.
Two notable movies of the period were made in the studios of Istanbul.
The first was Stelios Tatassopoulos’ Social Decay (Koinoniki Sapila, 1932) which
featured some interesting stylistic innovations. The camera moved frantically
between close-ups, medium and wide shots and withdrew into long shots
following the tense and anxious development of the story. This was another
movie still struggling to establish its narrative codes. Although the film did
not take risks with form, it depicted its topic with a masterful self-sufficiency
through the Marxist underpinnings of each distinct frame of reality. Social
Decay is an early, perhaps the first, Greek movie of socialist realism that
addressed the fresh trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the disastrous
economic recession after 1929. It also added a new dimension to urban life
by depicting the underworld of crime and delinquency with an affection that
bordered on sympathy, sentiments that would resurface in the 1950s, particu-
larly in Nikos Koundouros’ (b. 1926) The Ogre of Athens (O Drakos, 1956).
Tatassopoulos (1908–2000) would reappear after the war and his fate, as we will
see, become emblematic of many other important directors in the country.
Meanwhile, the rapprochement between Greece and Turkey after 1930
allowed possibilities for artistic collaborations. The Evil Way (O Kakos
Dromos, 1933), directed by the Turkish Mushin Ertuğrul (1892–1979), was
made in Istanbul at the Ipek studios with two great actresses of the theater
Marika Kotopouli (1887–1854) and Kybele (1888–1978). It was the first
co-production between the two former enemies. Ertuğrul was the Turkish
Gaziadis: “Influenced by the French and German theaters and Soviet revolu-
tionary cinema, he was the only film-maker during this period when cinema
borrowed from the theater and did not seek to find a language of its own.”26
Despite its lavish production and formulaic melodramatic story, the film
was a commercial failure and invited the question of whether people from
the theatrical tradition could be successful in the cinema, an issue that was
persistently discussed during this period. Yet another of Ertuğrul’s films, In
the Streets of Istanbul (1931), the first talking Turkish film, was one of the
most successful films in Athens. The Greek-Turkish collaboration was to
become untenable, however, due to fierce nationalistic criticism. As a conse-
quence it became necessary to find a new location.
The masterpiece of the decade and of the entire period of silent movies in
Greece is Orestes Laskos’ (1907–1992) Daphnis and Chloe (1931). This appears
to be the first Greek film with a script written for the cinema and successfully
adapted from the ancient Greek story by Longos. Also, the actors were all
amateurs and consequently theatricality is strikingly absent from their acting.
Furthermore, the Charlie Chaplin of Greece, Kimon Spathopoulos, contributed
his knowledge as a make-up artist, working effectively with the actors’ faces to
eliminate the strong glare of open-air location shooting. The film followed
Laskos’ previous experience as assistant scriptwriter with Dimitris Gaziadis.
The movie unfolded in brief interconnected shots with soft focus,
dissolves, and alternating close-ups. The rapid juxtaposition of frames
Orestis Laskos, Daphnis and Chloe (1931). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
created a surprising interplay between mental states and bodily images

against a sensual and lush natural background. Laskos wanted to represent
the confusion caused by eroticism as it takes over the adolescent body; and
he did so by blurring the camera and dissolving human form through a
suggestive use of medium-long shots and, occasionally, dangerous close-
ups. His camera boldly explored the possibilities of human form: in order
to avoid the representation of the body as still portrait he made the camera
wander discreetly around the body as it also gently immersed itself in the
natural landscape. His use of dissolves as transitions between different
camera angles is still admirable and ingenious.
Laskos’ depiction of the human face was a brave attempt to enter the
psychological world of the character, indeed to recreate a psychological
atmosphere around the complete human body in its absolute fragility and
beauty. (Dimitris Meravidis’ masterful photography also contributed to the
psychologization of each frame. For the first time, panchromatic film was
used which stressed the contrast between black and white, framing a soft
and rich chiaroscuro.) Despite its prudishness, the movie was an unexpected
stylistic experiment and a bold form that remains memorable, brimming
with unintended sensuality and bold exposure of the human body.
The poster advertising the film was equally interesting:
The most original, the boldest, and the most “piquant” film ever made.
The immortal, archaic idyll by Longos Daphnis and Chloe. The masterful
cinematic creation by Orestis Laskos. Protagonists are, Apollo Marsyas,
the embodiment of Hermes of Praxiteles, and Loukia Malti, the Greek
American with the gorgeous flexible body. A movie filmed in superb
locations on Lesbos, full of idyllic and realistic scenes.
Daphnis and Chloe is usually credited with the first nudity scene in European
cinema. What has not been discussed is how nudity was cinematically
framed in order to avoid censorship and public controversy. Indeed, the
representation of a de-sexualized nudity, the nudity of a body without desire,
is probably the most characteristic element of Laskos’ film. Despite its visual
sensuality, the film avoided all forms of libidinal interaction—as effective
editing totally stripped the naked body of its sexual energy and radiance.
Certainly, there can not be a singular interpretation of the film’s nudity. It
could be perceived as a revelation in the romantic sense of making sense of
social fragmentation by transforming the human body into a complete map
of reality. It could also be seen as an exposure: the naked body revealed as
guilt and shame, suggesting the deep crisis of authority that the country was
experiencing after 1922.
The nudity could also be perceived as a provocation, a challenge to the
patriarchal logic of hiding and protecting the female and male body in an
attempt to control its function. In any case, this is a deceptively simple movie.
Tongo Mizrahi, The Refugee Girl (1938). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
It has encoded the collapse of political and moral authority by exposing

power to the objectifying eye of the camera so that it becomes a public
spectacle. At the same time, its depiction of rural innocence combined with
its lack of historicity exoticized ancient Greece and depicted it as an escapist
landscape. So, the messages of the film are both radical and conservative,
making it a paradoxical space of confusion and disorientation, an image of a
society in transition and turmoil.
Unfortunately, after the Second World War, Laskos squandered his
artistic vision on slapstick comedies and period pieces without ever rising
to the level of his early work. Laskos, and this can be seen in his postwar
films, was extremely conservative, both politically and socially. His life story
and development as an artist reflected the compromises that a creative
talent had to make both in relation to the state and to his audience in
order to make movies.27 However, this unique and masterful work with its
soft, gentle and contemplative sensuality can be placed alongside Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms (1918) and Jean Vigo’s L’ Atalante (1934). It also bears
close resemblance to another masterpiece of the period, F. W. Murnau and
Robert Flaherty’s Tabu (1931). Within Greek cinema, the legacy of Daphnis
and Chloe can be traced still decades later in Koundouros’ Young Aphrodites
(1964).
Developing Film Culture

The first literature on film was written between 1923 and 1933, mostly
as empirical testimonies of the film-viewing experience. The magazine
Cinema and the journal Cinematic Library were launched in 1923 but ceased
publication within one year. A magazine carrying a French title, To Parlan,
was published from 1931 to 1933 and is extremely important for the early
debates on what constituted “Greek cinema.”
Dimitris Gaziadis’ short book How I Can Play in the Cinema (1926) was
heralded as the first attempt at critical reflection on the art of cinematic perfor-
mance. Moreover, the fortnightly journal Cinematic Star (Kinimatografikos
Astir) was first published by Heraclis Oikonomou in 1924 and continued
until 1969, when more informed and theoretically inclined magazines
appeared. It was in these early magazines, before newspapers and literary
journals added special pages on films, however, that the first reflections on
acting and directing, as well as some interesting reviews on specific films,
were published.
Most literary writers of the period refused to see any other worth in
cinema beyond its entertainment value. It was only Nikos Kazantzakis
(1883–1957) who during his extensive travels realized the importance of
cinema for contemporary audiences. Having visited the Soviet Union on
a number of occasions between 1925 and 1929, he witnessed the seminal
importance of cinema for the establishment of the new society and watched
films by the Russian avant-garde. He tried to write a numbers of scripts
which were never produced into films, although at least one of them was
later incorporated into his monumental play Buddha.
In one of his letters to his disciple Pandelis Prevelakis, Kazantzakis
made some sensitive and extremely prescient comments:
When writing for films you are forced to transform the most abstract
idea into image . . . A multitude of psychological problems and especially
dreams, subconscious, visions can be perfectly expressed only through
cinema . . . You are overtaken by a bitter pleasure and pride when you
create through such shadows passions, loves, urges, and unite and separate
and create humans who silently, in a fleeting moment, vanish . . . This cruel
satisfaction of the immense drive and its sudden disappearance charac-
terizes what I have written so far.28
One could claim that Kazantzakis was the first Greek thinker who under-
stood the cinematic experience phenomenologically as the interplay of
photosensitized surfaces that appear fleetingly and disappear without a
trace—except that on the film itself. “I must learn to use this new weapon
well,” he wrote to Prevelakis, “which as I practice it, I like more and more
because it sharpens my eye beyond belief.”29
The first serious film reviewer was Elli Inglesi (1897–?) who, under the
pseudonym Iris Skarabaiou, established the foundations for film criticism
before anyone else in the country.30 Her reviews combine formal and
thematic criticism and offer a rare insight into the development of the termi-
nology of film criticism in Greek, which was then predominantly a matter of
French words transliterated into Greek—a practice that continues to this day.
Skarabaiou was one of the first reviewers to discuss the problem of lighting
and to suggest ways in which directors could deal with the brightness of
the Mediterranean sun and the glare of the Greek landscape. The fact that
the first serious reviewer was a woman is unusual for a patriarchal society
such as Greece, but may reflect the sense of modernity surrounding the new
medium. Other important reviewers were Vion Papamihalis (who also made
movies after 1945) and the ambitious young intellectual, Spyros Markezinis,
who was later to become an ill-starred politician and who wrote under the
initials RO-MA.
Unlike the writings of Inglesi, the tenor of most reviews was rather
dismissive and in many ways unfair. For example, Loros Fantazis (a
pseudonym) wrote in 1930:
As the reader can see, these films are nothing more than journals
(documentaries), presenting natural beauties, with insignificant directing
skills, clumsy, and destined to serve, I can’t deny this, intensely, tourism
but not, as it interests us here, Art.31
Indeed, the search for “authentic Greek images” through “art films” would
always oscillate between the commodification of the landscape for the
purposes of tourism and the serious attempts at its cinematic framing
through the camera eye.
Special mention must be made of G. N. Makris, a film reviewer for the
literary journal Nea Estia since 1932. Makris was one of the very few intel-
lectuals who saw the new art as “a new way of looking at the visible world.”32
“The camera,” he believed, “has the magical power to recreate the visible
world, to recompose time, to narrow or to enlarge space, and to mobilize
everything according to its own rhythm.”33 Makris based his reviews on
the aesthetics of Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir and was one of the first
film critics to discuss the dichotomy between European and American
cinemas—accepting them both as equivalent and complementary modes of
representation.
Generally speaking, it was in the 1930s that the urban landscape of
Athens was gradually discovered as material for visual representation.
Visually, Athens had remained an enigma for the camera; ancient ruins
coexisted with contemporary huts and formless buildings in stark and
unflattering juxtaposition. Gaziadis, Meravidis, Hepp, and Tatassopoulos
started exploring the Attic landscape by delving into the lives of ordinary
people and the misery of refugees. They did not see the landscape and
its people as idyllic images in a bucolic serenity, as was common in the
dominant literature of the period. On the contrary, they focused not on the
architectural ruins of a glorious past but on the human ruins of a chaotic
present. Such representation outlasted these early cinematographers to
become one of the hallmarks of Greek cinema.
The Athens of the 1930s was still a collection of self-sufficient neighbor-

hoods replicating the memory of distinct villages. The major film audiences
in urban centers were abruptly urbanized villagers who worked in the
expanding industries of the capital, and the millions of Anatolian refugees
living in small villages around Athens, which were later to be incorporated
as the suburbs of the expanding capital. For both audiences, the trauma of
displacement and exile was so fresh and deep that it could not be confronted
openly and critically. This accounts for the frequent production of idealized
fustanella movies, which reminded the audience of their origins by extolling
the virtues of the “true nation,” monumentalized by the symbolic ethnicity
of their “authentic” costume.
Thematically, the genre was a kind of populist therapy for social
displacement and communal loss, and, at the same time, a symptom of a
community in search of an “archetypal” identity in conditions of instability
and uncertainty. These states of mind permeated Greek cinema for many
decades to come. The ultimate function of such films, however, was a special
strategy of nation building which was achieved through the shared experi-
ences at the cinema and the establishment of spaces of communal bonding.
As in other nations, the experience of going to the movies was a socializing
rite of passage which helped to forge personal, social, and national identities.
Due to the lack of a functional and profitable studio system, it was
technically impossible for film-makers such as Gaziadis, Meravadis, Hepp,
Laskos and others to bring together a complete story on the basis of
narrative sequentiality. They were compelled by circumstances to avoid
grand narratives or phantasmagorical stories, that is, the kind of historical
reconstructions and period dramas that had been produced in Italian cinema
since its establishment. Most of their films remained virtual documentaries
that depicted existing realities in their multiplicities and contradictions,
often blending genuine political tensions and ideological subversions with
triteness and banality. The storylines were mostly a pretext, sometimes
arbitrarily inserted, and often inconsequential.
Nonetheless, by depicting existing realities they eschewed dividing
cinema into high and popular, into cinema for the select few and cinema
for the masses. Early criticism against cinema as an art was based on its
appeal to the masses and was consequently judged as being unqualified for
producing works of art (meaning high art, of course). Certainly, there was
an imminent danger in this. It led to the mindless comedies of the postwar
period and set the limits for the creative imagination in the mise-en-scène,
the camera angle and finally the story itself in all subsequent films.
On the other hand, it kept the cinematic eye close to ordinary people
rather than to ideological fantasies or to the historicist delusions of the official
state apparatuses. Even the fustanella dramas can be seen as a visual quest
for origins during a prolonged period of instability and unrest and against
the background of a rising modernity that fragmented all accepted forms of

self-determination and produced a continuous anxiety about belonging and
identity. The humbleness of the Greek cinematic eye has remained its main
source of renewal and simultaneously its own worst enemy.
The Collapse
Dag Films was dissolved in 1932 due to the commercial failure of its
productions and the increasing competition from other companies, such as
Olympia Films, Din-Drits Films, Skouras Films, and Foivos Films. A number
of movies of 1932 to 1935 failed in their attempts to coordinate sound and
image. The last film made on Greek soil was in 1934. New studios with
sound facilities were needed. In their absence, movies had to be sent either to
Germany or Egypt for sound to be added. The failure of the local industry to
produce its own talking movies led to a failure to compete successfully with
the influx of movies from Hollywood.
As a result, the industry totally collapsed for several years, and between
1936 and 1938 a number of Greek movies were made in Egypt, where well-
equipped sound studios existed and which Greek traveling players often
visited. The rightly renowned historian of Greek cinema Yannis Soldatos
calls 1935 the year of “the clinical death of Greek cinematography.”34 The
period is usually referred to as the Egyptian Triennium due to the circum-
stance that the very few movies produced then were filmed in Egypt by an
international crew with foreign directors and cameramen.
One of the factors fueling the crisis in cinema was the political insta-
bility following Venizelos’ fall from government in 1932. A number of
unsuccessful military movements took place, while a hung parliament
became increasingly unable to solve the looming social crisis that fed the
rise of communism and the challenge of fascism. In August 1936, General
Ioannis Metaxas seized power and established a military dictatorship with
a fascist ideology akin to that of Benito Mussolini. Metaxas imposed strict
censorship on all media, exiled many important intellectuals and imposed an
unprecedented 70 percent state tax on all “public spectacles.” This crippled
the industry and made the production of feature films almost impossible.
Between 1937 and 1939, a total of seven Greek language movies were
produced in the studios of Cairo and Alexandria. From this “Egyptian period,”
The Refugee Girl (I Prosfigopoula, 1938), directed by the Italian Tongo Mizrahi
(1905–1986) and containing scenes filmed on location at Athens, Tempe, and
Meteora, was an immediate success—and it can still be enjoyed because of its
fast narrative rhythm, suggestive photography and memorable music by Kostas
Yannidis. The story of an Asia Minor refugee being married off to a wealthy
provincial landlord who later deceives her for an aristocratic woman resonated
immediately with the urbanized villagers in Athens, so much so that it was
screened regularly until the 1950s. This melodrama deserves more attention
for its depiction of the refugee experience, rural and urban psychology, and
the divide between social classes. Despite its technical problems, it shows a
distinct sense of editing, camera angle and interior mise-en-scène; Mizrahi was
a master of narrative sequence, black and white contrasts and montage. Actress
Sophia Vembo became famous for the songs in the film (“a magnificent phono-
film,” according to the credits). Two years after the Italian invasion of October
1940, Vembo adapted an oriental song and transformed it into a patriotic
hymn. Mizrahi’s other Greek films Dr Epaminondas (1937), When the Husband
is Away (Otan O Sizigos Taxideuei, 1938), and Captain Skorpion (Kapetan
Skorpios, 1943) are not as good—but still were praised for their narrative pace,
which was to influence many Greek directors after the war.
The last movie produced in Egypt Little Agnes (Agnoula, 1939) by
the Italian-Egyptian director Alevize Orfanelli (1902–1961) was another
successful melodrama. Its poster proclaimed, “At last . . . A GREEK MOVIE
which will atone for the sins of all previous Greek films . . .” In reality it did
not. The historical context and the political circumstances were not favorable.
Orfanelli made one more film in Greek, Engagement with Problems (Arravon
met’ empodion, 1937), and another after the war, as the director of photog-
raphy for Nikos Tsiforos’ Wind of Hatred (Anemos tou Misous, 1954). Greek
directors returned to the Egyptian studios between 1951 and 1954.
During the Metaxas regime, the dictator actively promoted only the
production of documentaries and “journals” which glorified his tours
around the countryside as the “Father of the Nation” and which propagated
the life and works of the Fascist Youth Organization (EON). It is estimated
that around 450 such short films were made in a period of four years. The
regime even imported 75 projection machines for public screenings of the
movements of the dictator and his party through reels showing uplifting
orations by Metaxas or the sporting activities of his youth organization.
These short films were screened after imported feature films, in order to
make a stronger impression on the viewers. It seemed that the regime was
constructing its own visual history by promoting “the realism of true life,”
as the dictator declared. A notorious 1937 law established a committee,
comprised mainly of army and police officers, to oversee the ratings for
films: films were classified as “appropriate, inappropriate, or strictly inappro-
priate for minors.” Many people accused the cinema industry of fostering
immorality, criminality, and even physical ailments, especially “in young
people or women, who fall more easily and more deeply under the influence
of such spectacles.”35
Taking the medical advice of academics, the Committee suggested that
going to the cinema had dangerous effects on the optical nerve, created
respiratory problems, and spread contagious diseases. If any person, parent
or friend, was caught by the police escorting minors, under 15 years of age,
to the cinema, they were sentenced to up to six months imprisonment.

“Appropriate” movies were those that “had a content promoting the elevation
of the spirit through self-sacrifice, heroic deeds, the protection of public
health, and the propagation of public hygiene.”36

Despite the fact that a similar law was first implemented in 1930, the
connection between mental and physical hygiene with regard to the cinema
became the dominant theme in state propaganda, under the Metaxas dicta-
torship. In May 1938, the regime organized the first ever conference on
cinematography in Athens in an attempt to regulate the industry and control
its production. Later that year, a long documentary by Maurice Novak, Greece
of 1938 Speaks . . . (I Ellas tou 1938 Omilei) announced triumphantly that it
had solved the problem of sound. It was a compilation of various newsreels,
but it was very popular due to its successful synchronization of sound and
image. It was also the only film produced in the country in the Metaxas era.
Meanwhile, Greeks enjoyed American films, which held the primacy in
attendance. And the number of cinemas in the capital had increased to 26
with another 60 open-air summer venues. The grand cinemas Palace and
Rex were built and their opulence and magnificence have left an indelible
mark on public memory. Famous architects constructed lavish and, in some
instances, architecturally experimental venues throughout the country. An
overall number of 280 cinemas were recorded throughout Greek territory by
the end of 1939.
Because of its increasing popular appeal, the 1937 Metaxas law on
cinema imposed such strict rules regarding what could be said and depicted
on screen that competent screenwriters did not wish to submit their work
to extremely austere censorship and risk the prospect of being arrested or
exiled. The concept of “thinking nationally” (ethno-conviction, ethniko-
frosini) became the dominant ideology of the state—whatever was against
the official version of the Nation was to be banned—especially everything
that was, according to Metaxas, of communist inspiration. Between 1935 and
1943 only a handful of narrative feature films were made on Greek soil.
Greek Cinema Reborn

Despite the Metaxas dictatorship, a revival of Greek cinema began to emerge
in 1939 and continued during the German occupation. The major personality
in this movement was the charismatic Filopimin Finos (1908–1977), who
would become the most important producer in Greek cinema after 1945,
indeed the Greek Samuel Goldwin. In 1929, Finos had tried with Meravidis to
produce a Greek Western entitled Three Greeks from America (Treis Ellines apo
tin Amerika). Not much is known about its quality, as it was burned acciden-
tally while the film-print was being developed in 1929. Ten years later, Finos
directed his only movie, The Song of Parting (To Tragoudi tou Horismou). It was
thought destroyed after Finos’ arrest by the Germans, but early in the twenty-
first century a fragmented copy was recovered in Egypt and restored.
The Song of Parting is a social melodrama that deals with a wealthy
woman from the city who seduces an innocent fisherman and convinces
him to abandon his girlfriend and his village. He moves to the city, where he
becomes a successful singer, only to realize soon after that he does not fit into
this system of conventional relations and social etiquette. After he receives
a letter from his girlfriend, he abandons the wealthy seductress to return to
his native island and the pure love of the woman who has patiently waited
for him. Song and action compete for primacy in this film, without making
any real connection with each other, something which Finos would keep in
mind when he went on to produce the best Greek musicals. The actors stand
still and act out stylized mannerisms as the camera dives into long-medium
shots of the urban landscape to explore the emerging reality of an alien-
ating and frightening city or the salons of a hypocritical bourgeoisie. The
looming nightmare of history frames an interesting character with moral
and emotional dilemmas, one of the first near-complete characters to be
produced in Greek cinema.
The movie was a colossal failure and, in terms of directing, was a
dead-end for Finos. N. G. Makris was scathing about the film:
The directorship is altogether missing; it is not only bad: it is simply
missing. This is a movie made fatally and accidentally. There is neither
montage, nor editing, nor photography. There is nothing. Deep darkness
prevails from the very beginning till the very end.37
Although the film’s escapism and retreat from history ignored the onslaught
of events that were to befall Europe, the film was a great step forward for
Greek cinema as it was the first talking picture to be processed in a Greek
technical laboratory. The facility had been built by Finos and would be the
genesis of Finos Films, which would subsequently become the dominant
production company in the postwar studio era.
Another talking picture, Night without Dawn (Nihta horis Ximeroma),
was also made in 1939. The film was directed by Tonis Papadantonakis who
co-scripted it with Dimitris Bogris. It was a romantic comedy and featured
well-known singers of the musical stage. Tracking shots were used in a
primitive way: a carpet was placed under the camera tripod and was dragged
slowly across the floor! Despite its poor technical quality, it might have been
a hit but for the outbreak of the Second World War in Greece. (The film
would later be recut and reissued in 1955 as a drama under the title Better
Late than Never.)
The storyline dealt with a resistance fighter who faces the moral dilemma
of choosing between wife and country. Finos’ own sound technology
was used for the film. This involved a system of “post-synchronizing” or
“dubbing.” First the action was filmed, then the dialogue was recorded, and
finally they were mixed together. This system was used until 1954 when
modern sound studios and technology in the American style were imported.
The Italian invasion and the unexpected Greek victory in October 1940
would become one of the most celebrated themes of postwar Greek cinema,
inspiring a whole catalogue of movies ranging from popular melodramas
to genuine existential explorations of war psychology. In contrast, the
German occupation that began in April 1941, with its horrible atrocities,
humiliations, terrible famine of 1942 and 1943, collaboration, and finally
the Resistance, remained one of the most politically sensitive and heavily
censored issues for cinematic elaboration. Indeed, it became the dominant
subtext of almost all Greek movies produced after 1945 through to the 1990s.
The occupation of the country meant the destruction of the industry’s
infrastructure and the cinema culture, since large gatherings were banned
and most cinemas were used as Soldatenkinos—cinemas for soldiers. In one
of his last reviews before the occupation, Makris lamented, yet with deep
optimism, the destruction of cinema all over Europe:
Cinema’s defeat in Europe is but a local episode. Let all national produc-
tions perish! Let the great crisis unfold! The blow is not lethal. As long as
Hollywood remains, nothing is lost for ever. One day the whole of Europe
will become a huge screen on which the showing of Charlie Chaplin’s latest
film will acquire the magnitude and the power of an eternal symbol.38
Under German occupation, many movies made in the prewar years were
lost, not simply because of the destruction by the Nazi forces occupying
public buildings that housed archival material, but also because of the
intense lice epidemic that had infected the urban population of Athens. The
Germans had confiscated the city’s supply of soap and in desperation most
of the existing films were melted for their silver to make combs and lice
removers.39
The Italian invasion provided the stimulus for the creation of the first
Greek animated short film, Ducce Narrates How He Conquered Greece by
Stamatis Polenakis and the camera of Meravidis and Papadoukas. The film
was made on the island of Sifnos in 1942 and was finally released after
1945, but remained totally forgotten until 1980. Seven minutes long with
a very good synchronization of image and sound, this short film is a rare
achievement and quite interesting in terms of its innovative technique and
optimistic spirit. In 1946, Yorgos and Yannis Roussopoulos made the second
ever cartoon in the country, a satire on the ancient gods of Olympus called
Settle Down With the Thunders! (Siga tous Keraunous!). It took another 23
years for this experiment to find its sequel, when Thodoros Marangos, a
graphic designer, made his famous Tsouf (1969) and his scathing satire Hush
(Ssssst, 1971).
During the German occupation, only German, Italian, and Hungarian

movies were being screened, but in 1942 Filopimin Finos set up a studio with
its own sound equipment and montage facilities and called it Finos Films.
This modest and primitive studio was destined to become the center of the
most important film productions for the period of and after liberation, the
nucleus for the revival and the triumph of the medium in the country. Finos
and his associates, including the sound technician, production director, and
internal designer Markos Zervas, brought together screenwriters, directors,
actors, and all kinds of film technicians, providing them with a space for
discussion, exchange of ideas, and experimentation with filming.
Finos was also active in the resistance movement. His father was arrested
and executed by the Germans in early 1944 and Filopimin narrowly escaped
a similar fate. This made him later, when he had become the most important
producer in the country, suspicious of power and unwilling to get involved in
any unnecessary conflicts with the government, even the 1967 dictatorship.
During the last year of the German occupation, Finos produced
Dimitris Ioannopoulos’ The Voice of the Heart (I Foni tis Kardias, 1943),
a sentimental melodrama with many technical problems but good perfor-
mances and music. To the extreme consternation of the Nazis, the film
drew large audiences and was an immediate financial success. From the
three films made during the occupation, the most important was Applauses
(Heirokrotimata, 1943), directed by one of the greatest Greek directors,
Yorgos Tzavellas (1916–1976). The film, produced by Finos’ antagonist in
this period, Novak Films, was characterized by a suggestive atmosphere
of fear and claustrophobia, soft use of the camera and yet by a touching
optimism. It was about the life and death of Attik, one of the most popular
musicians and songwriters of the prewar period, and was similar to Charlie
Chaplin’s Limelight (1952).
Tzavellas filmed not just on location, but in the studio, exploring what
would later become his main contribution to the cinematic art: the hidden
and inexhaustible dimensions of interior spaces. As an anonymous reviewer
observed, “The director proved that he was not afraid of the studio.”40

From his very first film, Tzavellas was the master of perfect lighting,
effective spatial arrangements, and detailed photography. His shots were
full of details and hidden subtexts: the viewer had to look from one side
of the frame to the other in a series of “eye-stops” in order to form a
complete picture of the story: the narrative unfolded on each shot separately.
Meanwhile, the camera panned in and out in a gentle, almost imperceptible,
manner, revealing the endlessness of interior space, and essentially of the
domestic private space of families or lonely individuals. Tzavellas was the
first Greek director who achieved effective spatial continuity and thematic
unity in his movies, an achievement which found its complete maturity in
his films of the next decade.
Dimitris Ioannopoulos, The Voice of the Heart (1943). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
Yorgos Tzavellas, Applauses (1943). Greek Film Archive Collection.
Gregoris Gregoriou (1919–2005), one of the most prolific directors of the

next period, noted in his memoirs the importance of these two films: “If The
Voice of the Heart marks the beginning of the history of Greek cinema, Tzavellas
with his Applauses marks the beginning of the history of Greek cinematic mise-
en-scène.”41 It was becoming obvious that with these films something really new
had started to emerge in the cinematography of the country.
Meanwhile, Finos had constructed a well-equipped and functional
studio that offered the possibility of good interior settings, effective lighting,
and better photography; and technical innovations that allowed a complete
story to unfold in a linear narrative. By then, sound and image could techni-
cally work together in Greek movies. Consequently, when liberation from
the Germans took place in October 1944 the technical background was
ready for the industry to take off.
One of the most popular film critics of the prewar period, Vion
Papamihalis, claimed that 15 movies were ready to be released or close to
completion by the end of 1944. Although he criticized those who imagined
that Greece, “in its current historical situation, could easily become a
second Hollywood” because of the enthusiastic announcements regarding
the construction of new studios, he stressed that, “the creative performance
under the present circumstances is surprising” and concluded, “Tomorrow
there will be Greek cinematography, whether we want it or not. And we have
high expectations of it.”42
Shortly before the Germans left, another anonymous reviewer pointed
out the shortcomings in “cinematic experience” which could not be overcome
in the war period in which they lived. Yet the reviewer made the very inter-
esting point:
The perspectives of production . . . should tend towards purely Greek
themes, filmed in an “international” way, so that, even if the budget does
not allow for comparison and distribution in the international market,
there should exist at least at the artistic level the ethnographic color which
might interest international consumption.43
History, however, did not become any easier for the country after the
departure of the Germans, who, as they were withdrawing, destroyed all
important infrastructure including roads, factories, and railways. The process
of reconstruction was to be long and not without problems. The depiction
on screen of the traumatic events of 1941 to 1944 became extremely contro-
versial and politically dangerous in the context of a highly polarized society,
since new political problems began to surface with liberation.
During the occupation, as elsewhere in Europe, a strong division
began to loom between the resistance fighters, organized mostly by the
Communist Party, through EAM (Greek Liberation Front), and the
government in exile, supported by the British establishment. Attempts
for cooperation were made, as in the case of the destruction of the
Gorgopotamos Bridge in November 1942, but as Germany was collapsing
and the Cold War beginning, conflict was inevitable. After the liberation,
Greece was the only Balkan country to be assigned to the British-American
sphere of influence. Resistance fighters, mostly committed communists or
pro-communists, were marginalized, persecuted, and in many instances
systematically exterminated. The traumas of famine, public executions,
and savage brutality against civilians inflicted by the Germans were exacer-
bated by the events of December 1944 when a left-wing demonstration in
the center of Athens ended with the massacre of many innocent people by
British troops.
This tragic event caused collective disillusionment and rage and was
destined to appear more often in subsequent Greek cinema than the German
occupation itself. One could indeed claim that this event was the founding
mythos of postwar political cinema in the country.
After that, four years of civil war would destabilize Greek society and
cause a mass wave of refugees to migrate to the countries of Eastern Europe.
Although many of the defeated insurgents sought asylum in the communist
countries of the Balkans or in remote republics of the Soviet Union, many
others who were committed to left ideology and who remained in the
country were sent to uninhabited barren islands which became places of
exile, torture, and execution. These islands were soon transformed into the
symbols of a dark and horrific period in Greek history, which lasted well into
the late 1950s. The island prisons were later resurrected by the Greek Junta
between 1967 and 1974.
In the Greek collective memory to this day, every island seen on screen is
not simply an idyllic place for summer holidays under the hot Mediterranean
sun. On the contrary, it is surrounded by an unredeemed memory of exile,
oppression and death that rarely reached the screen, although it was present
through its very invisibility. As in the case of the Asia Minor Catastrophe,
the trauma of history was present but was never represented as an objectified
reality—and it remained so until the late 1970s.
An Assessment
Generally speaking, the prewar films were still, in their majority, pictures
that moved rather than real continuity cinema (with one or two exceptions
before 1936). The camera tried to capture real events, almost accidentally
and out in the open, in order to document life on location and then to bring
them together through a superimposed storyline, creating the illusion of a
cohesive visual experience. This method usually did not work well and the
gaps in plot, acting, and setting were too blatant to be ignored. This was
the harbinger of a problem that still haunts Greek cinema to this day, the
absence of screenwriters skilled in rendering, through cinematic dialogue,
characterization, continuity, and the transition of scenes.
Furthermore, there remains little to distinguish theatrical acting from
acting in movies. Until the early 1950s, when the first school of cinematog-
raphy was established, most playwrights were adapting their own theatrical
works to film scripts and were themselves the directors. Two prominent
examples are Alekos Sakellarios (1913–1991) and Orestes Laskos.
In the 1930s and 1940s most actors in film with formal training had
studied or worked under theatrical directors, often at the National (Royal
then) Theater of Greece, which promoted a neoclassical Germanic under-
standing of performance through a highly stylized form of acting. In short,
most Greek actors of this period seemed to act out emotions as if there were
no dialogue and the movies were still silent. Their acting was in reality a form
of pantomime, an attempt to show emotions and reactions in an obvious and

“loud” manner while remaining unsynchronized with the storyline and its
emotions. Also, in the rare cases of feature films with a good continuous
storyline, the same approach avoided improvisation and ad-libbing, thus
depriving comedians in particular of spontaneity and imaginative energy.
The most successful blending of theatrical and film acting was by Katina
Paxinou (1900–1973), who became an actor of international renown in
Hollywood films, and who was awarded an Oscar for her role in For Whom
the Bell Tolls (1943). She can also be seen in films such as Mourning Becomes
Electra (1947) and Mr. Arkadin (1955). Paxinou and her husband Alexis
Minotis (1898–1990), who can be seen in films such as Hitchcock’s Notorious
and Arthur Ripley’s The Chase (both 1946), refined a strong theatrical
element in a way that was appropriate for the cinema, while still retaining its
roots in the theatrical stage.
Theatricality, of course, is always on the horizon of acting; but in the
films of the period, especially after the introduction of sound, it often created
a singular point of view that conflicted with the special language of images
and the depiction of reality as ambiguous and polysemic. Theatrical acting
styles also collided with the directorial perspective, especially as directors
gradually became more important than producers, actors, or screenwriters.
The theatrical tradition dominated acting until at least the 1960s when
movie actors didn’t really need to work in theater in order to make their
living. After the 1970s, in a strange twist of history, theater became the final
refuge of every failed cinema actor.
After 1945, the industry, organized around relatively advanced
studios, developed its own dynamic and its own codes and almost
reinvented itself. The result was the neglect and the forgetting of earlier
productions. This oblivion was accelerated in the category of art films,
which emphasized the directorial view as the central element of a film. As
the director’s vision became the central focus, early attempts to construct
such a vision seemed primitive and irrelevant. The trend would continue
at pace in the decades to follow, with Greek film eventually being
dominated by the concept of the self-reflecting director as the auteur of
the film, as expressed by Alexander Astruc’s “camera-stylo” concept in
1948.
Meanwhile, as the studios flourished, the movies produced between
1910 and 1939 were almost completely forgotten, together with the names
of their directors, photographers, and cameramen. Despite the fact that
some produced their best work after the war, when technical facilities were
available, Hepp, Gaziadis, Meravidis, Madras, and so many others were
either thrown into oblivion or were looked upon with derision. Only in
recent decades have there been coordinated attempts to restore and preserve
these films, but still at a very slow pace.
This restoration work, funded by the state through the Greek Film
Center and the Greek Film Archive, has revealed the sustained and heroic
attempts of those early film-makers to establish a cinematic language and
tradition. Their films both need and deserve a contextual and situational
understanding in order for modern audiences or scholars to comprehend
the challenges they faced while trying to construct the dominant visual
idiom of Greek cinema.
Until the establishment of advanced studios with adequate technology,
early silent Greek movies were in their essence “photo-plays,” struggling to
capture the fleeting images of a turbulent reality, mostly through fusing the
genres of documentary and fiction. Their photography was almost always
blurred or faded, an indication of the cinematographer’s struggle with
natural light. Their mise-en-scène was static and inflexible, immobilizing
the camera while failing to produce widescreen compositions with emotive
strength or dynamic motion. When the camera moved, the focus was almost
lost and the scene became again a sequence of still photographs, mainly
middle-shot portraits to the waist, leaving human form unexplored.
The lack of funding, of organized and technically equipped spaces, of
trained screenwriters, actors, and critics made early Greek cinema a heroic
but doomed enterprise for those involved. The main quest in most produc-
tions was a growing awareness of the need for movies with “local character
and color.”
The need for the establishment of a Greek cinematic tradition was clearly
the objective of the pioneering Gaziadis brothers. Although their quest
remained unfulfilled, largely because of political instability and enormous
technical problems, they planted the seeds of a distinct visual grammar that
were to come to fruition under more propitious circumstances.
One anomaly of the Metaxas regime of 1936 to 1941 and its powerful
Committee for the Control of Public Spectacles was that it did not follow the
examples of the German and Italian dictatorships. As early as 1931, Dimitris
Gaziadis exclaimed in frustration, “The State cannot even understand the
importance of cinema for propaganda purposes!”44 As we have seen, under
Metaxas, only one feature film was produced. In addition to the restrictive
law of 1937, the puppet Greek government under the Germans introduced a
much stricter law that with a few subsequent minor alterations remained in
force until 1980, officially changing only in 1986.
The Committee of Cinema Control could ban a movie, “if, according to
its opinion, there were reprehensible elements in it, that could possibly have
a detrimental influence on the youth, or could cause social disorder if they
propagate subversive theories or could defame our country from a national
or tourist aspect, or could in any way undermine the healthy social traditions
of the Greek people or could reproach Christian religion.”45 All scripts had
to be submitted to this special committee consisting of army officers, police
officials, and state bureaucrats. Marios Ploritis (1919–2006), a pioneer of

cultural and film criticism, wrote as late as 1965:
The censorship committees exclude the largest number possible of grand
themes in cinema. Everything that has to do with our recent history, the
Resistance, the State, the security forces, the Church, the social reality, and
the problems of the country have been written off as permissible topics for
our cinema.46
Consequently, after liberation, Greek cinema continued to develop through

the vision and motivation of certain dedicated individuals, who worked in an
empirical way, without formal studies or the support of institutes with trained
people. For technical reasons, there could be no studio system to assist them,
as in Italy and France, with its own code of practice and working ethos.
Furthermore, the reality of learning on the job didn’t allow for the estab-
lishment of any form of theoretical self-reflection regarding the principles
and effects of the cinematic experience as production, consumption, and
viewing.
In the absence of state assistance, production costs were raised through
self-funding, personal loans from banks, or loans from wealthy friends.
Cameras had to be imported and were extremely limited. As Stratos
Constantinidis has noted:
Ultimately, the issues regarding the infrastructure of the Greek film
industry in the twentieth century and the struggle of Greek film-makers
to find economic resources, cinematic languages, and “genuine” Greek
images and voices were based on their desire to control their own image
making.47
Against all odds, the period after the war was to become the Golden Age of
Greek film-making, the period when the visual idiom of Greek cinema was
gradually defined and its thematic representations crystallized in a popular
almost populist iconography. As Aglaia Mitropoulou observed:
In most films from this period you can find elements with a specific
approach to frame and with a variety of levels and nuances in photography,
which can be considered genuine technical and artistic achievements.48
When cinema was introduced to Greece there was no visual language that
dealt with the modern architecture of space, the expanding urban landscapes
or the variety of chromatic shades and colorations permeating modern
visual practices. Cinema was the focal art of modernity and constructed new
representations of collective and individual identities through images rather
than “literary” (that is, verbal) means. Consequently, modernity in Greece
signified a different way of dealing with the ambiguities of reality through
the interplay of black and white and not through the grand historicism of
the Greek language. Cinematographers had to invent a new visual idiom in

opposition to what was customary in traditional ways of seeing, as in folk
tradition or ecclesiastical iconography.
Early Greek movies offer a prolonged exploration of the different hues
of grey. They introduced chiaroscuro, which had only been peripherally
employed by visual artists in the past. Cinematic language created a new
way of depicting the depth, distances, and magnitudes of the urban and rural
landscapes through a new visual perception of reality. The films thus offered
a new vehicle for psychological sublimation and the “redemption” of social
experience as individual and collective cultural memory.
Stamatis Polenakis, Ducce Tells How He Conquered Greece (1942).

Chapter Two
❦❦
Constructing a Visual Language:

1945–1960
Rebuilding the Industry and Reconnecting with the

Audience
Af ter the end of the Second World WAR , and especially during
the Civil War (1946–1949), a significant number of movies were produced
against all odds. Both break and continuity can be detected in the way the
film industry reinvented itself through the ruins and the continuing social
and political unrest. Good private studios were now in place and more were
being constructed. Furthermore, during the first years after liberation, the
legendary Finos Film Studios offered the opportunity to many cinematogra-
phers, old and young, to be involved in the production process in a creative
and systematic way. With substantial technical innovations that synchro-
nized sound and image, Finos Films made possible the rapid proliferation of
movies that came over the next ten years.
As a consequence, between 1945 and 1955, a new cinema culture
emerged in Greece, despite the heavy presence of censorship and the perse-
cution of most leftist intellectuals. Deep social changes also contributed to
the formation of new audiences with increased demands, tastes, and social
aspirations. The German occupation and then, especially, the Civil War,
depopulated the countryside; waves of migration to the cities from all rural
areas began, and continued well into the 1970s.
The population of the city of Athens had already risen substantially
with the influx of the Asia Minor refugees; by 1950, over 1,700,000 people
were living in the wider area of Athens, a city that was constantly expanding
without planning or infrastructural preparation. (In 1955, the population
had risen up to 2,000,000, while by 1960 this had increased by another
44
Constructing a Visual Language: 1945–1960 45
300,000.) The emergence of dense working class populations in Athens,

Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Patras, Volos, and other cities created a need for mass
entertainment. Until then, the majority of Greeks in rural areas had enjoyed
the traditional shadow theater of Karagiozis, together with traveling theat-
rical groups, which had created a legendary subculture (affectionately called
the “bouloukia,” the Turkish word for “mobs”). For decades also, mobile
cinemas, with the projection machine and reels transported and housed on
a truck, roamed the countryside, screening the latest films in the villages’
squares.
Against the backdrop of the big city and given the long work days, the
new urban working class went to the grand movie theaters with excitement
and enthusiasm, especially on weekends and public holidays. The cinematic
experience was their first initiation into the pleasures of urban life. On
the screen they could see opulent apartments, houses, and villas; beautiful
clothes; wonderful house interiors; large kitchens with refrigerators and
even bathrooms with running hot water—that is to say, the spectacle of a
decent “modern” family enjoying the ideal possessions and “comforts” of
Western civilization. The theme of being “modern” permeated many films
and became the implicit background of their sets and design.
Despite strict censorship, between 1944 and 1947, all kinds of foreign
films were screened. The main source remained Hollywood, while the
import of French films declined dramatically, as the French film industry
had collapsed during the war. In many ways, modernization meant watching
the American way of life—a theme that was to be explored cinematically in
the next decade. However, films from other countries were also extremely
popular in this period. Greek audiences passionately watched many Soviet
movies of socialist realism, such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925),
Mikhail Rohm’s Lenin in October (1937), Lev Arnshtam’s Zoya (1944) and
Mark Donskoy’s Rainbow (1944); films which were banned soon after. The
advertisement for Rainbow revealed the general feelings of the period: “The
enthusiastic embracing of the Soviet movies certifies beyond any doubt
that Greek audiences recognized in them what their psychological world
longed for.”1
Meanwhile, political life became tangled and precarious. The March
1946 elections created a parliament that was dominated by moderate and
extreme right-wing parties, after the Communist Leader Nikos Zahariadis,
who had unexpectedly emerged from Dachau and who fancied himself
the Greek Joseph Stalin, decided to impose abstention on left-wing voters.
The new conservative government reinforced the country’s ties with
the United States once it gained a complete majority. It also proceeded
with the restoration of the monarchy after organizing a plebiscite in
September 1946. The Communist Party boycotted the referendum and as
a consequence King Paul and his new German bride, Queen Frederica of
Hanover, returned to the country. The outcome of the elections and the
plebiscite led to a belligerent polarization of political parties and to the
entrenched ideologization of all social activities; soon after the elections,
as a reaction to the rise and domination of extreme right-wing groups
and militias, the Communist Party declared an armed rebellion against
the government in Athens.
The Communist Party’s stance led to civil war, which, from the very
outset, was disastrously futile, as Stalin was not interested in helping the
Greek communists, given his notorious secret “percentages” agreement with
Winston Churchill. At the same time, the central government in Athens was
the recipient of Marshall Plan support which gave it military superiority
against the rebels. The rebellion was doomed from its inception. Stalin had
conceded Greece to the Western sphere of influence and simply ignored the
rebels, who found themselves in the mountains fighting for their socialist
ideology with great conviction but essentially in a state of helplessness,
without any assistance and as Quixotic and suicidal as desperados. The
infighting between the communists themselves was equally fierce: armed
communist militias exterminated all of Zahariadis’ opponents and those
who disagreed with his decisions. Those who escaped to Eastern European
countries were imprisoned, assassinated, or exiled to the remotest republics
of the Soviet Union—a fate that Zahariadis himself was destined to share
after 1956.
In the context of such extreme political unrest in which citizens were
pressured from all sides, going to the movies was unavoidably an act
of political engagement; a political statement with consequences. Police
informers were everywhere and young students were turned away by
the police. The act of visiting the cinema to watch “un-patriotic” movies,
especially under the grim circumstances of a country ravaged by political
divisions, was a statement of civil disobedience and political defiance—an
experience that lasted well into the 1970s.
Needless to say, film production was extraordinarily difficult under
such circumstances. After the Civil War, Queen Frederica imposed a new
tax on all “public spectacles,” such as theater and cinema, in order to fund
her special schools for orphans of the war. In 1952, additional legislation
was passed which simply ignored local film production, imposing a new tax
on the gross income of Greek films while offering full tax exemptions to all
foreign films made in the country.
One must also bear in mind, though, that during this period the Left
was the most hospitable home for culture, especially after 1949, through its
cultural associations and cinematic clubs, or journals and other publications.
Conservative or right-wing parties showed distinct anti-intellectualism and
a reluctance to address questions pertinent to the arts of modernity.
Famous intellectuals of the Right, such as Constantinos Tsatsos and Yorgos
Theotokas, who presented themselves as the custodians of liberal humanism,

failed to transcend the limitations of their political ideology, in the way
that, for example, right-wing parties succeeding in doing in France and
Italy through the incorporation of influential intellectuals from the Left like
André Marlaux.
As a consequence, right-wing ideology, which was the official hegemonic
culture of the Greek state, promoted an ideological construct that was
founded on a confused political paradigm in which the autocratic Byzantine
imperium coexisted with Athenian democracy. This unlikely symbiosis
was held together by a volkish understanding of the ethnos as a continuous
trans-historical entity, expressed through its popular culture, in the villages,
or in the high culture of philosophy and art of the Greek intelligentsia. The
peculiar thesis that Greeks were the “same” nation from antiquity down to
the twentieth century failed to explore and problematize its foundational
principle of “sameness” or to account for the differences in social organi-
zation, cultural habits and political systems that have created and recreated
the historical experience, let alone the self-perception, of the people who
have called themselves Greek over such a long period of time.
Conversely, the Left privileged a more political, class-conscious under-
standing of the present or the recent past and favored representations of
the “heroism” of common people in the cities as well as in the villages.
Such representations were influenced by Soviet socialist realism, and to a
lesser degree by Italian neorealism, presenting “positive” and “constructive”
role models for their viewers. However, overall, even the official left-wing
intelligentsia remained close to a similar model of historical “sameness”,
transposing the agency for social change from the nation (ethnos) to the
people (laos) and thus creating an equally confused cultural paradigm of
colliding signifiers. Moreover, both right and left intellectuals were in a
strangely cordial agreement regarding ethical issues, the position of women,
sexual morality, and public “decency.”
While mainstream cultural policy was in the hands of the official state
and its apparatuses, intellectual and artistic production remained mainly in
the hands of the Left and followed the “dialectical adventures” of its ideology
during the next 30 years. The internal divisions of the Greek Communist
Party (KKE) that had begun to appear after the death of Stalin in March
1953 and during the twentieth Conference of the Soviet Communist Party
in February 1956 can be detected in the horizon of many developments in
and discussions about art since the early 1950s, especially in the journal Art
Review (Epitheorese Tehnis), which was the most important left-wing journal
of the 1950s and 1960s. The divisions can also explain the negative attitude of
many left-wing intellectuals towards everything “American” or “influenced
by American models”—including films which we now consider quintessen-
tially “Greek”, such as Michael Cacoyannis’ Stella (1955).
For both political orthodoxies, cinema was a spurious “uncontrollable”

art and industry, and not simply because of the thematic stories or the types
of heroes it depicted. As complex and collective constructions, films could
never elicit a singular and definitive interpretation; nor could the hybrid
character of film-making (the camera documents reality while the story
emphasizes aspects of individual experience) lead to a totalizing equation
of the complexities and ambiguities of social life. On the other hand, the
conservatives in power never produced a convincing or aesthetically inter-
esting counter-proposal and were predominantly interested in controlling
the film industry, institutionally and legally, mostly by banning “unpatriotic”
movies, imposing heavy censorship on scriptwriters or even by exiling
dissident film-makers.
After the war, some important critics, like Yiorgos Makris, Aimilios
Hourmouzios, Vion Papamihalis, Rosita Sokou, Aglaia Mitropoulou, Yannis
Tobros, and especially Marios Ploritis, explored the connection between
cinema and literature, usually privileging word over image, theater over
movie screen. Most of them perceived cinema as the visual translation of
the nineteenth-century novel structure and assessed films according to the
conventions of traditional novelistic narrative, as in the French tradition of
the “cinema of quality.” At the same time, they understood that the rules
of cinematic representation were dependent on technology and acting.
Ploritis, in particular, paid special attention to the cinematic enunciation
of acting as public performance; he accused most actors of suffering from
“theatrical infection” and thus over-acting. He also pointed out that the
lack of technically equipped studios determined the nature of the movies
produced—and accounted for their general inability to construct “Greek
images” or indeed “cinematic images.” Despite his intellectual cosmopoli-
tanism, Ploritis insisted that, “Greek cinema means a story happening in
Greece with Greek types and Greek mentality.”2
Their criticism dominated film reviewing throughout the 1950s without
ever articulating a coherent account of the meaning of the cinematic
experience—despite some intuitively superb remarks regarding the nature
of cinema by the two female critics we mentioned, Rosita Sokou (b. 1923)
and Aglaia Mitropoulou (1929–1991). Sokou had a deeply empirical under-
standing of film-making and was interested in pointing out the virtues or
the shortcomings of scripts. Mitropoulou, influenced by her French friend
and associate Henri Langlois, was the first systematic historian of Greek
cinema. Although her film reviewing is usually punctuated by personal
ad hoc comments, she was a pioneer in understanding the importance
of film history for the cultural memory of the country. Yet no one made
the important leap from film reviewing to film criticism, to approach film
viewing as a specific perceptual experience with its own codes, structure and
forms.
Meanwhile, the presence of censorship was strong and loomed as a

serious threat over the whole production system. In order to avoid the
nuisance of the state committees, many producers and gifted directors
turned their attention to slapstick comedies, cosy boulevard pieces, or period
dramas.
New magazines appeared, such as Seventh Art (Evdomi Tehni, 1945) and
New Art: Cinema, Theater, Music (Nea Tehni, Sinema, Theatro, Mousiki, 1946),
and were published up until the 1960s, while many popular magazines, daily
newspapers and literary journals featured pages on cinema, especially the
burgeoning Greek popular cinema. With the exception of two popular Greek
novelists, Mihalis Karagatsis (1908–1960) and Angelos Terzakis (1907–
1979), who produced two very interesting films Incursion (Katadromi, 1946)
and Night Adventure (Nihterini Peripeteia, 1954) respectively, most members
of the literary intelligentsia remained suspicious towards cinema and saw its
popularity as a sign of decline and decadence, as a concession to the vulgar
culture of the uneducated proletarian masses.
After the Civil War, a wave of mass migration to the United States,
Canada, Germany, and Australia began and impoverished further the
intellectual capital of the country. Another wave of intellectual migration,
especially towards Paris, had begun in 1946. Future philosophers such as
Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), Costas Axelos (1924–2010) and Costas
Papaoioannou (1925–1981), musicians like Ianis Xenakis (1922–2001) and
many other artists and intellectuals left the country through a program of
scholarships offered by the French government, which essentially saved their
lives (Xenakis had been sentenced to death in 1945).
Most of these artists did not return to the country until 1974. Among
them was the cinematographer Costa-Gavras (b. 1933), who, after leaving
Greece, made some significant film noir films in France, and who later
gained international fame with the political thriller Z (1968). Nicos Patatakis
(1918–2010)—collaborator of Jean Genet, co-producer of John Cassavetes’
Shadows (1959) and the person who baptized Nico (Christa Päffgen), singer
with the Velvet Underground—was also a diasporic Greek who returned to
Greece only on two occasions in order to make two of the most important
films in the history of Greek cinema—The Shepherds of Disaster (1966) and
The Photograph (1986).
There was also the distinct case of Adonis Kyrou (or Ado Cyrou,
1923–1985) who was one of the chief contributors to the film magazine
Positif, the main intellectual opponent to the realistic and auterish Cahiers
du Cinema in Paris. He wrote for the magazine Age de Cinema and became a
famous theorist of cinematic art with his books Surrealism in Cinema (1952)
and Eroticism and Cinema (1957). Kyrou evolved into a cinema theorist
who understood the new art as an exercise in freeing the imagination from
the shackles of particular material and historical circumstances—yet his
own involvement with Greek cinema would deliver something completely

different. After a victory of the Centre Left Party in 1963 when censorship
restrictions were loosened, Kyrou made one of the most important movies in
Greek cinema, The Roundup (To Mploko, 1965), a film of immense realistic
force and historical precision.
Production Begins Again

Film production started immediately after liberation, with some interesting
melodramas about the ravages of war, and with their number increasing
each year. During the immediate postwar years, production fluctuated
because of the raging civil conflict and the scarcity of funds. Six films
were made in 1945, only four in 1946, five in 1947, eight in 1948, seven in
1949, and seven in 1950. Yet the number was not insignificant given the
strict censorship, police restrictions on moving around the country, and
the lack of availability of film itself. Also, screening them was problematic:
most cinemas showed only money-making Hollywood films. The directors
themselves had to find time slots within the existing screening timetables in
order to show a local film (having convinced the venue owners); only if that
screening was a commercial success could it then be shown again. Despite
all odds, certain Greek films slowly gained the confidence of the audience,
especially in the cities.
Among the successful films were The Villa with the Lilies (I Villa
me ta Noufara, 1945) by Dimitris Ioannopoulos, Double Sacrifice (Dipli
Thysia, 1945) by Yannis Hristodoulou, and Broken Hearts (Ragismenes
Kardies, 1945) by Orestes Laskos and Nikos Tsiforos, all of which are
of special interest since they were commercially successful melodramas
and defined the atmosphere of nostalgia for a lost ideal, or a broken
unity, which dominated most films until the mid-1950s.
Double Sacrifice was an interesting exercise in film-making since it had
been started before the war and was completed five years later: viewers could
easily see the differences in the cityscape and the faces of actors.
Vion Papamihalis’ Unslaved Slaves (Adoulotoi Sklavoi, 1946) was one of
the best films of the period and depicts a group of young amateurs who try
to stage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream just before the German
occupation. The popular musician Manos Hatzidakis (1925–1994), who
composed the soundtrack for many acclaimed movies of the next decade,
made his debut with this film. (It was in reality made by the critic Marios
Ploritis who decided not to have his name credited.)
In 1946, Yorgos Tzavellas released his Forgotten Faces (Prosopa
Lismonimena), one of the best films of the period. As in his subsequent
work, Tzavellas focused on the predicament of common people against the
background of invisible yet omnipotent and large historical movements. A
migrant from the United States returns to Athens where he discovers that his
ex-fiancé has become a prostitute while her daughter is planning her wedding to
a wealthy man. He tries to blackmail them but the burden of the double betrayal
destroys him. The film was a box-office failure and Tzavellas himself considered
it his worst movie. Yet it prefigured his mature works of the next decade, while
showcasing his eye for detail in composition, lighting and set design.
Marina (1947) by Alekos Sakellarios is also worth mentioning for its
fusion of music and action in a strange musical melodrama with loose script
and minimal action. It also introduced the new form of female star, in the
mould of Katharine Hepburn, with the singer Stella Greca (1925–?), who
sang more than acted, thus linking contemporary production to prewar film
traditions and practices in an attempt to produce the first Greek film musical.
This was also the first Greek movie in which a long and passionate kiss was
recorded to the extreme consternation of moralists—from both left and right.
Mihalis Gaziadis and Ioannis Philippou’s Anna Rodite (1948) was
another interesting film set on the island of Rhodes (which had just been
annexed to Greece) and which explored the tortuous relationship between
Greeks and Italians. “Mussolini struggled for 20 years but Greeks remained
Greeks. Now that fascism is dead, Greeks and Italians will be friends,” is the
line that ends the film. The movie was a box office success and demonstrated
the ability of the second brother of the Gaziadis family to make a good movie
with a quick pace and decent script.
Another good film was Nikos Tsiforos’ Last Mission (Teleutaia Apostoli,
1948), the first film to represent Greece at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1949.
It was produced during the Civil War and with the Cold War emerging over
the political horizon. No political references were made in the film nor were
there any reflections on the recent past; only idealized representations of the
ethical virtues displayed by army officers.
Thematically, such war dramas that dealt with the resistance were
compelled by censorship or indeed self-censorship never to mention
anything about the “anti-nationally thinking” Left. Left-wing resistance
fighters or rebels were represented as sinister shadows, reckless trouble-
makers or faceless Soviet agents. As the advertisement announced: “Watch
this film: it contains magnificent stories of self-sacrifice and patriotism!”
Stylistically, Tsiforos’ film introduced flashback as a technical device of
narrative re-enactment, a device which was to remain dominant in many
movies referring to the historical events of the 1940s. Flashback was an
effective device with which to present the invisible survival of the past in
the present. Only Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players (1975), however,
succeeded in making present and past contemporaneous, intertwining them
in a continuous simultaneity.
Tzavellas’ next film, Marinos Kondaras: the Corsair of the Aegean
(Marinos Kontaras—o Koursaros tou Aigaiou, 1948) became the first Greek
film to appear at an international festival, in Belgium. It was a historical

drama filmed on the islands of Santorini and Paros. The script by Tzavellas
himself was based on a short story and was effectively written with fast-
paced action and expressive dialogue. The mise-en-scène was meticulously
executed, with effective lighting and space arrangements in internal and
external shootings through Jason Novak’s superb cinematography.
Nikos Tsiforos’ Lost Angels (Hamenoi Angeloi, 1948), an urban drama
about love and betrayal, depicted the unscrupulous domination of the social
reality of the country by the nouveaux riches. Josef Hepp’s photography reached
its artistic peak in this film, through well-structured interior settings and
geometric architectural perceptions of spatial arrangements. On the basis of
the filming of this movie we can clearly understand the technical progress that
Finos Studios had made, especially in the synchronization of image and sound,
an achievement that accelerated the production of films after the Civil War.
Yet two films, made as the Civil War was still raging, presented a
completely different take on recent history: Alekos Sakellarios’ The Germans
Strike Back (Oi Germanoi Xanarhontai, 1948) and Yorgos Tzavellas’ The
Drunkard (O Methistakas, 1948).
Nikos Tsiforos, Lost Angels (1948). Courtesy, Finos Films.

Credit: DVD
In both films we can admire the sculptural elegance of Hepp’s camera:

the veteran of Greek cinematography explored, as the technology had by
then become available, symmetrical frames and geometric arrangements
of space in an ingenious manner that should be studied more closely.
Within the “completely new studios of Finos Film,” the director and the
director of photography were in control of the mise-en-scène, the lighting
and ultimately of the acting itself. Hepp managed to control the lighting
and arranged each shot in a way that framed specific angles; meanwhile,
the camera easily followed the action through tracking shots or medium
to long takes. The synchronization of sound and image was perfect both
inside and outside the studio. Hepp’s camera explored both long shots and
discreet close-ups in an imaginative and dynamic manner, employing double
exposures, jump cuts, and dissolves that gave (especially in the first film) the
nightmarish yet quirky atmosphere of the terrifying possibility of a German
comeback.
The Germans Strike Back was initially a play and Alekos Sakellarios
made a functional adaptation to the new medium. It can be safely regarded
as one of the best movies of Greek cinema. Its story was about the confusion
of the common man in the face of the incomprehensible magnitude of
history. The film had the subtitle “satiric nightmare” (satirikos efialtis) and
was an unexpected, almost paradoxical movie for its time. It was based on a
dream that the common man has that Hitler and the Nazis, having rearmed
themselves, counterattack and conquer Europe and Greece again, at the
moment when Greeks are fighting each other. Suddenly, the divided Greeks
reunite against their conquerors. A group of them find refuge in a mental
hospital and although they pretend to be inmates, are eventually arrested
by the Germans. As they are about to be executed, the nightmare ends.3
Some lines from the dialogue still haunt Greek collective memory to this
day: “Humans, humans, what is the purpose of so much hatred and mutual
slaughtering? We are all humans. There is land for all, there is sun for all.
We are all parts of a great universe . . .” and “The foundation of happiness
is justice and love.” However, as the main protagonist discovers, superbly
performed by Vassilis Logothetidis, these are the words of a madman and
not of a “good” patriot!
The shot of the Gestapo informer through an enormous keyhole was
one of the most effective technical innovations of the film. The camera
reconstructed a period of conflict and fratricide that could be expressed only
through a mixture of comedy and tragedy, through an in-between confusion
regarding the future of the country and an optimism about the possibilities
of the medium.
Sakellarios’ story was effectively translated into a unified metaphor,
which synthesized codes and signs into a delightful black comedy which
the audience liked but which infuriated state censorship, despite the very
Alekos Sakellarios, Germans Strike Back (1948). Courtesy,

Finos Films. Credit: DVD
conservative ideology of its director. Nevertheless, it was extremely brave,

in the middle of the Civil War, to preach unity, peace, and reconciliation, as
though asking to fraternize with the enemy. After this, Sakellarios avoided
“controversial” works and despite the fact that he was to direct some
hilarious films, he squandered his shrewdness for comedies of manners on
burlesque caricatures and eventually bad taste.
Yorgos Tzavellas’ The Drunkard remained for a long time the most
commercially successful movie of postwar Greek cinema (selling 300,000
tickets in its first week and thus proving the growing confidence of the
audience towards local production). It depicted the consequences of war on
individual psychology by presenting the ruined optimism of the generation
which had fought against Italy only to find itself excluded and persecuted
afterwards by the Greek state it had freed. Sombre colors, dark backgrounds,
half-finished sentences: all markers of the atmosphere of fear and oppression
that dominated the surrounding society—the human ruin was the epitome
of a society in which there was no trust, gratitude, or recognition. Orestes
Makris (1898–1975) gave the most accomplished performance of his career,
acting with unassuming sensitivity and restrained dramatic intensity.
Hepp’s photography constructed almost a third dimension of deep

perspective by exploring the external landscape in a passionate and intrusive
manner, zooming in and out and creating through effective lighting an
atmosphere of urgency, confusion, and anxiety. In this film, the camera
did not depict simple portraits in juxtaposition or collision, but complete
and unified actions, and integrated narratives, an achievement that was to
become Tzavellas’ major contribution to film-making. His style was on a par
with Roberto Rossellini’s Umberto D. (1952) in its subversive depiction of
social relations and class differences through the foregrounding of individual
adventure and personal drama. With this film, Greek cinema moved towards
exploring individual characters and psychological specificities, leaving
behind its long tradition of presenting general types and stock images.
Gregoris Gregoriou’s (1919–2005) directorial debuts with The Red
Rock (O Kokkinos Vrahos, 1949) and Storm at the Lighthouse (Thiella sto
Faro, 1950) were notable for his sustained efforts to construct a complete
mise-en-scène using still inadequate technology. (Gregoriou didn’t work
for Finos Films and produced his first films independently.) He observed
that films were “dominated by technicians and not by directors,” and in his
memoirs described his countless conflicts with the director of photography,
the legendary Dimitris Gaziadis, who thought he was filming political events
and not works of the imagination.4 Gaziadis wanted the camera to remain
still while actors simply came and went in front of it. Yet the film was an
excellent achievement of well-timed action and extremely “dark” individual
psychology. The editing, which was done with ingenuity and feeling for tense
drama, was probably its most important contribution to the renaissance of
the film industry. Gregoriou superimposed shots and images in a “collage of
collisions,” depicting psychological conflict and anxiety. External shots on
the island of Zakynthos recorded the last years of an organic community and
a traditional lifestyle. In 1953 a terrible earthquake totally destroyed the old
Yorgos Tzavellas, The Drunkard (1948). Courtesy, Finos

Films. Credit: DVD
architecture and this film became one of the few records of how Zakynthos
used to be.
In his second film, Gregoriou collaborated with Jason Novak and went
completely in the opposite direction: the camera moved fast and without plan,
in a frantic way that, as Gregoriou himself admitted, made viewers dizzy:
I tried to juxtapose many diverse and heterogeneous elements, as a
result of a thematic and visual greed which had taken me over during
the shooting of the film. That was due to the complete freedom I had to
film whatever I wanted, without self-control and a third critical eye. As a
result, the film became a mosaic of different elements of Italian neorealism,
American thriller, and French psychological drama or detective story.5
Gregoriou’s statements were emblematic of a period when the lack of technical

expertise was still defining the grammar of visual language, with gaps in script,
continuity, and style. At that time, Jean Cocteau happened to be in Athens
and attended the shooting of the film; after watching all of these technical
efforts he told Gregoriou with amazement, “But you are reinventing cinema
from the beginning! Are you not wasting your energy?”6 Until his death,
Gregoriou explored cinematic language in many genres and made some of the
most important films of Greek cinema, and, despite his many concessions to
ephemeral circumstances, he must be considered one of the seminal directors
who constructed the mainstream idiom of Greek cinema after the war.
Discovering Reality in the 1950s

These movies seemed to bid farewell to prewar societal patterns and, therefore,
to represent elegies to a bygone era. Sakellarios’ The Germans Strike Back was
dominated by the news transmitted on the radio, which had by then become
the new symbol of communication and power. Tzavellas’ The Drunkard
Gregoris Gregoriou, The Red Rock (1949). Greek

delved into the immense background of a city under reconstruction, where

rapid and relentless change was imposingly visible. Even Gregoriou’s Storm
at the Lighthouse, with its expressionistic shots and blurred lines, created a
completely different understanding of the visual experience.
After the end of the Civil War in 1949 and the defeat of the communist
rebels, Greek society turned towards a program of intense westernization
and modernization, supported by the new superpower, the United States,
through the Marshall Plan. However, despite ubiquitous state oppression,
artists, critics, and audiences came together and established new associa-
tions for the promotion of cinema and the consolidation of cinema culture
in Athens and other urban centers.
Cinema Asty and the Cinema Club (Kinimatografiki Leshi) became the
first venues to screen Italian neorealism, French poetic realism, American
film noir, German expressionism, and the films of the Soviet directors of
the 1920s and 1930s. In Thessaloniki, a city with a long cinematic tradition
thanks to the Jewish intellectual presence, Pavlos Zannas (1927–1989)
established in 1955 the Cine Club of Art (Kinimatografiki Leshi tis Tehnis)
with similar goals. In these venues, young audiences and new directors were
exposed to different forms of film-making; the experience of seeing reality
from different angles and through diverse codes of representation had an
immediate impact on the style of the movies produced. Yet it took almost
five long formative years to establish a complete visual idiom that would
make Greek cinema self-reliant and self-sufficient.
After 1949, an ambitious new production company AnZervos, set up by
Anthonis Zervos (b. 1930), started its implied antagonism to Finos Films. Such
antagonism and the need for more movies created a new breed of actors specifi-
cally trained for the camera rather than the theater. More production companies,
such as Novak Films, Piraeus Films, Pergantis Films, and the very important
Spentzos Films, which supported new directors like Gregoriou, soon followed.
From the early 1950s and onwards the most popular and talented actors
were those who had learned to act in front of the camera. In order to meet
the demand for more actors, the first school for acting was established by
Lykourgos Stavrakas in Athens in 1948 and was recognized by the state as
the only school for the performing arts in 1950. (Gregoriou also became
one of its most important contributors.) Almost everybody who became
involved in postwar Greek cinema was a graduate of this school—a mythical
place for the cinephiliacs of the country, and to which the history of Greek
cinema owes more gratitude than to the Greek state.
Between 1950 and 1955, many changes had already taken place in
order for film directors to be technically and aesthetically equipped to
translate Greek reality into cinematic depiction. Italian neorealism was on
the horizon, especially through films by Rossellini; Renoir’s works were
also praised for their artistic merits; but many Hollywood movies, such as
Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), were
extremely popular and defined the ways in which Greek directors saw the
relationship between camera and human form. During the late 1950s Indian
films became popular too, especially Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957),
and gave the story template for many Greek melodramas and the melodies
for many popular songs.
The main characteristic of the early 1950s was the growing number of
movies in different genres. Urban dramas, period films, and comedies were
equally represented together with rural stories and fustanella remakes. By
the end of the decade, production was dominated by tearful melodramas
and delightful comedies, which unfortunately proliferated so much that their
initial freshness and sparkling wit were ossified into clichés and stereotypes.
The articulation of a complete visual language can be attributed to a number
of directors who need special mention, since they established the dominant
genres of postwar Greek cinema.
In 1951, Frixos Iliadis (b. 1931) released his Dead City (Nekri Politeia),
which was the official Greek entry in the 1952 Cannes Festival and which
received positive reviews. The film contained spectacular shots of the
medieval city of Mystras and its ruined palaces. It was, however, a commercial
failure that would haunt Finos Films for many years. In this film, together
with Josef Hepp, the rising star of cinematography, Aristidis Karydis-Fuchs
(b. 1925), made manifest the artistic sensibility that was to make him one
of the finest cinematographers in the country in the decades to come.
Unfortunately, after the commercial failure of this film at home, and after
some attempts at comedies, Iliadis abandoned film-making for a long time
and later made a comeback with superficial melodramas.7
Gregoris Gregoriou with his Bitter Bread (Pikro Psomi, 1951) infused
Greek cinematography with new temporalities by accelerating narrative
pace and by introducing neorealist forms to his depiction of social relations.
The important contribution of this movie was that it finally constructed a
complete narrative based on purely cinematic performances, which avoided
the theatrical elements in acting and photography, despite occasional
problems with transition scenes and the synchronization of sound with
image and lighting. Both amateur and professional actors took part in the
film with performances of authentic and refreshing simplicity.
At the same time, Bitter Bread inaugurated the tradition of political
movies with Marxist references, a tradition that was to be rediscovered in the
1970s. “The more wars happen, the more lame and cripple people will exist,”
was one of the most inflammatory lines of the script, and it was removed by
the censors. Thematically, this was also the first movie to depict the perse-
cution of Greek Jews and the extermination of the Jewish community in the
Nazi concentration camps. “You Jews are such clever people. They say that
you gave birth to great minds—and Hitler hated you for that,” was another
Gregoris Gregoriou, Bitter Bread (1951). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
memorable line of dialogue. Despite the fact that it appeared only briefly,
the figure of the Lord (Archon) implicitly dominates the film without saying
a word: after his return from the concentration camp, he loses his mind,
speaks to no one and stays in his room painting imaginary beings, other-
worldly landscapes, and fantastic machines on the walls.
Gregoriou represented the attitude of Greek society towards the Jew as
the uncanny eternal stranger in an admirable way. The movie was heavily
censored and was also viciously criticized by reviewers.
Josef Hepp’s photography gave further proof of his mature style: stark
concrete forms surfaced against the ruined and unmitigated background of
the city. He focused on the deep contrast of black and white, which at times
dissolved into a fluid and blurred expressionist confusion, effectively repre-
senting a city and family in ruins.
Gregoriou continued to explore his neorealist aesthetics in The Big
Streets (Oi Megaloi Dromoi, 1953), a film that failed commercially and
forced Gregoriou to compromise himself within the growing trend of the
commercial mainstream.
Stelios Tatassopoulos’ Black Earth (Mavri Gi, 1952), a story based on the
emery miners of Naxos, was another important yet uneven movie. It was praised
for its “direct photography,” austere plot and suggestive cinematography. Also
close to neorealism, the film explored working class conditions and economic
exploitation with overt political references. The dialogue was minimal in order
to avoid sentimentality, and the camera depicted with unembellished cruelty,
as though in a documentary, the predicament of common people. The film was
shot on location at the actual mines, mixing social documentary and fictional
characterization in a way that is reminiscent of the British documentaries of
the period and of Giuseppe de Sanctis’ Bitter Rice (1949).
Gregoriou and Tatassopoulos explored the plight of the common man
in a society that denied them voice and representation. It could be claimed
that they represented the first appearance of “cinema povero” by elevating

the common man as the central cultural hero of the cinematic tradition
that was to dominate the 1950s. Unfortunately, after the financial failure of
Black Earth, Tatassopoulos squandered his considerable talent on slapstick
comedies, bucolic dramas, and finally populist television serials.
One of the most important directors of the period, whose work
developed under the shadow of the dominant male cinematographers, was
Maria Plyta (1915–2006), the first female film-maker. Overall, she made 25
films between 1950 and 1971. Among them were The She-Wolf (I Likaina,
1951), Eve (1953), The Neighbourhood Girl (To Koritsi tis Geitonias, 1954),
and The Duchess of Plakentia (I Doukisa tis Plakentias, 1955), all films which
explored female presence as a disrupting irregularity within the continuum
of traditional patriarchal representations.
Plyta worked till the end of her long life to construct distinct representa-
tions for the downtrodden, the outcast, and the marginalized, articulating a very
interesting and underrated variety of melodrama. Her films were characterized
by a dark atmosphere of trauma and loss, and her photography was framed by an
extremely sensitive, almost impressionistic, camera. She had an immense gift for
representing the individual as the focal point of a crumbling social fabric—her
empathy and humanism elevated individual stories into collective symbols of
mutual recognition. She also paid meticulous attention to the interior settings
and designs of her films, despite the fact that she always had to work within
the constraints of very tight budgets. She also had to deal until the end of her
creative life with constant prejudice and rejection: Filopimin Finos had declared
in public, “Women cannot be directors!” Consequently, Plyta was not able to
secure enough funds through established producers until the 1960s.
Furthermore, Plyta had an intuitive knowledge of effective setting,
interior lighting, and fast montage. As she had once admitted, she liked
working on the moviola and reviewing dialogue and action while editing
her films. She had a deep empirical understanding of how camera shots
influence the mind of the viewer. “Melodrama,” she explained to Kay Angeli,
“is not to be found in the story alone as a whole but also in the mise-en-
scène; if I wanted to show that somebody was angry I had to do a close-up
of his clenched fist.”8 In The She-Wolf, Plyta created the first charismatic and
independent female character in Greek cinema with marked neorealistic
elements through a deliberately stylized and almost theatrical represen-
tation, which nevertheless went beyond the codes of pure neorealism. She
also had clear ideas about the role of the director: “In each film, the director
is to be dominant and responsible for everything; the director is the person
who sees the whole movie on an imaginary screen, in all its details . . .”9
Eve was a provocative and confronting film for the morality of the
period; the story was about a woman who returned to her husband after
eloping with her young lover. Based on a script by Andreas Lambrinos, Plyta
Maria Plyta, Eve (1953). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
made a film full of sensuality, emotional cruelty, and sexual guilt, which
could be aligned with Alf Sjöberg’s Miss Julie (1951) and Marcel Carné’s
Thérèse Raquin (1952) in its relentless interplay between desire and moral
responsibility. Her central female character was full of existential euphoria
and ethical ambiguity, while the two central male figures were tormented by
lust, insecurity, and self-hatred. “Why does love leave such a bad taste . . .?”
Eva’s young lover asks, while her husband, in order to convince her to stay
with him, says, “You feel disgusted by me . . . but I will stay with you till
the end.”
Plyta depicted her female character as a true-to-life human being,
fallible, ambivalent, and seductive: no idealization, no promises of eternal
love, no marital fidelity—the ultimate insult to the patriarchal establishment.
Even the name Eve, with its religious connotations as the conduit through
which evil possessed the human soul, was counterbalanced by the strange
name of her young lover, Antinoos, the thoughtless youth, like Penelope’s
arrogant suitor in Homer’s Odyssey. Eve was a “problematic” film, and the
first major breakthrough in gender representation in Greek cinema, with
realistic dialogue, convincing characters, and rhythmic narrative, paving the
way for Cacoyannis’ Stella. Despite its sound problems, poor studio settings
and problems in scene continuity, Eve is still worth watching and, indeed,
must be rediscovered for its pioneering exploration of gender identity.
After The Drunkard, Yorgas Tzavellas made Bloodstained Christmas
(Matomena Hristougenna, 1952), which was the great commercial success
of the year. It was yet another movie which imparted its message through
implicit criticism. Some interesting subversions of gender roles in society
appear, which the strict censorship at the time did not leave untouched.
Despite its melodramatic character, the film addressed the question of
women who had intimate relations with Germans—a viscerally repulsive
issue in the polarized Greek society of the period.
Between 1952 and 1955, a number of good releases seemed to put Greek
cinema on the international map. During the same period, many of these
films were again made in the advanced studios of Egypt, before their national-
ization in late 1954. Some of these films were also international productions,
common ventures with producers from, especially, Turkey and Egypt.
Tzavellas’ next film was the blockbuster that gave him the opportunity
and the producer’s consent to proceed with his artistic vision. Agnes of the
Harbour (I Agni tou Limaniou) was the big commercial success of 1952/53. It
was a loose remake of Marcel Carné’s La Marie du Port (1949), but Tzavellas
infused his film with the intensity of spontaneous realism as he explored
personal exile, the ethics of the underdog and the bitterness of social
marginalization. The film proved his ability to take deep shots of the urban
landscape while focusing simultaneously on individual episodes and signif-
icant details. The voice-over of an omniscient narrator sometimes becomes
intrusive with its patronizing tone, but does give narrative continuity to the
film. Tzavellas’ actors, especially the leading actress Mary Hatziaryiri, were
also extremely effective in depicting a wide range of emotions and encour-
aging empathy for the characters. In this film, as in the next, the conservative
director didn’t hesitate to foreground the female body in all its sensuality and
voluptuousness and even to discreetly address the issue of sexual practices.
Tzavellas’ comedies of the period were also interesting: The Jinxed Man (O
Grousouzis, 1951), The Little Chauffer (To Soferaki, 1953), and The Jealous Man
(O Ziliarogatos, 1956). The life of ordinary people is explored with frivolity,
empathy, and humour. Tzavellas was the most conservative but, at the same time,
the most compassionate humanist of Greek cinema, and in some respects his
cinematic achievement stands close to that of Jean Renoir or early David Lean.
However, the 1950s was a precarious decade which saw some promising
young artists imprisoned, others leaving Greece, and others having turned to
Yorgos Tzavellas, Agnes of the Harbour (1952). Courtesy,

Finos Films. Credit: DVD
commercial slapstick comedies or cheap melodramas in order to survive. For

those left behind, forced modernization came through the discovery of the
immediate, the contemporary, the actual—and all of the compromises they
entailed.
Between 1945 and 1954, attempts to construct an altogether new
cinematic language led to the elaboration of diverse visual strategies for the
depiction of reality. Indeed, the quest for “reality” dominated the minds of
film-makers; consequently, a hybrid form of realism was constructed, still
close to the films of the 1930s but also influenced by English, Italian, and
French models. This hybrid realism was based on accepted melodramatic
conventions, which secured commercial success with script innovations
necessary for the production of “quality” films.
1954 to 1956 became the wonder years of film production. They consoli-
dated the visual idiom of local cinema, established its representational codes,
and redefined its position internationally. In these miraculous years, four of
the most important Greek films were made which not simply consummated
cinematic language, but also established the stylistic and thematic prototypes
for almost all films produced in the country until today. During this period,
all efforts that went back to the time of Dimitris Gaziadis and the early
Laskos for the construction of functional narrative, stylistic and technical
threads finally came to fruition.
The cinematic eye turned persistently and with curiosity to the new
shanty neighborhoods of Athens and started exploring the life of ordinary
people as they struggled to survive day by day. In the background, the ruins
of a glorious past were really “non-places” for living human beings—meeting
points only for tourists, pickpockets, and archaeologists. Even the war
heroism of the previous decade was rather neglected. The anarchic recon-
struction of the country gave rise to new issues that the movie camera was
intentionally or unintentionally recording every time city life was filmed. For
ordinary people, reality was concentrated in their job, their home, and their
neighborhood—these were the spaces where life actually occurred.
But these spaces were all under police surveillance and were being dimin-
ished by the constant expansion of the city, the construction of new “comfortable”
apartment blocks, the proliferation of cars, and the rise of a new class, the petit
bourgeoisie, which began to impose its own codes and practices on the public
sphere. Most films explored precisely these shrinking communal spaces; spaces
under attack by invisible and hostile authorities and the rise of the new class,
which destroyed everything and everyone who reminded it of its origins.
The Wonderful Years of Masterpieces

As for the efforts of other local directors, expatriates returned to help with
the reconstruction. Among them was Gregg C. Tallas (Grigoris Thalassinos,
1909–1993), who spent most of his life traveling between Greece and
the United States and who produced, with his trained cinematic eye and
unflagging enthusiasm, his pioneering movie The Barefoot Battalion (To
Xipolito Tagma, 1954). Tallas’ life was strange and unique. He came from
Hollywood where he had worked with great directors in the editing of films
such as Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), Jean Renoir’s The
Southerner (1945), and the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946); he
then directed two technically accomplished feature films, Prehistoric Women
(1949) and The Siren of Atlantis (1949), which are still minor cult B-movies.
His first Greek film, The Barefoot Battalion, was characterized by a fluid
poetic realism that depicted the German occupation through the eyes of 160
six orphans who roamed the city streets, stealing bread from the German
soldiers, as though taking part in an innocent and exciting game. The camera
followed their bare feet, constructing an elliptical image of a reality full of
suspicion, fear, and tension. The children were forced to deal with moral
dilemmas—and while they managed to do so effectively, instinctively imple-
menting notions of justice and solidarity, the world of adults denied them
everything they discovered.
The dialogue was a masterpiece of vernacular as the script moved
rapidly from scene to scene, creating an intense atmosphere of anxiety
and suspense. The dilemmas were enhanced by Mikis Theodorakis’ score,
orchestrated with wind, string, and percussion instruments, in an almost
operatic style that amplified the emotive force of recollection, nostalgia, and
trauma. The conflicting sounds of wind instruments and string harmonics
created an atmosphere of heroic distance and yet of extreme urgency; the
music transformed the children into symbols of a perpetual war against
fear. Aglaia Mitropoulou praised Theodorakis’ music as a unique attempt to
explore Eisenstein’s contrapuntal function between image and sound.10
Stylistically, the realism of the movie is densely organic, in the sense
that the external emptiness of the urban landscape corresponds to bodily
hunger and suffering. The film is also underpinned by religious fervor and
strong “spiritual” symbols without ever veering off into the sentimental or
the melodramatic. In a strange way, through subtle touches of humor and
irony, Tallas’ movie is more akin to Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)
than to Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945). In the movie, we can also see
the first and probably only positive depiction of the American presence
in the country—something that made Tallas a target of accusations of
pro-American bias.
Finally, we can also admire the mature camera work by the veteran of the
previous era, Mihalis Gaziadis. He had used the same camera since 1924 and
had only six projectors for lighting; yet his cinematic eye found its ultimate
consummation in The Barefoot Battalion with a dense depiction of rich detail
and nuance, in a constant interplay of shadows, through long shots and deep
Gregg Tallas, The Barefoot Battalion (1954).

focus frames, documenting a ruined city and recording a shattered mentality

in a way that could match any other similar achievement in postwar European
cinema. Unquestionably, Tallas’ film was one of the best movies ever made in
Greece and one of the most important in postwar Europe.
Shortly after Tallas’ film, Tzavellas released his poignant melodrama The
Story of a Counterfeit Pound (I Istoria mias Kalpikis Liras, 1955), his greatest
cinematic work. In terms of the simplicity of its continuous linear narrative,
the movie was the first major “formal” achievement of Greek cinema and
arguably one of the best films ever made in the country.
The director successfully staged a seamlessly unfolding storyline by
intertwining four episodes in stylistically diverse ways. The film depicted
a society that could still discover bonds and symbols of identification even
in a worthless piece of nickel. Each episode had its own lighting, different
music, distinct setting, and specific idiolect. The movie revealed a society
already complex and diversified, with communal bonds still intact, but
traumatized and in confusion, disguising insecurity and uncertainty with
the melodramatic facade of frivolous incidents or sentimental exuberance.
In the background, there still existed a city bustling with energy and constant
activity. People appeared from everywhere searching for money and the
ultimate security that wealth and material possessions could bring. Tzavellas
was at his best within confined spaces, in the private interiors of ideal living
rooms and modern houses. He was the master of set-design, costume, and
internal lighting, depicting effectively how humans interact in the shrinking
space of privacy and domesticity.
Tzavellas’ style was a reflection of a deep empathy for the lonely
individual in the urban reality of anonymity and depersonalization—and
this was the central theme of all of his movies. He depicted a community still
holding on to its values, but with the cracks and the ruptures imposed by
the modern capitalist system becoming more obvious and destructive. The
Yorgos Tzavellas, The Counterfeit Pound (1955).

Courtesy, Karagiannis-Karatzopoulos. Credit: DVD.
four stories of the film were about likable outcasts who lived out their daily
adventures alone and against a universe of negative presences and intrusive
institutions; no political ideology or sexual passion assisted them in defining
their identity and self-perception. An episode with a prostitute and a fake-
blind beggar depicted with tragic poignancy and pessimistic humor the
horror of commodified human encounters. Against the backdrop of a sinister
state and an absent authority, Tzavellas’ heroes tried to make sense of reality
and to find their place in the shifting sands of history.
The protagonists resorted to deception or pettiness because something
greater was missing from their lives. They risked their dignity because
this was the only way to escape an existence without hope; they became
ridiculous because they understood that feelings have become exchangeable
commodities. “I want to paint not uncertainty, but the certainty of our love,”
says the poor painter to his girlfriend in the last story. Yet their only certainty
was based on a fake pound, on an illusion, a fraud. They will separate and
live in silent despair, in subdued tragedy and affluent banality. “Our story is
not fake,” says the narrator at the end of the film. “Only money is completely
fake.”
Tzavellas’ gaze tried to restore human emotions to their pristine
pre-modern purity; but nothing stands the march of time and the stigma of
poverty—all life ends in solitude. Social respectability and public acceptance
became the most obvious manifestations of emotional despair and existential
resignation. Through such “conventional” material, with clearly defined
gender roles and class distinctions, society simply marched on, over the
ruins of ordinary people. Tzavellas tried hard to believe that there are no
class distinctions in Greek society and his films always end with some recon-
ciliation and appeasement. Yet they also depict the dark shadows of a reality
that simply does not care for the individual, in which individual life is a
paradoxical aberration, “healed” through conventionalism and conformism:

only by becoming “normal” does one gain the right to exist.
The film was the first triumph of the new technologically advanced
studio system of Finos’ competitors, AnZervos. Lighting was one of the
great triumphs of its mise-en-scène; Tzavellas’ editing endeavored to create
a suggestive atmosphere reminiscent of early silent films through juxtaposi-
tions, double exposures between inner spaces and outer realities, and slowly
fading transition scenes. The richness of texture and the density of image
make Tzavellas’ films parallel to those by Max Ophüls and Frank Capra.
It was two newcomers, however, who consolidated the achievements
of the American outsider and the accomplished storyteller. In 1954, after
returning from exile, the young Nikos Koundouros released his expres-
sionist Magic City (Magiki Polis, 1954). The movie was screened at the Venice
Festival but was banned by Greek censors from officially representing the
country. The movie started like Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great
City (1927) and ended like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1945). The story
seemed to be used almost as a pretext so that the camera could record the
modern ruins of Athens, the demolished buildings, the ruthless class that
was taking over, the destruction of organic neighborhoods, the growing
alienation between people, and the hostile nature of the state apparatuses.
Old houses were being mortgaged in order to buy cars, the symbols of
modernization, class, and distinction.
The aesthetics of the urban landscape did not undervalue the human
adventure in them: it is human misery, or human dignity, that interests
Koundouros more than anything else. Neorealism was also present here,
with references to Renato Castellani’s Due Soldi di Speranza (1952), which
had received first prize at the Cannes Festival in 1952. The movie explored
the oscillation of the city between the American boogie-woogie dances
and the oriental belly dance—from distinct Greek traditional tunes to
Hawaiian music—a chaotic confusion of the real and the imagined. The poor
neighborhood was juxtaposed with the underground Magic City, the club
where people sold drugs, bought love and organized heists. Viewers found
themselves in the world of a moralist with distinct ethical principles and an
aggressive moral agenda. The car became the ultimate symbol of alienation
and anomy—modernity fell as an avenging angel into what was left of the
old organic community. At the end of the movie, all of the inhabitants of the
neighborhood collected enough money to pay off the car—this was an act
of social solidarity that Koundouros, in his youthful idealism, thought that
ordinary people still valued, even under such adverse conditions.
Another newcomer appeared in the same year. Michael Cacoyannis
(1922–2011) was born in Cyprus and during the war studied in England
with the documentary school of cinematographers. His first film was
Windfall in Athens (Kiriakatiko Xipnima, 1954), filmed partly in the studios
Michael Cacoyannis, Windfall in Athens (1954). Courtesy,

Karagiannis-Karatzopoulos. Credit: DVD.
of Egypt, which received the Prize of Merit at the Edinburgh Festival. It was
a charming and fast-paced comedy, with convincing and likable positive
characters emerging under the bright Athenian sky. The city itself was
depicted as shining with optimism and ebullience. Elements of Lucciano
Emmer’s comedy Domenica d’Agosto (1950) were present, as well as some
interesting references to René Clair’s musical comedy Le Million (1931).
From his debut, Cacoyannis established himself as the master of cinematic
transcriptions and intertextual references as gestures to other films and
directors, thereby developing the formal affinities and stylistic analogies that
made his films dense and complex.
Cacoyannis’ first film was produced by a new company, Milas Films,
which seemed to give special attention to scripts focused on individual
characters and their humanity. Indeed, Cacoyannis is the most Chekhovian
of Greek directors. He is predominantly interested in representing complete
human characters, with their internal life, dilemmas, and follies. The repre-
sentation of individuals as “psychological beings” living in an internal reality
of their own soul and making failed or successful attempts to communicate
became the dominant theme in his films.
A year after women were allowed to vote for the first time, Cacoyannis
released Stella (1955), and this film was the culmination of the process of
bringing Greek cinema to its maturity. Stella was a masterful, if somewhat
unexpected, achievement. Until then, most Greek movies had failed to
produce a complete character let alone a complete aesthetic for the repre-
sentation of Greek selfhood, and, indeed, for a gendered selfhood, through
cinematic images. Stella transformed feminine irregularity into a powerful
moral presence by casting Melina Mercouri (1920–1994) as a superstar in
the mould of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella
Dallas (1937).
With Cacoyannis, Greek cinema constructed a visual language that was

in dialogue with the dominant traditions of the period, thus opening up
its cinematic language to endless new potentialities and opportunities. His
“Greek” gaze was built on the narrative strategies of Hollywood, the realistic
precision of the British documentaries and the psychological complexity of
French poetic realism. His cinematographic frame was also defined by an
experimental use of frame through editing and intercutting reminiscent of
both David Lean and Sergei Eisenstein.
In Stella, there is an ingenious “transcription” of the famous piano scene
from Casablanca. Instead of an assertive and desperate man however, a glori-
ously indifferent woman of dubious morals smokes and philosophizes with an
enigmatic grin set straight into the camera—but not really at the camera. Another
reference, to the famous kiss at the beach in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to
Eternity (1953), was used to present the first explicit depiction of eroticism in
Greek cinema. Indeed, the film opened with a homage to Hollywood, when the
Michael Cacoyannis, Stella (1955). Courtesy, Michael

Cacoyannis Foundation. Credit: DVD
local singer tried to make her entry as a primitive Carmen Miranda (who had
just died in 1955), and it remained to the end the most successful adaptation of
Hollywood narrative strategies to the conditions of a specific country.
Furthermore, Cacoyannis succeeded in doing something that no one
else had achieved until then: he unlocked the mystery of human form
and made the human face the ultimate map of reality. Mercouri’s radiant
and spacious face added a new dimension to the cinematic depiction of
femininity through its vast autonomy and self-reliance. Until that time,
cinematic close-ups were basically replicas of traditional pictorial portraits,
depicting their subject up to the shoulders or the chest through medium
long shots and using material symbols in order to indicate the social position
or the emotional state of the character. In very few samples of the existing
visual culture, were the eyes, the skin or the whole face used as symbols of
an inner world or of a psychological reality.
In Stella the human face dominated the landscape and gave meaning and
depth to a reality that wanted to deprive the individual of its own interiority.
Cacoyannis constructed the first complete character in Greek cinema within
her own social context and psychological realities; a character who was
indeed an enigma, without a singular interpretation being able to exhaust
her contradictions. She was at the same time, loud and vulgar, dedicated and
individualistic, passionate and unfaithful. It was this very enigmatic quality
in Stella that made her appealing, annoying, and challenging.
The other female characters in the film were also quite interesting: her
rival Anneta (played by Voula Zouboulaki, performing a proletarian role
with imposing aristocratic elegance), who wants to have what Stella has,
represents a provocative statement by Cacoyannis about the ambiguity of
feminine desire. The second singer, played by the legendary prewar vamp,
Sofia Vembo, accepted her inferior status, but dreamt of another life, of an
escape into the world of her own mind, and of living her true life through
Stella’s transgressions. Finally, the mother of the main male character was
the ultimate proof of a self-alienated femininity: degenderized, passionless,
archetypal—a human being that has lost its ability to resist and react.
In the final scenes of the movie, a frantic dance between female and
male took place, accentuated by a battle between foxtrot and rebetiko music;
the camera dived into the human face and dragged the audience along with
it: the camera was both the viewer and the character, the director and the
anonymous person on the street. Cacoyannis’ editing through cross-cutting
in the final scene suggested an ingenious symbolic marriage of minds and
souls, at the deepest level of human existence and beyond social constraints
and ideological imprisonments. By juxtaposing and contrasting images,
Cacoyannis articulated a complex and ambiguous metaphor for social
debates, individual identities and political agendas. Robert Peckham and
Pandelis Mihelakis concluded their analysis of the film with the observation:
The confrontation between Stella and Miltos at the crossroads draws on

traditions as different as the Classical Greek tragedy and the American
western. The final encounter is dramatized both as a rendition of the
tragic revenge that anticipates the director’s subsequent interpretation of
Euripidean drama, and as a showdown between gunslingers in Athens
that has been emptied of crowds. While the crossroads becomes the
stage set for the crossing of gazes, the space in front of the closed doors
of Paradise frames the confrontation between the protagonists. The last
scene underlines the ways in which space, narrative, and character are
intertwined. In doing so, it encapsulates the film’s central preoccupation
with irreconcilable perspectives and the pervasive conflict between forces
of assimilation and resistance in Greece in the 1950s.11
Gender was of course at the heart of the film, but the film was also about the
conflicting emotions that come with the freedom to choose. The internalized
social and gender roles were turned upside down: the man was a prisoner
of his dominant position and the woman was free to choose her life and her
death. As Dimitris Eleftheriotis noted:
Masculinity in Greek films of the 1960s unfolds and operates in this

restricted domestic space. “Being male” involves a negotiation of the
position that a man occupies in the domestic sphere, the extensive family,
and the omnipresent neighborhood.12
In one of the most memorable dialogues in Greek cinema we hear the male
protagonist of Stella (performed with passion and disguised insecurity
by Yorgos Foundas), a victim of his masculinity as public performance,
shouting at Stella what has since become a proverbial line: “Go away,
Stella, I am holding a knife . . . Why don’t you go, Stella? I will kill you . . .”
From a Freudian point of view, the knife itself becomes a substitute for
something that Stella has taken from him: his manhood. Her independence
and self-reliance, her ability to choose for herself, and her willingness to
take risks castrate the man who cannot see the woman as a human being,
with contradictory feelings and ambivalent behavior. Consequently, the
conflict remains beyond resolution—she is killed by him as it seems that
her death is the only way in which he can regain his masculinity. The film
ends as if in a Greek tragedy with the neighborhood community mourning
over Stella’s dead body, dwarfed by the vast long shot of the endless city as
the camera moves ceremoniously away from the small personal drama to
show the impersonal magnitude of an urban reality in which all are equally
depersonalized.
Manos Hatzidakis’ score, which is based on a suggestive fusion of tradi-
tional bouzouki sounds and modern popular music, foregrounds the social
underpinnings of action: songs and music function as catalysts of action, as
parts of the story. The song “Love, who became a double-edged knife” has
the same impact as Gilda’s famous “Put the Blame on Mame”.
It is hard to imagine the development of Greek cinema without
Cacoyannis’ “sculptural realism,” which encapsulated the transition of Greek
society from the organic unity of isolated neighborhoods to the impersonal
order of an expanding urban space. After Stella, Greek cinema developed
a new sense of filmic time and visual space, established distinct narrative
codes to express the polarities between city and countryside and the intro-
spective conscience of contemporary subjects, and explored gender issues or
matters of sexuality in a subversive and somehow invisible manner. As Dan
Georgakas observed:
Stella is not a realistic character exploring a new sexual role for Greek
women, but a poetic embodiment of the irresolvable conflict between
absolute independence and the commitments associated with a permanent
relationship.13
Yet when the movie was released, left-wing criticism was scathing:
Vulgarity and obscenity are represented as heroism, machismo and
aggression as bravery . . . How could they believe that the crude whore
they presented, the woman who does not want to marry in order to be
free to have fun in her life could be a character? How could her attempt,
her “struggle” to defend an immoral and perverse permissiveness ever
generate any sympathy or even admiration, or that her stabbing by a drifter
could be a tragedy? 14
Cacoyannis constructed the first complete visual language in Greek cinema

by liberating the camera from the static tradition of the prewar years and
converting it into an active commentator on human emotions. In the
liberation of the cinematic eye, we can clearly detect a political as well as
psychoanalytic dimension, as the eye now enters forbidden spaces and peers
into invisible realities.
Nikos Koundouros in his next film represented another urban reality—
that of the sinister underworld and of the dark shadows lurking beneath the
official versions of prevailing order. In The Ogre of Athens (O Drakos, 1956),
Koundouros explored the subtexts within Greek society, experimenting with
form and space, reality and neuroses, madness and sanity to break down
the morphological autonomy of Cacoyannis’ crisp realism and to create a
cinema of fluid forms and illusory spaces. The story was rather common:
the misidentification of a common man as a notorious criminal unravels the
latent violence and aggression of a society of scared and frustrated people.
The symbolism was too strong to be missed: the viewer understood that the
police were after anybody, persecuting everyone and incriminating innocent
bystanders.
The script was by the most important screenwriter of Greek cinema,

Iakovos Kambanellis (1922–2011), who had been imprisoned in the
Mauthausen concentration camp. Koundouros was exiled to the Greek
islands because of his political beliefs, where, as he says, he discovered
“the power of the human voice.” Koundouros’ psychological realism
constructed a demonic parable about Greek society: law-abiding citizens
were in themselves morally perverse and therefore politically evil. The
complacency of the middle class, the nouveaux riches, and public servants
who worked for an oppressive state was the main root of the ominous and
suffocating atmosphere of the movie. At the same time, the destiny of the
solitary man in a lonely crowd became the central theme in Koundouros’
movies.
In the final scenes of The Ogre of Athens, the underworld of criminals
initiates a Dionysian orgiastic dance full of sinister homoeroticism. The
barriers between the real and the illusory are demolished, all taboos vanish
and the only thing heard is a primeval sigh of pain and suffering, an inartic-
ulate scream from the nightmare of history. The sexual tension between men
is confronting and, at times, shocking. The scene where the underground
criminal mourns for the girlfriend he has lost to the supposed Ogre is an
incredible depiction of an inflected, mediated, sexual encounter between
them. Through irony and parody, Koundouros frames a revolutionary and
liberating depiction of the hidden histories of the Athenian underworld,
especially during a period of political persecutions.
The Ogre of Athens combined two themes: Alfred Hitchcock’s recurrent
innocent’s flight from arrest and Fritz Lang’s claustrophobic societies, as
found in M (1931) and the Dr. Mabuse films. At the same time, Carol Reed’s
The Third Man (1949) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) seemed also
to belong to the referential subtexts of Koundouros’ noirish atmosphere.
Actors looked at each other through mirrors because they knew that their
society was a society of masks and disguises. Sexuality was ambiguous and
diffused; it was another mask in a society of situated roles. The film was a
political essay on surveillance and domination. Police were everywhere, and
with them suspicion and fear: the camera floated over all shades of dark
and darker—there was no horizon, no sky, no exit, and no escape from
oppression and totalitarianism. The extreme theatricality of the state in its
parades was a motif that recurred frequently in Koundouros’ films.
Koundouros, however, spiced such dreadful reality with touches of
carnivalesque surrealism, as if people were there but not really there; in a city
without societal bonds, communicative codes, or meaningful encounters,
the spirit of Luciferian rebellion lurks everywhere through the jokes, puns,
and sarcasm of the persecuted and the marginalized.
The scene of the Ogre’s arrest by the entire police force and a delirious
public in front of a bra hanging on a clothes line is probably the most
Nikos Koundouros, The Ogre of Athens (1955). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
diabolically funny shot of Greek cinema. Within its historical context,

the film was a continuous coded message. Everything was said through
secret patterns, cryptic rituals and invisible languages. The brother-making
ceremony with the mixing of bloods was a magnificent rite of invisible
scripts, as the heartbreaking Dionysian sighs of “Isn’t it a pity that we Greeks
kill each other?” or “My whole life changes tonight!” or “I have my little
brother dying of tuberculosis; help me Jesus to find money for the doctor!”
erupt out of the primordial depths of human misery, dignity, and despair. As
the lonely man dies, he utters the ultimate words of self-respect and nobility:
“Thank you, leave me alone. All my life I have avoided attention!”
The film remains to this day the most subversive and revolutionary text
of Greek cinema: both formally and fictionally it reshaped the aesthetics of
visual representation as a counter-style, in opposition to dominant forms
of storytelling, which with their completeness and circularity confirmed
the prevailing order of thinking. With Koundouros, oppositional aesthetics

established their perpetual presence in Greek cinema as a complete and
uncontested aesthetic statement.
Cacoyannis continued his exploration of Greek society and human
form in a number of path-making movies. The Girl in Black (To Koritsi me ta
Maura, 1956) and A Matter of Dignity (To Teleftaio Psemma, 1957) depicted
human form and its historical position in a unique and complex manner. In
these films, Cacoyannis mastered the cinematic medium and constructed
images of wider appeal which gained international recognition. His frames
became converging points at which the individual and the collective inter-
sected, thus establishing a convincing and believable metaphor about their
subject matter.
One could perhaps claim that Cacoyannis completed his cinematic vision
through the cinematic eyes of the German-born English cinematographer
Walter Lassally (b. 1926). Lassally’s camera simply made each character
pulsate with a life of its own, establishing symmetries between human desire
and the natural landscape while intimately exploring the social spaces where
people interact and mingle. An accomplished cinematographer by 1957,
Lassally worked with the Free Cinema movement in the mid-1950s and the
British new wave in the early 1960s; the main premises of the Free Cinema
movement became the ultimate aesthetic background of his collaboration
with Cacoyannis and culminated in their great common accomplishments,
Electra (1962) and Zorba the Greek (1964). Walter Lassally’s collaboration
with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson gave him the opportunity to
explore the pragmatism of everyday life outside hegemonic metropolitan
centers, as well as to delve into the radical undercurrent of the mundane and
the quotidian.
Michael Cacoyannis, The Girl in Black (1956). Courtesy, Michael

Michael Cacoyannis, A Matter of Dignity (1957). Courtesy,

Michael Cacoyannis Foundation. Credit: DVD
The famous manifesto of the Free Cinema, co-signed in 1956 by

Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson,
with Lassally and John Fletcher as its main cinematographers, expressed
precisely the new perspective towards representation:
As film-makers we believe that no film can be too personal. The image
speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not
an aim. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.15
Cacoyannis made his Girl in Black as an exit from the suffocating reality of a
depersonalized urban reality, and dived into the heart of “authentic” Greek life,
with the pure morals and innocent intentions of “natural” people. Yet what he
found there was neither pure nor innocent. Two friends from Athens go on
holidays to the island of Hydra. They rent rooms in the imposing house of a
deceased sailor. His family still lives there—a young boy and a girl, together
with their mother. The local men with their macho mentality try to take
advantage of the two women; as a friendship develops between the girl and the
Athenian, they play a prank with a boat that then sinks, drowning five children.
This simple story shows more than in Stella the power and the complexity
of Cacoyannis’ vision. His script was written with fast and direct dialogue.
The change of scenes has a peculiar rhythm of its own, starting slowly, then
speeding towards a tragic dénouement and then ending ambiguously leaving
only questions for the viewer. Walter Lassally started with this film his close
collaboration with Cacoyannis and has stated:
Michael Cacoyannis and I saw very much eye-to-eye in visual matters, and
his script for the film was one of those rare ones where the scenes were
already broken down into actual shots, making it into a shooting script
which was both meaningful and practical.16
The central actors, Elli Lambeti and Dimitris Horn, gave the script a tense
and electrifying atmosphere: the power dynamics of the small village, the
secret lives of the inhabitants, the internalized oppression of women, the
phallic machismo of the male population—indeed, the lack of any sort of
moral energy in the public life of the community—made this film radical in
its critique of established order in Greek society.
Lassally’s camera created an almost three-dimensional space, as it
moved discreetly around the face and neck of Elli Lambeti, caressing
her with sensuality and affection. The scene where the children drown is
carefully structured, emotionally and stylistically; Cacoyannis’ neoclas-
sical reserve and restraint rejecting all forms of sentimentalism. The silent
and indifferent landscape testifies to the human drama after transforming
people into amoral animals. Villagers are fatalistic and resigned. The story
of the sexually active mother, indeed of an older woman having affairs with
younger men, is probably the most interesting subtext of this film and will
find its full treatment in Electra and Zorba.
The fact that Cacoyannis avoided one-dimensional roles and depicted
only moral ambiguities (there is something quite unsympathetic in most
of his characters) made this film a prime text on sexual psychodynamics
and gave it a peculiar position as a seminal text on repression and sexual
inhabitations in the history of cinematic representations. Overall, The Girl in
Black was probably one of best Greek movies ever made, with its sculptural
vividness of human form emerging from the barren and timeless landscape,
and with the power of its story, depicting the woman as an agent of moral
and social change.
The same can also be said of his next film, the urban drama A Matter
of Dignity. If Tzavellas in his urban dramas and comedies was the Honoré
de Balzac of Greek cinema, with this film Cacoyannis became its Gustave
Flaubert. Cacoyannis returned to one of his main themes, that of a family in
trouble, with a reckless mother gambling the family fortune away in order to
keep up appearances with the rest of the Athenian rich and lazy, with a weak
and sensitive father, and an obedient but unstable daughter willing to be sold
to the wealthiest husband.
Cacoyannis’ characters here are essentially good: they are unable to
commit acts of bad intention or to act in bad faith. They are trapped in their
social roles—they wear masks all the time which destroy them. Their tragedy
is that they are fully aware of what happens to them, but they are unable to
change their life. Around them, Cacoyannis explores both the mentality of
the affluent urban class, which passes its time at parties and excursions, and
the resilience of the poor villagers with their moral strength and directness.
Lassally’s camera moves with impassioned vividness throughout the
urban buildings, capturing Athens at night and at dawn with neoclassical
luminosity, transparency, and clarity. On some occasions, each frame looks
like an engraving full of texture and depth. Manos Hatzidakis’ music is

distinct for its diverse rhythms, moving between jazz, tango, and rebetika in
an imaginative fusion of sounds that underline the emotional references of
the story.
The scene where Elli visits the village and returns home by bus together
with the commoners is one of the most eloquent social commentaries on
Greek society. Even the much-criticized final scene where Elli takes her child
to the island of Tinos to pray to the Mother of God for a miracle is composed
and restrained.
Cacoyannis’ film is an homage to Vittorio de Sica’s Miracle in Milan
(1951) and to Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953), indicating the
transition from the stark realism of the previous period to the poetic
realism of his next movie and the symbolic universe of his magnum opus.
Additionally, with this work, Cacoyannis further explored the notion
that films do not simply tell a story but inaugurate a dialogue with other
films to construct a grammar of visual perception different from that
of verbal communication. Indeed, with these films Greek cinema was
not “reinventing” cinematic tradition, as Jean Cocteau had told Gregoris
Gregoriou ten years earlier: it spoke with other filmic texts about the
language of cinema, addressing for the first time questions about realism
and its representational codes.
Meanwhile, Koundouros flirted with the cinema of cruelty and self-
destruction, as is clearly seen in his next two movies The Illegals (Oi
Paranomoi, 1959) and The River (To Potami, 1960). Both became “cursed
masterpieces,” banned from being screened, for various reasons, with their
scripts heavily censored to the point of rendering the stories incomprehen-
sible, especially in The Illegals. Yet both were precisely about the absurdity and
irrationalism of an oppressive and violent state, which destroys individuals
to quash dissent and silence public discussion. In both films, Koundouros
creates a poetic but bleak atmosphere, reminiscent of the early works of Pier
Paolo Pasolini, full of emotional energy and violent tension. He replicates
a photographic framing of action, making overt references to photographs
of the Spanish Civil War. The films also reveal a tendency that was to make
his later films somewhat dense and opaque: a tendency, that is, to create
abstract symbols out of concrete situations. Ninos Fenek-Mikelidis observed
about The Illegals something that can be applied to Koundouros’ later films:
“Stylistically, Koundouros’ film depicts an unusual, attractive beauty, yet its
images look so like static paintings in a work that it collapses under its own
symbolism.”17
In all of their films, both Cacoyannis and Koundouros were aware of
a latent violence in the fabric of Greek society, together with a profound
existential panic in the face of history caused by the growing awareness
of the presence of an external or internal other. Later, Cacoyannis’
cinematic adaptation of ancient tragedy revealed the need for recovering

a lost unity in an overwhelming synthesis of all ethical and metaphysical
certainties. On the other hand, Koundouros explored the liminal condi-
tions of self-determination through an expressionist cinema of fluidity
and instability.
From a historical and aesthetic point of view, Koundouros’ movies
led to the emergence in the early 1970s of what has been called the New
Greek Cinema. If Tzavellas, Sakellarios, Gregoriou, Plyta, and Tallas
established the foundational visual language that became the basis of
cinematic representation in the country, Cacoyannis and Koundouros
reconfigured its principles by infusing it with new themes, narrative
rhythms, and editing practices. We cannot really appreciate the new sense
of filmic structure that entered Greek cinematography after 1965 without
reference to their work. Both Cacoyannis and Koundouros, almost by
themselves and in three miraculous years, brought Greek cinema to
maturity and established a cinema of formal self-sufficiency, diversified
aesthetics, and thematic complexity, constructing complete metaphors
of the real, in the tradition of René Clair, Jean Renoir, Vittorio de Sica,
Lucino Visconti, John Ford, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles. And both
followed different pathways in their future development. Cacoyannis
reverted to an almost academic style, while Koundouros radicalized
his representations, flirting with avant-garde practices. Nothing can be
understood in the subsequent history of Greek cinema without simulta-
neous reference to both of them.
The Proliferation of Films

Between 1955 and 1967 many radical changes took place in Greek society.
New production companies (including Spect Films, Millas Films, Tzal
Films, Olympos Films, Karagiannis Films, Clearhos Konitsiotis Films, Klak
Films) produced a remarkable number of films in many different genres.
Such production was greatly assisted after 1957 by the construction of the
best-equipped Alpha Studios in an implied antagonism to the AnZervos and
Finos Film studios.
Between 1955 and 1956, 22 feature films were produced; between 1957
and 1958, 28 films; between 1958 and 1959, 46 films; and in 1960, 63 films.
The pace accelerated wildly, so that between 1966 and 1967 a total of 118
movies were released, not including short films. At a certain stage, the Greek
film industry was producing annually more films per capita than Hollywood
and was competing with Hindi cinema for world supremacy.
All of the neighborhoods in the large urban centers had a remarkable
number of cinemas for winter and summer screenings. By 1960, there were
at least 350 cinemas in Athens, with another 140 in the working-class city
of Piraeus. A similar number existed in Thessaloniki and other major cities,

with the tendency to increase in order to cater for different audiences. For
the growing urban populations, movie theaters became spaces of communal
experience, public visibility, and social recognition. The need for more
popular entertainment demanded the immediate production of as many
new films as possible, especially of comedies, melodramas or, at the end of
the period, erotica or soft-porn.
Between 1955 and 1965, the act of going to the cinema was an
experience of nation building with social and educational value. The urban
masses that had just left their villages were in their majority illiterate (40
percent of a total population of about 8,300,000 people in 1960). Going to
watch Greek movies was a socializing experience for them, as they were
informed about the nation and its history through sanitized depictions of
the War of Independence and, occasionally, of recent history. Audiences
were thus implicitly conditioned regarding public morality, gender roles, and
political ideology.
With very few exceptions, these films perpetuated stereotypes by
depicting one-dimensional characters without dilemmas or inner life. Their
stories were also simplistic and formulaic, depicting either a lost “innocence”
through fustanella dramas or the victimization of women in melodramas
about poor girls falling in love with rich promiscuous men. Titles like I
Sinned for My Child; Mother, I am Your Child; The Deviation of an Innocent
Girl; Mother, I lost My Way; I Killed for My Child; After the Sin; Mother, Why
Did You Give Birth to Me . . . have become proverbial phrases in the political
vernacular when referring to silly sentimentalism and bombastic banality.
Yet important and, on many occasions, great actors took part in such
films, which were commercially successful. (Some of the revenue from these
films was used to produce artistically ambitious films, especially by Finos
Films.) From their titles, one could also notice the rise by the late 1950s
and early 1960s of rather risqué movies, which expressed a preoccupation
with sexuality and extramarital affairs. A number of films, such as Lust and
Passion (1960), Desires in the Wheat fields (1960), Girls of Athens (1961), The
House of Lust (1962), Sinful Hands (1963), and the notorious The Perverts
(Oi Anomaloi, 1964), made by ephemeral directors, laid the foundations for
a more explicit representation of sexual behavior, which, in the latter part of
the same decade, led to the establishment of a thriving soft-porn industry.
Consequently, the control of their production was of immense signifi-
cance for the state—and despite the relaxation after 1960 and during the
interlude of 1963 to 1967, the state kept a very strict control over film
scripts and the dissemination of “nationally or morally dangerous material.”
The period shows an increase in slapstick comedies, which made use
either of good performances by significant actors or of topical events that
caused some sensation. What they retained in immediacy and sincerity,
however, they lacked in style and form. Most also lacked the moral and
psychological complexity that would have created complete and believable
characters. In a sense, these were grass-roots attempts to deal with the
modernity that was reshaping Greek society by rapidly transforming it into
a quasi-capitalist economy. During this process, the traditional ethics of
communal bonds began to collapse, but no value systems emerged in their
place. The new political establishment simply continued its opportunistic
policies in economy, nation building, and social cohesion, based mainly on
coercion, ideological conceptions of nationality and the systematic exclusion
of “dangerous” ideas.
The image of the “rascal” (katergaris) as a likable and sympathetic
character became the central figure in these movies, a new variety of the
common man dominant in earlier films. In this new representation, all
urbanized villagers and the aspiring petit-bourgeois or middle-class audience
recognized the compromises and the concessions they had to make in order
to be accepted and become mainstream. Their transformation meant that
they had to dispense with their villageois accent, their uncouth manners,
and their existential innocence and organic unity with nature, in order to
succeed in their new environment of class-conscious capitalist organization.
They also had to ingratiate themselves to state power and its representatives,
by concealing their thoughts, disguising themselves into those “acceptable”
by the official state in the new urban reality.
The image of the innocent villager who goes to the city and deals with
the intricacies, contradictions, and pretensions of the new urban culture
became the dominant theme in most comedies. In the beginning, they
were delightful moral tales of self-empowerment, with witty dialogue and
occasionally some extremely funny malapropisms (some of which have
become standard expressions in the daily vocabulary). The attempts of
uneducated low-class individuals to use sophisticated vocabulary and savoir-
vivre manners provoked genuine laughter together with the carnivalesque
depiction of the local aristocracy.
Certain movies that reflect the social tensions of the period should also
be mentioned. Dinos Dimopoulos’ Jo the Menace (Tzo o Tromeros, 1955),
and The Little Car (To Amaxaki, 1956) depicted the gradual transition to
Americanized forms of commercial interaction in a still underdeveloped
country: the juxtaposition of the prevailing traditional prewar mentality
with the capitalist mechanized rules of modern urban realities provoked
laughter by pointing out the contradictions and conflicts that existed in the
minds of ordinary people. The mental tension explored here showed that,
in these comedies at least, the individual was depicted with psychological
depth and moral agency. Their comic stories caused an implicit psycho-
logical release not simply on a personal level. Dimopoulos (1921–2003) soon
became one of the most prolific and uneven directors of the so-called Old
Greek Cinema, and one of the central figures of the most successful period
in film production in the country.18
Similar can be said about some other comedies made by Alekos
Sakellarios during the 1950s, such as Music, Poverty and Pride (Laterna,
Ftohia kai Filotimo, 1955), a hilarious carnivalization of stereotypical
behavior, juxtaposing the urban mentality with the activities of wandering
outsiders, the gypsies. During this period, Sakellarios (1913–1991), a lighter
form of Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, made a number of highly successful
comedies dealing with the process of social transformation.
Among them, The Coffee Oracle (I Kafetzou, 1956) was extremely funny
and quirky, starring the most important comedian of the period, Georgia
Vassileiadou (1897–1980), an actress who distinguished herself for her
peculiar idioms and sparkling wit. In Auntie from Chicago (I Theia apo to
Chicago, 1957), Sakellarios brought her together with the dramatic actor
Orestes Makris of The Drunkard to create one of the most exhilarating,
exuberant, and absurd comic situations: this was the Greek equivalent of
Waiting for Godot, minus the existential angst, metaphysics, and gloom.
With its whimsical contrasts, irreverent paradoxes, and spirited euphoria,
the film explored the deep and irreconcilable dualities coexisting in Greek
society that were to receive their inevitable denouement in the next decade.
The terror of the new realities of capitalist commodification, urban
alienation, and community dissolution can be seen in an amusing comedy
by Tzavellas, We Only Live Once (Mia Zoi tin Ehoume, 1958), starring the
great dramatic actor Dimitris Horn (1921–1988). The misappropriation
of money from a bank by a low-level clerk in order to live out the passion
of his life with a voluptuous woman (Yvonne Sanson, the first foreigner to
appear in a Greek production) became the starting point for an exploration
of the emerging capitalist class that was assuming power by imposing the
exchangeable objectification of human emotions.
Sakellarios’ A Hero with Slippers (Enas Iroas me Pantoufles, 1958), with
its melancholic humor and sad irony, and starring the great theatrical actor,
Vassilis Logothetidis (1897–1960), seemed like a farewell to an era and
to a type of cinematic hero. In the same genre of good comedies, Tsiforos
released his hilarious spoof on urban myths The Treasure of the Deceased (O
Thisauros tou Makariti, 1959) with two great comedians Vassilis Aulonites
(1904–1970) and Georgia Vassileiadou. The quirky humor of this film
almost established a peculiar style in scriptwriting with unexpected puns
and irreverent innuendos. It also farewelled a particular style in house-
making in Athens, as the old architecture with the courtyard in the middle
was gradually replaced by fortified and privatized blocks of flats.
After years of city life, innocence was replaced by compliance and
complacency, and by the terrifying image of a citizen without moral respon-
sibility or a civil conscience, an individualistic opportunist who would do
anything and accept everything in order to “make it.” The cultivation of such
an image became the dominant theme in these comedies which, despite
the freshness of their vernacular and elegant simplicity of their plot, propa-
gated a distinctly conservative and highly regressive ideological message. It
must, however, be conceded that they managed to keep the industry alive,
offer training in technical skills to young directors, and make the industry
self-sufficient, so much so that after the 1960s a new wave of cinematic repre-
sentations became possible.
In 1956, Elias Paraskevas presented the first color movie in a rather
faded Technicolor. The film was The Shepherdess’ Lover (O Agapitikos tis
Voskopoulas) a fustanella drama that enjoyed a revival in such a period of
social transition. As we have seen, back in 1932 Tsakiris had produced his
own sound version of the bucolic drama written in traditional demotic
verse—and the fustanella tradition with its reassuring clichés and assuaging
stereotypes gave a sense of continuity and strength to the urbanized masses
working in factories against the depersonalizing presence of state bureau-
cracy, urban anonymity, and capitalist mechanization. Two versions of the
same story had appeared the previous year; one by Dinos Dimopoulos and
a second by Dimis Dadiras. The latter became extremely successful thanks
to the fresh and authentic innocence of Aliki Vouyouklaki (1933/4–1996),
whose presence was to dominate the next 25 years of film-making.
In 1957, Gregoriou attempted a modern adaptation of the ancient
Persephone myth in The Abduction of Persephone (I Arpagi tis Persefonis).
The film was set in two villages that feud about having the daughter of
Dimitra, Persephone, amongst them. It was the most ambitious and most
interesting work made by Gregoriou during this decade. He filmed it in a
village outside Athens, forcing himself to abandon the written script and let
his camera simply record the actual life of the villagers. He recollected:
The camera became the all-seeing eye stealing scenes from the everyday
life of ordinary villagers, forcing me to adjust appropriately the set scenes
of the script, in a form of unpretentious following of actual life, dialogues,
movements and reactions—as if there was no predetermined editing, but
cinematic narrative followed objective reality.19
Gregoriou’s quest for realism soon ended, as his major films failed at the box
office and reviews were particularly, and unfairly, negative.
In the same year, Gregg Tallas made his own provocative and controversial
Ayoupa (Bed of Grass, 1957), which took risks with narrative and story-
telling, reminiscent of Tallas’ Hollywood days and of Howard Hughes’ The
Outlaw (1943). The rather explicit and uninhibited sexuality of the film
challenged the morals of a society that saw an enemy of the social order in
the nudity of the female body.
Another diaspora Greek returned to the country for an aborted exper-

iment in mainstream film-making. The American avant-garde director
Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992) was invited by another Greek-
American producer, James Paris (1921–1982), to direct a narrative film based
on the famous Greek novel Serenity (Galini) by Ilias Venezis (1904–1973).
The novel was about the predicament of Asia Minor refugees in their attempt
to build a new life outside Athens. Markopoulos’ poetic take on the inner
life of the characters through his depiction of their psychological yearning,
trauma, and confusion in a series of dreamlike sequences was rejected by
the producer; Markopoulos left before completing the film, which was not
released at the time. However, what survives (about 65 minutes) is a strange
hybrid of narrative cinema and avant-garde discontinuous images with
classical music linking them as the deepest thread in emotional affinity. The
colors of the film are variations of bright green, yellow, and blue, creating a
surreal atmosphere of loss, absence, and expectation. Gregoriou, the director
who was invited to salvage the project, considered Markopoulos’ work as
incomprehensible rubbish and destroyed a substantial part of it.
In 1958, Dimopoulos released one of his most interesting and least-
appreciated movies, The Man of the Train (O Anthropos tou Trainou). For the
first time, through an ingenious use of flashbacks, the German occupation
was recreated almost nostalgically as a period of unity and solidarity. The
story was not about the Germans, who appeared as dark and impersonal
shadows, but about the Greeks: their moral dilemma between resistance and
collaboration, action and apathy. Also, the female protagonist, played with
aristocratic grandeur by Anna Synodinou, initiated lovemaking with the
male lead, played with an engaging mysteriousness by Mihalis Nikolinakos.
She was represented with agency, internal life, and personal moral codes,
and ultimately as a human with a distinct personality. The movie introduced
a film noir tradition to Greek cinema, a tradition which was continued
by various directors throughout the 1960s. The final scene in which the
unknown man is lost in the dark, with his steps echoing as if in a dream,
remains one of the most suggestive and atmospheric achievements of Greek
cinema.
In the same year, Kostas Manousakis released his first feature film Love
in the Sand-dunes (Erotas stous Ammolofous) with Aliki Vouyouklaki and
the most popular male idol of the period, Andreas Barkoulis (b. 1934). The
film contains explicit scenes of a passionate love affair between a young girl
from a coastal village and a strange handsome man who arrives from the
city. Nikos Gardelis’ photography works with deep contrasts of black and
white—Manousakis makes here his first attempt to explore the crumbling
structures of families. The risqué scenes and the controversial topic averted
the far-seeing Vouyouklaki from ever appearing again in films of such bleak
critical realism.
Yorgos Zervos’ The Lake of Desires (I Limni ton Pothon, 1958), a

melodrama about the love affair between a fisherman and a woman from the
city and set in the shallow lake of the city of Missolongi, was a successful film
of the same year. It won two international awards at the Cork Festival and
was favorably mentioned at the festivals of Karlovi-Bari and San Sebastian.
Andreas Lambrinos’ Bloodstained Sunset (Matomeno Iliovasilema)
represented the country at the Cannes Festival in 1959 and established a
very convenient myth for the tourist industry: a repressed Swedish woman
goes to Greece in search of an ancient god but instead discovers a handsome
shepherd—the actor who was to make an international career, Spyros Fokas
(b. 1937). The story became almost a cliché in the 1960s when “the seduction
of the Mediterranean” was one of the main campaign strategies of the tourist
industry.
Another female director whose work has been completely ignored is
Lila Kourkoulakou (b. 1936). She directed an extremely controversial and
groundbreaking movie, The Island of Silence (To Nisi tis Siopis, 1959), about
a notorious and yet completely “silenced” leper colony on the small island
of Spinalonga off the coast of Crete. The film was partly made on the island
itself with real patients appearing, and had such an immediate effect that the
colony was subsequently closed down. Kourkoulakou’s was another kind of
Greece: not the sunny country with handsome shepherds, seductive women,
and a glorious history; but a country of deformed people with unrepresented
suffering, of hidden social groups whose history was not to be told and made
visible.
The story, by Vaggelis Hatziyiannis, also depicted a country whose
people hated knowledge and thinking, preferring to be governed by super-
stition and a demonic fear of difference. The semi-documentary style of
the film, a first form of docu-fiction, recorded real people in actual circum-
stances, thus producing a cinema of critical realism, which provoked and
annoyed. The movie represented Greece at the Venice Festival, making
Kourkoulakou the first woman director to participate in an international
competition, but it had no commercial success. Kourkoulakou returned later
that year with At the Gates of Hell (Stin Porta tis Kolaseos) and in 1965 with
a fictionalized biography of the former prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos,
one of the first attempts to cinematically reconstruct recent history, in a
mixed form of original documentary and staged episodes (since no funding
was ever available for lavish historical productions). She has made only short
documentaries ever since.
From 1959 onwards, film production was intensified and reached indus-
trial proportions. One could claim that the line between good popular and
bad populist cinema became blurred. Dinos Dimopoulos made his best
fustanella film, Astero, with Aliki Vouyouklaki in an effective dramatic
performance; the young director, Yannis Dalianidis, produced the refreshing
Lila Kourkulakou, The Island of Silence (1959). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
comedies Little Vixen (Mousitsa) and Commoners and Aristocrats (Laos kai
Kolonaki); Alekos Sakellarios released his marvellous comedy about a dialect-
speaking villager turned policeman in the city in his Ilias of the 16th Branch
(O Ilias tou 16ou), and Dadiras his tense war drama The Island of the Brave
(To Nisi ton Gennaion), which featured great performances by Tzeni Karezi
(1930–1962), a sensitive actress with an intellectual performance style.
Comedies and melodramas have been unduly underestimated from
the perspective of the exploration of the social mentality surrounding the
cinematic experience of the audience. Just as in Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso
(1988) and in all Mediterranean societies, going to the movies was a profound
social ritual which tended on many occasions to compete with or even replace
church-going. For the urban masses of the period, going to the movies was
an experience of social bonding and status recognition, implicitly creating an
alternative public sphere in which feelings and reactions could be externalized
without fear of punishment. It also represented a space devoid of class divisions,
a democratic spectacle, or illusion, of social equality—despite the fact that the
luxury cinemas at the centre of Athens always enjoyed the privilege of the “first
screening.” Furthermore, the villagers and the urban proletarians heard their
own language on screen and not the austere and archaic idiom employed by
the government. The demoticism of these films has to be studied carefully as
an opposition to and parody of the official language of power, which seemed
incomprehensible, hostile, and opaque to the audiences of the day.
Yet, for each one of these, another five or ten facile and foolish films
were made in all genres, sometimes by the same directors who were “prosti-
tuting” their talent for easy money and immediate success. It would suffice
to mention the old neorealist Tatassopoulos who produced some of his worst
patriotic melodramas and frivolous comedies during this period, but also
Sakellarios, Laskos, Tsiforos, and others who, unfortunately, fell victim to the
studio system, sometimes in full consciousness of what they were doing.
Despite their social and cultural significance, both melodramas and

slapstick comedies had a long-term effect: they domesticated modernity by
de-radicalizing it. Indeed, most of the films in these genres constructed a
rather naive and repressive image of modernity and its consequences. Buying
a car, traveling to Europe, and changing manners did not mean moving into
the modern world but taking the modern world back to the old. In these
films, modernity was not represented as a break with the past, or at least as a
rupture with certain past practices, but as compromise and accommodation;
it was a style, without any radical potential, a simple decorative background
and not an active reality with political implications. Consequently, most of
these films functioned as confirmations of conservative values and practices,
legitimizing them as modern and acceptable, since they were presented and
disseminated through the focal art of modernity, the cinema.
Chapter Three
❦❦
Glory and Demise: 1960–1970
The New Decade

The 1960s for med the period when Greek cinema was so prolific
that, according to anecdotal statistical evidence, the studios were releasing
one and a half movies every two weeks. In 1961, the first attempts to establish
a functional institutional framework were made by the state. The Nikolaos
Martis Law, named after the minister who proposed it, had many positive
aspects but was never implemented. (Director Lila Kourkoulakou was the
special advisor on the new legislation.) Its articles prescribed the protection
of local films, the investment of money in the industry from the profits
of imported blockbusters, and screening sessions for Greek films—even a
monthly screening for short films. Yet, as critic Vassilis Rafailidis remarked:
The law of 1961 was abolished by itself because it approached and defined
Greek cinematography as though it already was an industry, whereas in
reality it was at its pre-industrial stage, and it could have developed into an
industry not with the assistance of the legislator but of the bank manager.1
The missing link, therefore, was the funding to systematize production,

establish its guidelines and create a long-term plan for local development.
Elias Papadimitrakopoulos made a summary of the situation in the early
1960s:
Two attributes generally characterize contemporary Greek cinema. First:
it is not Greek. Second: it is not cinema. It is not Greek because it hasn’t
succeeded in depicting (or it didn’t want) until today a single authentic
Greek moment. And it is not cinema, because it is not art but a banal
convention.2
Although there is some truth in such a bitter rejection of Greek cinema, as

well as a lot of elitism, it overlooked the persistent attempts made by people
88
Glory and Demise: 1960–1970 89
such as Tzavellas, Gregoriou, Cacoyannis, and Koundouros to establish

a visual grammar of themes and forms that would frame the cinematic
representation of Greek society. Also, Plyta and Kourkoulakou constructed
images of the rejected and the marginalized in a way that cannot be easily
dismissed as inauthentic or banal. Indeed, today we are able to reassess
their distinct gaze on history, identity, and society and form a better under-
standing of their artistic vision and accomplishment.
Another important event took place in 1960; the inauguration of the
Thessaloniki Film Festival. It started out as a week of Greek film but soon
evolved into a major cultural event that still defines the development of cinema
in the country as a showcase for its productions. The Festival immediately
became a battleground between various film-makers, between the audience
and the directors, between the critics and just about everybody else, and, of
course, between the film-makers and the state. In spite of this, the Festival has
generally played a benevolent role in the development of cinematic art and
the formation of critical discourse around the cinematic experience.
The proliferation of cine-clubs all over the country during the same
period was also impressive. Throughout the decade, they screened world
cinema from the past and the present while at the same time developing a
special awareness of the Greek cinematic past.
In 1960, the first history of Greek cinema was published by the director
and critic Frixos Iliadis. Meanwhile in 1963, an institution which was
continuing the Greek Film Club was officially established under the name
Greek Film Archive (Tainiothiki tis Elladas), indicating the first attempts for
the codification of the cinematic past, through the preservation of “filmic
memory.” New journals like Cinema-Theatre (Kinimatografos-Theatro, in
1960) attempted to introduce the French New Wave and the English
Free Cinema, while newspapers, such as the left-wing Democratic Change
(Dimokratiki Allagi, 1964–1967), offered the freedom to a young generation
of reviewers and cinema intellectuals not simply to evaluate films but to
reflect on their identity, form, and structure.
In 1963, a change in government led to fresh discussions about relaxing
censorship laws and promoting the financial support of local production.
However, film production itself was exhausting its expressive idiom through
the proliferation of inane slapstick comedies, urban melodramas, and
folkloric tragic idylls.
The 1960s were full of strong contradictions; despite the gradual
emergence of a new understanding in cinematic representation, influenced
mainly by the Nouvelle Vague in France and a certain degree of Italian
cinema, the superstar system became prevalent, arresting the development
of the medium and undermining its social function.
As they proliferated, new production companies wanted fresh faces in
order to promote their merchandise. So, new “cute” and “attractive” actors
were found and soon became the symbols of a populist cinema for the
masses. The most famous of these eventually became Aliki Vouyouklaki, a
local version of Doris Day or Brigitte Bardot, who, during the 1960s, was the
cult idol for the aspiring lower middle class that looked for entertainment,
escapism, and fun. Her movies (and from the early 1960s, they were essen-
tially movies tailored around her) had immense commercial success and
sold more tickets than all other movies combined, until her retirement from
cinema in 1981.
The truth is that Vouyouklaki’s own adventure in show business was
equally interesting. As we have seen, she started as an aspiring and talented
young actress in 1953 and played some very demanding roles in the early
stages of her career, as in her first film, Tsiforos and Asimakopoulos’ The
Little Mouse (To Pontikaki). Dimopoulos’ Madalena (1960) was a widely
recognized ethographic film which gained international recognition at the
Cannes Festival. It was an unpretentious representation of rural life, a fine
example of a good “popular” movie, combining coherent narrative plot and
wider ideological concerns within the simplicity of its story and the clarity of
its depiction—not dissimilar to Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) but without
its didactic political message. Furthermore, it presented Vouyouklaki as a
consummate actress; her appearance in this rural drama marked the peak of
her career as a performer.
The film framed Vouyouklaki through the pulsating cinematic eye of
Walter Lassally, the Englishman to whom we owe some of the most “authentic”
Greek images ever made. The story is set on a small Greek island during the
transition from the old sailing boats
to the new passenger steam boats.
Madalena and her family become
victims of modernization and
are on the brink of utter poverty;
yet the film explores the death of
traditional economies without
melodramatic sentimentalism and
with the directness of irrevocable
change, as well as with a sense of
optimism. With documentary-style
precision and realistic complexity,
Dimopoulos’ craftsmanship and
Lassally’s cinematography trans-
formed Vouyouklaki into a “tragic”
heroine who for once did not imper-
sonate herself as somebody else on
Dinos Dimopoulos, Madalena (1960). Courtesy, screen. As Lassally observed: “Aliki’s
Finos Films. Greek Film Archive Collection. character in Madalena was typical
of the kind of part she loved to play—active, independent, cheerful and

‘lovable.’”3 Unfortunately, this was the most she could achieve as an actor:
from then on she sacrificed her considerable talent for easy success and big
money.
In 1960, she also appeared in Alekos Sakellarios’ Maiden’s Cheeks (To
Xilo Vyike apo ton Paradeiso), a hilarious comedy of manners about high
school girls. The genuinely innocent story, the incredibly funny characters,
and the memorable punchlines of the dialogue, together with the sweet
melodious songs by Manos Hatzidakis, constructed some of the most inter-
esting comic situations ever produced in film. The resounding success of
this film, however, typecast Vouyouklaki to such a degree that until the end
of her life she would play only “girly” roles, which confirmed gender stereo-
types and re-articulated the feminine mystique as a life destined to be lived
in the kitchen.
The film itself was the most popular comedy ever made in Greece and
became an international success in Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, and India. It can
be enjoyed to this day as Vouyouklaki was surrounded by some of the best
comedians of the time who effectively counterbalanced the excesses of her
frivolous acting and narcissistic self-indulgence.
The Journey (To Taxidi, 1962) by Dinos Dimopoulos was her last good
film. It is a tragic story of love, betrayal, and sacrifice, as Vouyouklaki
plays the lover of a successful married man (the sexy Nikos Kourkoulos),
who decides to kill his wife in order to elope with her. However, the girl,
tormented by guilt, saves the wife at the last minute while she herself is fatally
wounded. The tragic end of the film determined its commercial failure since
Vouyouklaki lost her real audience: “children.”4 It was a movie for grown-up
people and for those who had taken the fatal step towards adulthood.
Her artistic “development” was proof of the dangers of the star system;
one that transformed good performers into opportunistic impersonators. As
for the system itself, the producer Filopimin Finos understood perfectly the
problem within the restrictions of a small market. In an interview in 1971 he
commented that he created “stars” for a very simple reason:
. . . Because of the non-existence of scripts. If I have a good script, I don’t
need a star. A mediocre script, however, which is supported by a star, will
make money. It is a necessary evil and there is no other way.5
The star system and the film industry converged with an unexpected movie,
internationally produced, which was to create the most enduring cinematic
legends of Greek cinema and Greek culture as a whole. Despite the fact that
it does not belong to Greek cinema proper, it would be unfair not to mention
the crucial contribution to the construction of “images about Greece” and
their impact on film production in the country by the American expatriate,
Jules Dassin (1911–2008).
Before being blacklisted in the United States, Dassin had directed

three great film noirs, one of which was The Thieves’ Highway (1949), based
on a book by the Greek-Armenian A. I. Bezzerides.6 Dassin had to move
to Europe, after the other Greek-American Elia Kazan, Dassin believed,
testified against him during the McCarthy investigations into the presumed
communist infiltration in Hollywood. While in Europe, he directed two
significant films: in England the delirious film noir Night and the City (1951),
and in France, Rififi (1955), two films of great suspense, tense atmosphere,
and narrative force.
In 1956 at the Cannes Film Festival, he met the star of Stella, Melina
Mercouri, and discovered his emotional home in her existential euphoria
and her motherland. The film which he directed for her and in which he
also starred was Never on Sunday (1960). The film reinvented in a subtle
yet subversive manner the way that “Greece” was represented in cinema.
Instead of choosing a charismatic individual as its main character, it opted
for a common prostitute from the industrial port of Piraeus. The script
was a modern retelling of the story of Pygmalion, but was poorly written
and utterly silly. Yet Dassin made the most of it and created an eloquent
metaphor for the archaeological pretensions of the official historicism of the
state, while, at the same time, focusing on the actual life of ordinary people.
The naive and jejune story about pimps, prostitutes and petty thieves is
set against the background of a bustling and vibrant city, where one could
still discern the scars of war and the struggle of everyday people for survival.
The crude retelling of ancient Greek tragedies by the main character Ilya
depicts how differently from the official line unschooled people understand
the history and culture of their nation. What dominates the plot is history
as oral performance and as a parodic representation of accepted ideas and
rituals. Classical ruins become the attractive backdrop for contemporary
prostitution: the place itself becomes the psychological focus of the film;
Jules Dassin, Never on Sunday (1960). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
hence the very successful song about the children of Piraeus which appears
so unexpectedly and without any real connection with the plot.
The film became an international success after Mercouri received
first prize at Cannes, (which she should have received for Stella) and the
composer Manos Hadjidakis the Oscar for best song in 1961.
Dassin was the first international director who not only made a number
of films in Greece, but also attracted international funds and casts for films in
the country. In 1962, on the island of Hydra, he filmed a modern adaptation
of Euripides’ Hippolytus story in his much underestimated Phaedra, starring
Anthony Perkins, Melina Mercouri, and Raf Vallone, which can be seen as
one of the first trans-national films made by an expatriate struggling to find
a new homeland.
Some special movies have to be mentioned, especially as tentative but
significant attempts towards film noir, which for Greece did not originate
in Hollywood but was mediated through its French appropriation. In these
films, the detective or the lonely policeman champions the “little man”
against the abuse of power by the pillars of society or the delusions of the
bourgeoisie. Under the story one can detect the very thinly veiled political
criticism, which was not allowed to be articulated.
Tzanis Aliferis’ Murder at Kolonaki (Englima sto Kolonaki, 1960)
addressed collaboration with the Germans under the guise of a detective
story in a powerful script by Yannis Maris, a Greek fusion of Raymond
Chandler and Georges Simenon. The theme of treason became here an
implied but not articulated subtext. Aliferis’ camera, framed by Aristidis
Karydis-Fuchs’ complex cinematography, worked through stark black and
white contrasts, as well as through the dark, ominous, and sinister streets
of Athens, to create the nocturnal aesthetics that dominate the film. Kostas
Kapnisis’ music was an exotic melange of diverse sounds that blended with
the slow but atmospheric action in an organic way, foregrounding some of
the most sensual and erotic scenes of the period. His music linked story and
audience in an agitated and highly ingenious way.
The critic Ion Ntaifas (b. 1927), an accomplished reviewer of movies,
released his most important work as a film-maker with the film noir, The
Killer Loved So Much (O Dolofonos Agapouse Poli, 1960). The film was based
on a very good script, which addressed in an indirect way the illicit activ-
ities, during the German occupation, of people who later became powerful
constituents of the Conservative Government.
It opens with an insert incredible for the times: “This film is a tribute to
the journalists who fight for justice and to the actors who struggle for high
artistic ideals.” Despite its weakness in continuity, it is a powerful document
of an era of persecution and fear, through its intense claustrophobic atmos-
phere and its expression of the untold secrets that were not allowed to be
articulated.
Another good film, indeed a must-see, in the same genre was Dinos
Katsouridis’ Backstage Crime (Englima sta Paraskinia, 1960), one of the most
atmospheric, expressionistic and dark films ever made in Greece, based
again on a Yannis Maris detective story. The murder of a leading actress leads
detective John Bekas to investigate people above suspicion and to uncover
the guilt for crimes committed in the recent past. Its exploration of the
Athenian underworld is masterfully depicted and suggestively underlined
by the peculiar musical score by Mimis Plessas, a brilliant mixture of jazz,
pop, and rock and roll. Katsouridis’ story unfolds through strange camera
angles with frantic movement, rapid changes of scene, and an accelerating
rhythm of narrative—this film brought Hitchcock’s style into Greek cinema.
It was also one of the very few Greek movies which found distribution in the
United States, and it can be considered one of the best artistic achievements
of cinema in the country.
Errikos Thalassinos’ Death Will Return (O Thanatos tha Xanarthei,
1961) was an incredibly intense film, made in the closed and confined spaces
of a huge tower and set on the island of Cyprus. The scars of the Second
World War and the betrayal of Jews play a considerable role in the unfolding
of the story. Argyris Kounadis’ music underlines the agony and the claustro-
phobia of the strange story of repressed desire, revenge and hatred: in the
final scene, piano music alternates with the police car siren, creating a tense
atmosphere of frenzy and insanity.
The best and most complex film of the genre came in 1961/62 when
Errikos Andreou (b. 1938) released his debut movie Nightmare (Efialtis).
This was an atmospheric and well-structured film noir about the double
personality of a woman who lives isolated in a hotel: a mirror functions as the
catalyst for her second, murderous, personality to emerge. Psychoanalytically,
the film attempts the visual representation of the sexual panic that the female
body causes in the masculine gaze. The oval-shaped omnipotent mirror
resembles both the eye that looks into the realm of human motives and the
depthless, cavernous vagina ready to devour the masculine intruder. Indeed,
the film is about the desire of a woman to possess, or destroy, the male gaze,
or the penis, as an instrument of violence, domination, and murder.
The action is extremely tense and the psychological subversions highly
challenging. Karydis-Fuchs’ camera creates an atmosphere of urban unreality
full of illusions, reflections, and phantoms. The voodoo dance scene is
probably one of the most evocative and impressive mise-en-scènes in Greek
cinema, with real nudity and fascinating music. At the same time, the camera
moves at a fast pace through an effective use of chiaroscuro, reminiscent of
the original Scarface (1932) and Double Indemnity (1944). Mimis Plessas’
music, with its idiosyncratic melange of rock, jazz, and African tunes, made
this film quite unique, a complex filmic text which needs more attention,
especially for its possible psychoanalytic readings.
Errikos Andreou, Nightmare (1961). Greek Film Archive Collection.
To the same genre belongs Gregoris Gregoriou’s Doubts (Amfivolies,

1964), a gripping psychological drama with tense gender psychodynamics
overflowing with female sexuality. The subtexts of sexual abstinence and
repression, foregrounded by Kostas Klavas’ jazzy music based on wind
instruments and xylophones, creates a bizarre and dark film of considerable
stylistic accomplishment and compositional depth.
Finally, another interesting film noir must be included: Kostas
Andritsos’ Scream (Kraugi, 1964), with its atmospheric dark settings,
ingenious script by Nikos Foskolos and intricate subplots, all underlined
by the bizarre juxtaposition of sounds by Yorgos Katsaros (incorporating
train sounds with jazz tunes). This was narrative cinema at its best as it
focused on the story itself and the atmosphere surrounding the action.
The nocturnal expressionist aesthetics of mise-en-scène dominated the
film, highlighting the sexual tension, displaced desires, and unconscious
motives of its characters. A constantly postponed wedding, a tense
relationship between brother and sister, an absent father, and a strange
relationship between a younger man and an older woman (“Some say
that I should be your mother”) made this film an exploration in sexual
repression. Unfortunately, Andritsos never repeated this remarkable
achievement.
During 1961 and 1962, about 70 films were produced, mostly melodramas
and comedies. However, political crisis and social unrest led to a new approach
to authority and tradition. One can detect a deep interest in revisiting history
and its legacy as an implied critique of the local political establishment.
In 1961, Elli Nezeriti, released her only movie, The Stranger of the Night
(O Xenos tis Nihtas), a war drama about a British soldier’s time in Mykonos
during the Italian occupation. The director of photography was Giovanni
Varriano, an Italian who stayed in Greece after the war and who contributed
to the production of many films. Despite the fact that Nezeriti did not pursue
her film career further, her movie depicted a solid and dynamic style.
During the same year, we must mention the release of the first experi-
mental, avant-garde film of Greek cinema, John Kontes’ The Hands (Ta
Heria). It was a film without story or dialogue, based on the cinematic explo-
ration of how human hands express emotions and states of mind.
The magisterial black tragicomedy Hands Up, Hitler (Psila ta Heria,
Hitler, 1961) was made by Roveros Manthoulis. It was a nostalgic look at
the recent past as collective memory and, as such, an attempt to understand
what happened during the German occupation. In a characteristic scene,
the German soldiers who take photographs in front of the Parthenon chase
away the redundant and ordinary “modern” Greek who is passing by. Yet the
political implications for the present were obvious: at the peak of the mass
migration to other countries, organized by the government, Greeks felt like
strangers in their own homeland, like picturesque images for tourists and
case studies for experts.
A film that had a deep impact in 1961 was the historical documentary by
Vassilis Maros released under the title The Tragedy of the Aegean (I Tragodia
tou Aigaiou). It was a historical reconstruction of the greatest events of Greek
history from 1900 to the end of the Civil War (1949). Maros (1929–2002)
put together the most important reels filmed by the early cinematographers,
such as Prokopiou, Hepp, Gaziadis, Loggos, and Finos. It was an unset-
tling critical look at the recent past, with an ironic and occasionally acerbic
commentary, the first ever cinematic reflection on the experience of history
not simply as political narrative but as felt reality by the common people. The
predicament of these people is apparent throughout the film which, despite
its documentary form, can be seen as a grand epic of hope and destruction
and, as such, an indirect indictment of the political establishment which
persistently and consciously betrays the expectations of its own citizens.
Mitropoulou considers this film, which provoked fierce reactions and was
heavily censored on account of its critical stance towards the ruling elite, as
“the first historical and political film of Greek cinema.”7
Yorgos Tzavellas released the first attempt since 1927 to film ancient
Greek tragedy in his multi-award-winning Antigone (1961), a film that
established the international status of the actress Irene Papas (b. 1926). The
cinematic translation of the quintessential ancient Greek tragedy was a risky
and unpredictable experiment. Tzavellas was the master of internal spaces,
bourgeois formalism, and introspective understatement. Here he had to
reinvent his own visual idiom and create for Sophocles’ tragedy a cinematic
public space by reconfiguring its structure. He filmed on location, giving
the ancient chorus a powerful presence, using the language of the common
people and transforming the solemnity of the tragic ritual into a vibrant and
lively realistic confrontation. The film managed to balance naturalism and
archetypal time. It is the most expressionistic of his works; soft focus and
long shots create a sense of distance, indicating the mythic dimension of
the story, and yet the tangibility of images and distinctness of human form
articulate a relief-like depth. Irene Papas’ performance as Antigone was one
of the best of her career, while Manos Katrakis (1908–1984) as Creon gave a
mesmerizing performance of awe-inspiring terribilitas.
In the same year, Cacoyannis produced the underrated poetic gaze of
Eroica (1961), a film that depicted the indeterminacy of adolescent sexuality
and the nostalgia for a lost childhood through the soft use of camera, sparse
dialogue, and the slow pace of narrative. The film was a contemplative and
imaginative recreation of the innocence and purity of youth before it is thrown
into the world of adult social roles and taken captive by the cruelty of history. It
was based on a popular novel by Kosmas Politis (1888–1974), which recreated
the last years of growing up in Smyrna before the great Catastrophe. Its form is
reminiscent of Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), and Walter Lassally’s camera recreates
with immense sensitivity and affection the motifs of lost innocence and lost
homeland, intertwined through a magnificent use of slightly unfocused, hazy
frames, which record a remembered past with empathy, reserve, and despair.
It is certainly not irrelevant to see the connection between this film and
Cacoyannis’ next, which was to become an international success, the ingenious
and magisterial filming of Euripides’ Electra (1962).
Cacoyannis’ Electra was a major formal achievement whose influence
can be discerned in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
and Medea (1969), and Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love (1974). It is probably
his ultimate cinematic masterpiece, a visual translation of ancient tragedy
through the practices of Russian formalists and specifically Eisenstein’s and
Dovzhenko’s theories of montage and editing.
Walter Lassally’s contribution to this film cannot be understated. During
the same period, he worked with Tony Richardson on films such as A Taste
Michael Cacoyannis, Eroica (1960). Courtesy, Michael

of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom
Jones (1963), which inaugurated the British New Wave. His cinematography,
with its crisp pragmatism and preference for foregrounding the immediate
and tangible, counterbalanced the symbolic, mythical, and archetypal story.
With its strong tonal ranges of black and white, Lassally’s camera created
dense contrasts and juxtapositions of forms through subtle movements that
made the camera itself participate in the story; indeed, through its sensitive
immobility the camera becomes the ubiquitous eye that guides the viewer
through the intricate psychological complexities of the story. As Lassally
explained:
I chose to film all the day exteriors in Electra through a deep red filter,
which gives a high contrast image with near black skies and we went for
very formal and somewhat stark compositions that filled the frame to its
very edges.8
Furthermore, it was a risky experiment to transfer the closed settings of the

theatrical stage to the natural world of an endless sky. As critic Andonis
Moshovakis observed, “The transfer of action to open nature” makes natural
elements, the landscape, and weather patterns integral parts of cinematic
representation.9 Cacoyannis himself elaborated:
I didn’t try to reconstruct Electra in time, but to denude her of time.
Searching for the common links between present and past, I didn’t look for
a common quality but for a fundamental identity; I didn’t search for what
survived but for what never ceased being alive . . . I started inevitably from
the landscape, which through its unmitigated abstraction predetermined
the most austere life measure for body and soul. I tried to penetrate time
through the living perception of the past.10
Michael Cacoyannis, Electra (1962). Courtesy, Michael

For his part, Cacoyannis brought everything together: image, sound, and
silence. Indeed, at the most crucial moments, silence takes over action, while
the archetypal figures of tragedy emerges in the viewer’s subconscious in
all their psychological force. Mikis Theodorakis’ music unsettles the viewer
with its tense sounds, constructed by elemental instruments, mostly percus-
sions, xylophones, and harpsichord, in an effort to create a ritual rhythm of
solemnity and gravitas.
The theme of the tragedy is matricide—a topic which is the ultimate
taboo in all Mediterranean societies. A sexually active mother and her virile
and promiscuous lover “castrate” both brother and sister, Orestes (Yannis
Fertis) and Electra (Irene Papas), after the lovers kill their father. Such a
psychoanalytic background creates the suffocating atmosphere of guilt
and angst that permeates the film as the children struggle to avenge their
father’s murder. They both feel disgusted by and attracted to the animalistic
vitality of their mother’s lover (Fivos Razis), and want revenge from while
at the same time being bound to their mother by the psychic bonds of their
emotional umbilical cord. Love and hate struggle within them and they feel
neutralized by their conflicting emotions.
In a powerful scene, the mother (hauntingly performed by Aleka
Katseli) is isolated in a dark and circular hovel where her son Orestes is
lurking to kill her. The camera avoids showing the killing, but such ellipsis
makes the act more horrible and blasphemous. In this Freudian scene, the
ritual murder becomes a miasma, a horrible act that needs purification and
atonement. Yet there is no redemption: the children destroy their maternal
beginning and are condemned to an existence without a home to return
to. This film consummated the ultimate themes of Cacoyannis’ cinema:
troubled families, castrated children, and lost homelands.
Obviously, the tragedy was an apt metaphor for the indeterminate
realities of modern life. An “absent” father lurks in the background as
the phantom of peace and stability. His children, dispersed and confused,
struggle to come to terms with loss and trauma. At the same time, they
know the cause of their loss, but their inability to act demoralizes them in
a self-castrating way. The dominant mother, full of power and self-confi-
dence, reduces them to a life of insignificance. When they act, they destroy
themselves—a double exile awaits them, estrangement from their family
hearth and from their country.
The film was Cacoyannis’ response to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh
Seal (1956), a film about the silence of history and the death of God.
(Interestingly enough, left-wing film-maker and critic Dimitris Stavrakas
criticized Electra for its “Scandinavian photography” and “Babylonian
costumes.”)11 It was a humanist’s answer to the major questions of postwar
Europe and to the criminal mentality that seized power with the rise of
totalitarianism. The criminals were the people we loved—our kin, our
blood. How could ordinary people confront the terrible consequences of a

knowledge that revealed the criminal as a family member and the crime as
their birth certificate? It was no longer the silence of God or of history that
rendered individual life meaningless, it was the absence of the will to act, the
voluntary resignation from moral valuation through action, which destroyed
all kinds of meaning.
Electra was the masterpiece of anthropocentric morality, exploring the
human ability yet reluctance to make rational choices in an era of existential
anomie and amoral depersonalization. At the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, it
won only technical awards competing with Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Jean
d’ Arc (1961) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1961)—parallels with
Bresson’s film can be easily drawn. A contrast with Tyrone Guthrie’s Oedipus
Rex (1957) or even Pasolini’s Marxist Edipo Re (1967) or his Freudian Medea
can show how more effectively Cacoyannis worked with ancient tragedy and
the problems of representing its moral message today.
With this great movie, as its dialectical antithesis and complement,
one must juxtapose Nikos Koundouros’ Young Aphrodites (Mikres Afrodites,
1963). If in Tzavellas’ Antigone, as composed by the aristocratic sublimity
of Sophocles, there were no common people, and in Cacoyannis’ Electra, as
written by the rebellious mind of Euripides, there was only one good-hearted
commoner, Koundouros’ movie was about only anonymous, unexceptional,
and insignificant people. Neoclassicism had convinced everyone that ancient
Greece was about the perfection of form and the grandeur of ethical virtues
achieved by great men mostly and a few exceptional women. The plight and
the life of the common people were always buried under the mythology of
wisdom, temperance, and magnanimity usually associated with the classical
worldview.
With Young Aphrodites, Koundouros went against the trend of an
idealistic and idealized understanding of the classical world. His film was
about the life of ordinary folks as it unfolded around the grand histories of
Oedipus and Troy: it unravelled a story that was never written and was never
considered worthy of being told.
Koundouros’ story, loosely based on Longos’ Daphnis and Chloe, is set in
archaic Greece, around 200bc, where a group of nomadic shepherds settles
for a few weeks close to the sea. Love affairs develop between two couples,
only to be interrupted by the departure of the nomads, with one young man
left behind broken-hearted. The script is skeletal and the dialogue minimal:
the style of representation is sparse and geometric, with simple gestures,
facial expressions, and costumes. The human body appears almost totally
nude; no moral pronouncements are declared, and no rituals of redemption
or catharsis are performed. Only the voice of desire, inarticulate, raw, and
elemental permeates the film, as the couples try to explore their bodies,
control their lust, and enjoy their mutual attraction.
Nikos Koundouros, Young Aphrodites (1963). Greek Film

Archive Collection. Credit: DVD
Koundouros’ cinematographer Giovanni Varriano was equally magis-

terial in the way he used deep and close-up takes, and the seamless
transitions from one scene to the other, based on emblematic shots that
framed evocative individual sequences—the image of the young boy holding
the dead swan of equal size to him was probably the ultimate symbol of
Koundouros’ poetic realism.12 This was a wonderful gesture towards Laskos’
Daphnis and Chloe, as reimagined by the radicalism of Kostas Sfikas who
co-scripted Young Aphrodites with Vassilis Vassilikos, but technical progress
and magnificent camera movement transformed the simple story into a
brilliant exploration of the uncivilized self that lies beneath the veneer of
social etiquette. As in his other films, Koundouros’ heroes were not on a
pedestal or the Parthenon frieze, having won immortality through aesthetic
perfection and stylistic elegance; they were eternal in their triviality and
triteness, because of their earthy existence and attachment to the world of
immediate objects and in their banal struggle for survival.
The anonymous characters were people defined not by class, power,
or status, but by their desires, bodies, and emotions. As Koundouros said,
“This is a film about ideological nothingness . . . and its narrative is the
narrative of silent films.”13 The archaic simplicity of space converted human
forms into ideograms and “icons” through the denuding of the architectural
composition of all emotional rhetoric. The bare geometry of forms, sounds,
and movements with its hypnotic symmetries, like Pythagorean harmonics,
against the canvas of a cruel, indifferent, and omnivorous nature made this
film an extraordinary achievement of abstract lyricism and formal austerity.
This was a film about the history of anonymity; full of warmth, empathy, and
understanding, celebrating Koundouros’ one and only hero, Everyman.
Yet the defining film of the 1960s, indeed of the whole of Greek
cinema (for better or worse) was the international production of Zorba the
Greek directed by Cacoyannis (1964). Because of its cast, production, and
distribution, the film defined the international image of Greece, and its
presumed social mentality still crystallize specific ways of looking at Greek
reality to this day.
Zorba the Greek is usually judged negatively; especially today when
the image of the crafty and resourceful village philosopher or village
fool that Zorba came to represent have imploded and all but vanished.
Yet around this demonic figure, so ambiguously performed by a frenetic
Anthony Quinn, Cacoyannis represented a universe of moral and psycho-
logical ambiguities replete with fear and panic. The adaptation of Nikos
Kazantzakis’ novel is more or less successful as a cinematic translation
of a work composed around philosophical dialogue, complex narrative
structure, and highly abstract speculation. Cacoyannis totally ignored
the central themes of the book, such as the strenuous intellectual effort
of the Boss to write a play entitled Buddha. He also omitted altogether
the stoic ethic of self-restraint and temperance that permeate the book
in favor of the epicurean celebration of euphoric exuberance and sensual
excess.
The film is uneven, as it can be seen as a series of loosely connected
episodes appearing out of nowhere in an attempt to move from the individual
to the community and to construct a fresco of their interaction. Emanuel Levy
notes that “the film is uneven due to Cacoyannis’ plodding direction, resulting
in a structurally shapeless film, despite great on-location shoots and melodic
score from Mikis Theodorakis.”14 Zorba is comically spectacular and dominates
each scene with an almost Luciferian presence which often borders on the
ridiculous; yet the episodic stories that unfold around him, like the widow’s
assassination, the presence of foreigners, the influence of institutional religion,
and the hidden reality of madness in small communities, are depicted with an
accomplished and stark realism and through a puzzled and inquisitive gaze.
Michael Cacoyannis, Zorba the Greek. Courtesy, Michael

Cacoyannis Foundation. Greek Film Archive Collection.
These qualities are unfortunately underestimated if the movie is judged on

the basis of its euphoric and somehow annoying syrtaki dance ending. Yet as
Thanasis Agathos concluded in his study on the relationship between book and
film, the movie’s continued success “confirms the dialogic character of a genuine
work of art, through its endless and enchanting journey through time.”15
Like the book, the film was a fable about the human mind losing its
certainties and expectations within a world of unpredictable occurrences
and imponderable factors. The depiction of the organic unity of the village
was almost Kafkaesque, as the monochrome photography by Walter Lassally
created a composition of archetypal animism, dominating the minds of
people who saw culture as a threat to the established “natural” order. Lassally
used strong contrasts of black and white, but of different shades and hues, in
such an ingenious way that some shots look like choreographed emotions—
the stylistic unity he achieved was something unique and unsurpassed to this
day.16 (Lassally won an Oscar for his cinematography in 1965.)
Zorba marked a further step in Cacoyannis’ exploration of the human
form: the camera moved from the face and the body, encircling the form
and adding depth to the frame, elevating through its sculptural realism
the completeness of the human figure to the level of a powerful symbol of
presence and rationality. Within the context of a Greek society overshadowed
by persecution and fear, the movie itself became a symbol of relentless
resistance, optimism, and hope. At the same time, it further investigated the
formal juxtaposition of the landscape and the human, exploring the structur-
alist duality of nature and culture in an extremely direct and powerful way.
The absence of all religious sensibility or awe, feelings that permeated the
novel, was another striking characteristic of the film, criticizing indirectly
the ossified ritualistic and amoral practices of rural communities.
The film also explored female sexuality in a world of masculine predators,
frustrated sexual energy, and social hypocrisy. The ultimate symbol of decay
and loss, the character of Madame Hortanse, so touchingly performed by the
Oscar-winning Lila Cendrova, was one of the most humane and profound
depictions of human mortality in world cinema and at the same time a
powerful image of female sexuality as the cultural and corporeal other in
societies where there is no place for otherness.
The brief scene in the rain when the constantly confused Alan Bates
offers his umbrella to the distressed widow, performed with elemental
nobility by Irene Pappas, shows Cacoyannis’ extremely subtle and sophis-
ticated attention to detail: redemption comes through such small acts of
Chekhovian generosity and kindness.
Through such well-hidden subtexts, Cacoyannis avoided statements
about identity; exploring instead the visual language of a self that is neither
in crisis nor deprived of its unity, but which struggles to balance itself
over the thin line between rationality and insanity. Nature provided the
indifferent and unsympathetic background for the unfolding of collective

and individual tragedy: yet destruction is life too, the mind that falls into
insanity is the mind that transcends its own madness through creative
sublimation.
Zorba was a film about the quest for certainty in an era of anxiety engen-
dered by the silence of God and the death of all revolutionary projects: the
only certainty that a human being can have is that of his or her corporeality.
The stoic ethics of self-mastery as well as the epicurean ethics of sensual
pleasure presuppose the primacy of the body. The euphoria of being alive and
the meeting of some remarkable people compensate for the violence, horror,
and chaos of history. Cacoyannis transformed this “mental psychodrama”
into the representation of a heightened embodied presence by representing
the invisible networks of undercurrent libidinal attractions, intense gestural
expressiveness and the realm of post-linguistic communication.
On the other hand, Mikis Theodorakis’ score reinvented the music
industry in Greece and established a horizon of expectations for the “people”
that Zorba supposedly represented. Undoubtedly, in the film there are more
subtexts than its music has come to suggest. Unfortunately, the commerciali-
zation of its music has contributed to misleading interpretations of both film
and novel. Indeed, the problem with this movie was its final outcome, which
raised many important questions for the function of cinematic products
in contemporary societies: for some inexplicable reason, the character
of Zorba commodified the notion of “Greekness” and made “Zorba” the
powerful money- spinning symbol of an amoral, noble savage, of an exotic
phallocrat who titillated the senses of an international audience and excited
the repressed sexual imagination of European and American housewives. As
Robert D. Kaplan remarked, after this film, “Greece was where you came to
lose your inhibitions.”17
The movie has been appreciated more from the point of view of the
expectations of its audience and less on the basis of its actual structure. One
could go so far as to claim that such commercial success worked against
Cacoyannis’ overall cinematic achievement and culminated in his inability
to do anything similar or of equal value later in his career. Artistically, it was
a disastrous success and arrested Cacoyannis’ evolution as a film-maker.
His subsequent films have been but pale reflections of a brilliant cinematic
achievement that began in 1954 and ended ten years later when Zorba’s
spectacular success gave him enough self-confidence to kill his eye for
significant form and differentiating detail.
The Revenge of History: 1960–1965

Zorba’s international success turned the eyes of the world to the internal
politics of Greece at a very peculiar and anomalous period. Between 1963
and 1967, Greek society suffered an intense political crisis. The Conservative
Government of ERE, under the leadership of Constantine Karamanlis, which
had been in power since 1955, was increasingly unable to deal with the
growing social tensions created by intense industrialization and unplanned
urbanization. Greece signed up for the European Common Market in 1961,
but democratization and liberalization were necessary prerequisites for the
ultimate fruition of the project. (Greece eventually joined the EU in 1981.)
The Communist Party, however, was still banned, while many political
dissidents were either imprisoned or exiled. Secret, state-sponsored nation-
alistic and ultra-conservative militias kept society under strict surveillance
and in a state of open terror. The notorious elections of “violence and
fraud” in October 1961 gave the Conservative Party a precarious mandate
to govern, which became untenable as the conflicts within the party itself
intensified. The most infamous incident associated with such secret militias
was the assassination of the deputy of the Left Grigoris Lambrakis in
Thessaloniki on May 27, 1963. The truth about the culprits was revealed
by the sense of duty, or simple personal stubbornness, of the local attorney,
Hristos Sartzetakis, who would resurface in the 1980s, for the wrong reasons.
The event was immediately transformed into a book by Vassilis Vassilikos
and later adapted to the screen by the expatriate Costa-Gavras under the title
Z (1968).
Karamanlis himself was politically damaged by the inability of his
government to control the right-wing extremists, despite his good inten-
tions. In a moment of frustration, he uttered one of the most indicative cries
of despair to have ever been expressed by a prime minister in a (quasi-)
democratic society: “At last! Who is governing this country?” Continuing
social unrest through strikes, demonstrations and open confrontations with
the police made obvious the fact that society had turned against the state
and its oppressive apparatuses, and that a deep division existed between the
body politic and the institutional framework of a society as it was entering a
phase of economic recovery. In November 1963, Karamanlis fled the country
under a pseudonym and remained in self-imposed exile in Paris until 1974.
The Conservatives lost the election in November 1963, and a new centre-left
coalition under Yorgos Papandreou received the majority to govern. The
period is referred to as “the Lost Spring,” as its optimism and great expecta-
tions floundered tragically with the coming of the military dictatorship on
April 21, 1967.
Internal divisive factions and external influences derailed the process
of democratization. In February 1964, Papandreou renewed his mandate
to govern, despite the interventions of King Paul and Queen Frederica,
a looming crisis in Cyprus, and the CIA-sponsored subversion of his
authority. At a critical moment, in July 1965, at the instigation of the new
King Constantine and under the leadership of the future prime minister
Constantine Mitsotakes, a number of Papandreou’s MPs defected in a

notorious act which has been called ever since “the Apostasy”. As a conse-
quence, the coalition lost its majority and was forced to resign. After this
event, a number of weak governments appointed by the young and inexpe-
rienced King failed to gain a vote of confidence at the Assembly. Strikes and
mass rallies became the obvious symptoms of a deepening constitutional
crisis regarding the distinct authorities of the Parliament and the Monarch.
After a year of anarchy, the Dictatorship of the Colonels was imposed in
April 1967 which brought an abrupt but foreseeable end to the aspirations
for social renewal and democratization.
As such political dramas were unfolding, social reality was permeated
by a profound instability. The Cold War and the Cyprus dispute created
a prolonged crisis of political legitimacy for the Greek government.
Meanwhile, the right-wing extremist Deep State was organizing provocation
acts to undermine parliament’s authority to govern. The certainty that
something surreptitious was taking place under one’s very nose was one of
the permeating characteristics of the period. Furthermore, the social crisis
involved a new sense of loss and displacement as hundreds of thousands
of young people, especially from rural areas, migrated to the United States,
Canada, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Australia. Emigration had already
started after the Civil War but it became a systematic state policy after
1954 through bilateral agreements with many countries, thereby depriving
Greece of its most productive labour force at the most crucial moment of its
reconstruction.
The cultural production of the period expressed, together with the
feeling of sinister presences, the reality of people leaving or people already
gone to remote lands and abandoning a traumatized country as it was
confronting its recent history and in the fluid process of renegotiating its
cultural memory. It is estimated that around 700,000 people migrated during
the 1960s from an average population of 8,300,000 between 1960 and 1970.
The cultural imaginary of the period, in literature, popular culture, or
cinema was permeated by images of empty villages, anonymous faces on
transatlantic liners at Piraeus harbor, and an atmosphere of melancholia
over the people who remained behind. The theme of exile became dominant
again in the popular films of the period, especially those produced by Klak
Films, as well as in the songs that made them successful and memorable. A
rebetiko song from the 1950s by Markos Vamvakaris beautifully captures
this theme in the lyrics, “Much have my eyes seen, and I’ve been through
storms/ as I’ve travelled alone in foreign lands./ Always alone, no one was
ever there for me/ who had so much trouble hidden in my heart.” As Stathis
Gauntlett observed, “The already durable popularity of exile as a theme for
Greek songs was thus extended at a time when Greek migration changed
destinations but not intensity.”18
Towards the New Greek Cinema

The crisis in politics led to a revision of cultural memory, especially in the
way that it interpreted the past. The revision was profound and led to a new
role for cinema. The screen became the site of a revelation, of a disclosure
and an unveiling, and, as such, it was a political act and intervention. That
which permeated society as a suppressed and excluded knowledge found new
forms of expression—not coded and implied, but transparent, immediate,
and precise. The young directors of the 1960s had to invent a new kind of
realism in order to address the urgent needs of such a volatile environment,
as well as to depict the frightening ambiguities that had shattered a society
struggling to free itself from the legacy of the Civil War and the oppression
of the 1950s. This seemed possible only after 1963 when the centre-left
government was elected. During the next three years, the government took
critical steps to give incentives for Greek movies: it lowered taxation on
ticket sales and reinvested a considerable amount of what was collected as
tax revenue in the industry. These crucial years paved the way for the New
Greek Cinema which would emerge and flourish after 1970.
The central themes of the most interesting films of the early 1960s
concerned the new urban reality mainly in Athens, the traumas of recent
history, and the continuing waves of migration. Alekos Alexandrakis’ The
Suburb of Dreams (Sinoikia to Oneiro, 1961) must be mentioned for its stark
realism and bleak atmosphere and its depiction of the poverty and squalor
dominating the Greek capital—one of best expressions of neorealism and
one of the least recognized films of Greek cinema. The camera cleverly
indulges itself over ruined houses, human misery, and the obscene wealth
of the ruling class. It is a didactic camera, exposing and denouncing social
injustice with moralistic passion. The film, in spite of its shortcomings, was
Alekos Alexandrakis, The Suburb of Dreams (1961). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
a call to rebellion through a rediscovery of the radical humanism in the

working-class experience. It was a film of idealization by all means, indeed
of a polemic against high culture, but its exploration of the ethical nature of
the downtrodden and the marginalized offered a completely different social
vision to the mainstream audience of the period.
Maria Plyta’s brilliant work The Little Shoe-Shine Boy (O Loustrakos,
1962) depicted a strange and uncontrollable reality full of dark secrets and
terrifyingly invisible structures, which revolved around a young character
who simply tries to survive in a sprawling megalopolis. Alone, abandoned,
and mistreated, the innocent child reverts to tears, thus recreating the
mentality that dominated the violently urbanized populations—that of a
defeatist victimization. The audience identified with such “little men,” since
displacement was an overpowering emotion that disconnected them from
the urban relations of a growing capitalist society, and which left them
mourning their dead and grieving for those leaving as migrants. But now,
however, Plyta had abandoned the strong female characters of the previous
decade and made stylistic concessions to the dominant visual styles imposed
by the studios. Unfortunately, as her style matured, the common themes of
her melodramas lost their intensity and emotional force. Her last film, The
Unknown Woman of the Night (I Agnosti tis Nihtas, 1969), was technically
impeccable, but formulaic, trite, and dull. Afterwards, her melodramas were
either forgotten or looked upon with derision.
Gregoris Gregoriou released his underrated Brother Anna (Adelfos Anna)
in 1963. The story was set in a remote monastery in which, according to
legend, the first cross made by the Emperor Constantine after his conversion
was held. Disguised as archaeologists, a group of thieves arrive at the
monastery to steal the cross, but instead of stealing treasures of the past they
discover the secrets of the present: the young boy entrusted with the secret is
found to be a girl, indeed a Jewish girl who had been hidden in the monastery
since the 1940s. A strange love affair blossoms between the girl and the leader
of the smugglers, played with overwhelming emotional intensity by Petros
Fyssoun. The film was heavily censored since religious morality was for the
first time visualized with vague inferences of pedophilia and sexual abuse.
Indeed, that was the original notion of an English journalist, who spent many
months in the monastic community of Mount Athos—even the story of the
Jewish girl was left unexplored because of the censorship.
Overall, in its attempt to deal with the religious establishment and
to address the commonly known secrets of the monasteries, the impact
of the film became contradictory, as its story, while left incomplete and
somewhat fragmented, still resonated with suggestive cinematography,
anxious narrative, and evocative music.
Amok (1963) was an extraordinary movie made by Dinos Dimopoulos
with the directorial assistance of Pandelis Voulgaris (b. 1940), who was later to
become one of the principal architects of the New Greek Cinema. Amok also
featured Nikos Kavoukidis making his debut as director of photography. The
movie inaugurated a less-terrified but deeply critical look at the recent past in
an attempt to reassess it under the prism of the new political environment.
The story is about a group of girls who escape from a reform centre and
find refuge on a remote island. One of the girls, a Jew, has lost all her family
in Thessaloniki. A group of Germans arrive, ostensibly to excavate for ancient
ruins, but in reality only to discover the treasures of their Jewish war victims.
The conflict between them escalates; the younger German falls in love with
the Jewish girl and they escape together after his Nazi father is killed. The
movie was censored and was considered “bold,” with nudity and scenes
of brutal rape and ruthless cruelty. It was the first movie to overtly depict
racism, sexual violence and anti-Semitism. It was also extremely successful
in the United States, one of the very few Greek films which made a profit for
its producer (Finos Films), selling for the unprecedented amount of $20,000.
Kostas Manousakis’ (1935–2005) monumental Treason (Prodosia, 1964)
uses the same theme. The movie was about the extermination of Greek Jews,
told through the story of a German soldier who, after having discovered
that his Greek lover was Jewish, betrayed her to the Gestapo. Through inter-
cuttings between authentic footage from the German occupation and the
narrative, Manousakis made one of the most successful movies of the decade
on such a previously unexplored topic, and before any other Holocaust
movie.
It was criticized for its fascination with the military might of the
Nazis, as reflected in its frequent use of clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s films.
(Some critics even called it a “hymn to Nazism.”) However, Manousakis
merely exposed the hollowness of such parades, juxtaposing the exhibi-
tions of collective grandeur with the manifestations of individual meanness.
Dinos Dimopoulos, Amok (1963). Courtesy, Finos Films. Greek

Furthermore, through addressing the extermination of the Jews, he explored

the genocidal mentality and the subconscious ways in which Nazi ideology
influenced human behavior after the war. The movie represented Greece at
the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and became commercially successful—
showing that even controversial topics could reach wide audiences.
Gregoriou continued with a brilliant historical epic, probably the only film
of the period which deserves to be classified as such. The Expulsion (O Diogmos,
1964) was a monumental production linking the Asia Minor Catastrophe to the
plight of refugees during the German occupation. A group of Greeks escape
from the Germans and find refuge in Turkey. There they are compelled to wait
at a detention centre until their deportation to the Middle East; the officer in
charge of the centre is a greedy and sadistic individual who exploits them for
money and jewelry. Yet he develops a fascination for a middle-aged woman
who in the end is revealed to be his mother lost from the 1922 Catastrophe.
It was a drama of recognition which attempted to investigate the predic-
ament of common people who survive under conditions of displacement
and psychological dislocation. The issue of identity and belonging became
dominant in the film: “I am neither a Turk nor a Greek,” says the main
character. “Do I belong to anything or to anyone?” The film’s representation
of the Turks was ambivalent, both negative and sympathetic, with the main
criticism aimed at those in authority.19
The Expulsion was produced by the Greek-American James Paris,
who for the next ten years would become the main producer of patriotic
melodramas. Gregoriou continued his work with some great melodramas
that carried traces of neorealism and film noir, as in Desires in the Cursed
Swamp (Pothoi ston Katarameno Balto, 1966), A Woman is Accused (Mia
Ginaika Katigorite, 1966), and Red-light District 67 (Truba 67), before
making some exciting films in the service of the dictatorship’s ideology.
The most interesting movie of this revisionist trend, however, was made
by the expatriate Adonis (Ado) Kyrou. In his brief return in 1964, Kyrou
made his only Greek movie, The Roundup (To Bloko, 1965), touching on two
sides of a very controversial issue: Greek resistance and collaboration with
the Germans, a topic that was hotly debated in France, his adopted country,
during the same period. Despite its minimal budget and technical faults,
the film tried to deal with the lingering trauma of the German occupation
through a kind of gritty, sombre and austere realism.
On August 17, 1944, the Germans and their collaborators rounded
up 20,000 men at the central square of the Athenian suburb of Kokinnia
(meaning “the red area”) where many communists lived, and executed
300 people in front of the civilian population, while deporting 1,200 more
who were to die later in German concentration camps. The events were so
brutal and vile that they remained indelible in the memories of the people
of Athens; all the more so because the Germans acted with Greeks, who,
having concealed their faces beneath black hoods, singled out communists
or members of the resistance for execution. Many of these collaborators
were never punished and became wealthy and powerful, especially after the
communist defeat. The film was the very first occasion that such exposure
took place and it became an objectified representation in the public domain.
It was also strange aesthetically, since Kyrou, as a French thinker, was
famous for his criticism of realist cinema (as understood by André Bazin)
and his preference for surrealist and erotic films. It seems that his unreserved
endorsement of Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1957) inspired him to deal with the
ghosts of his own youth and country. Kyrou praised Kanal “because it is neither
bathed in blissful optimism nor false pessimism, because it sees both cruelty and
the absurd, because it draws from this an immense joie de vivre.”20 Despite his
anti-realist pronouncements, back in Greece the former member of the resistance
directed one of the most gripping and fascinating realist movies ever made in the
country and in Europe; a movie that certainly deserves further study.
Kyrou filmed The Roundup at the location where the viewer could still
see the disastrous marks of the past. At the same time, many collaborators
during the occupation, now in high positions of power, could recognize
themselves in the movie and could feel its political edge pointing to them.
The movie belonged to a tradition of “cruel realism” which Greek audiences
had not been permitted to see before. In one of its most terrifying scenes,
men with their faces covered under black hoods point their fingers within
a crowd of thousands to individuals who had participated in the resistance:
the film was as real in its impact as were the real events themselves. Nothing
similar had ever been depicted before: the horror was engendered by the
image of Greeks betraying other Greeks, by the cruelty and the vulgarity of
the Germans, by the banality and the immorality of the collaborators.
Adonis Kyrou, The Roundup (1965). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
In spite of all this, Kyrou depicted how life still goes on: a child steals
food from the Germans, a German soldier breaks a mirror as he looks at his
reflection, and a woman in love tries to make good coffee for the man she
has lost to another woman.
And at the end of the film we see a different brand of tragic chorus: the
women whose relatives were executed search through the pile of corpses
in absolute silence: no cries, tears, or any form of emotion. The tense and
ominous silence is broken by the slow appearance of a child who approaches
the camera and simply stares straight at the viewer. This is an homage to
Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) with its similar ending and a discreet
response to his cinematic philosophy. The open ending made this film
extremely uncomfortable for both sides of politics; for the right because no
one was ever brought to justice after the war and for the left because it didn’t
give any indication about the class consciousness of its director.
By way of explanation Kyrou once wrote:
Directorship must be realistic, must have the truthfulness of a document,
but must at the same time give to lyricism the position which it has by
natural right in a story of human passion. The Nazis in the movie will
express the uniform dehumanization of an excessively organized totali-
tarian army; in contrast, the Greeks will be distinct for their individual
human personality, which may or may not be heroic. The central massage
of the movie will be the objective inability of contemporary man to remain
inactive when great events take place.21
The Roundup was the revelation of a new aesthetic, akin to Robert Bresson’s
A Man Escaped (1954) but without its existential and religious metaphysics;
a movie about the contingency of reality and with deep reverence towards
the concrete with the explicit intention of helping to heal the trauma of the
period through its unembellished, direct, and confronting representation.
The film’s striking simplicity amplifies the cruelty and brutality of
the events depicted. At the same time, the unheroic depiction of the
main characters, the shaken consciousness of the ordinary human being,
the existential terror of death, and the obvious fear in the face of the
ruthlessness of the German war machine make Kyrou’s movie one of the
most consummate depictions of history within the context of moral drama,
one of the best to have ever been produced in Greece.
Another film dealing with the same topic was made in 1966 by Panos
Glykofrydis (1930–2010) under the title With Glittering Eyes (Me tin Lampsi
sta Matia). The film revolves around the decision of a father who has to
choose which of his three sons would be saved from execution by the
Germans. The film avoids all patriotic rhetoric and focuses instead on the
dilemmas of the ordinary man who cannot fathom the immensity of the
historical events around him. Through a demythologization of the past,
Glykofrydis touched upon the idea of resistance itself by questioning official

myths from all sides. The resistance against the Germans was the predic-
ament and the duty of people who simply found themselves in the middle,
unable to act or react, vulnerable, pitiable, and guilty. The final scene in
which all young men are executed by the Germans while an empty boat is
carried away by the river is one of the most powerful depictions of symbolic
redemption and resurrection ever produced in cinema.
In the same year, Kostas Manousakis released his final movie Fear
(Fovos). This explored the psychological tensions within families living in
the countryside and debunked the unity of a supposedly “authentic” Greek
life by exposing the hidden immorality in its everyday realities and by
criticizing the phallocentric structures of patriarchal masculinity. The story
focuses on the attempts of two parents to cover up the murder of an innocent
girl perpetrated by their mentally disabled son in a moment of sexual frenzy.
Sexual repression, violence, and criminal collusion become the methods by
which the core institution of society legitimizes its authority and perpetuates
its power.
The film represented Greece at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966 and
unofficially at Cannes in the same year. Manousakis, then 31, never made
another movie—remaining one of the most elusive personalities in modern
Greek cinema. Together with his sudden departure, many things were
changing in the country—or at least were about to.
It was obvious that these films marked the full maturity of the old Greek
cinema. They had perfected the art of narration, the grammar of images,
the sonorities of music, and the subtlety of filmic subplots to a superlative
degree of exactness and through their consummate integration. Their
very strength, however, proved to be a precursor to the gradual demise of
the language these films had created. Dimopoulos, Andreou, Glykofrydis,
Aliferis, Andritsos, Dalianidis, Georgiadis, and Foscolos, among others,
constructed solid and brilliant mythopoetic matrices which could be imagi-
natively reconstructed and reconfigured to tell a dramatic, melodramatic, or
comic story. The tensions in them were sometimes obvious, as in the case of
Foscolos and Dalianidis, but nevertheless the achievement was considerable
and one must concede that if some of the films were made in Hollywood,
they would have been recognized as the key texts of a radical movement for
cultural emancipation, social critique, and individual empowerment.
Just as in the previous decade, for every good film made, ten bad
ones were produced, thus aping and depreciating its most expressive aspects.
Consequently, successful style was gradually transformed into a catchy formula
while a copied storyline was trivialized into conventional patterns and stand-
ardized truisms for immediate commercial consumption. It was inevitable that
the industry would implode and the signs were visible both in some lonely
figures as well as in the risks that several “commercial” directors started to take.
The Solitary Case of Takis Kanellopoulos

In the hiaitus between good commercial cinema and the new perception of
filmic representation that was emerging there stands a unique film-maker
whose work deserves closer study and recognition. A lonely auteur from
Thessaloniki, Takis Kanellopoulos (1933–1990) made only seven movies,
all independent productions, which are suffused with overwhelming poetic
elements that surface in a narrative lyricism dealing with the trauma of war,
human loneliness, and the magic of sensuality. He does not seem to fit any
classifiable continuity, belong to any particular movement, or respond in a
direct way to any of the immediate problems of his society.
Kanellopoulos began his career with the ethnographic documentary
Macedonian Wedding (Makedonikos Gamos, 1960), a film that can comfortably
occupy a place next to the best achievements of the genre and which was created
in the vein of Robert Flaherty’s The Man of Aran (1934) and Louisiana Story
(1948). The cinematic eye recorded local customs and traditions, but not with
the ideological bias of a Germanic Volkskunde that sought to justify preconceived
notions about the noble savages inhabiting the mountains. On the contrary,
Kanellopoulos explored human interactions, ritualistic patterns, and states of
mind in an effort to foreground common spaces, gestures, and interactions where
patterns of social cohesion and individual behavior converge. He repeated his
achievement in his other two documentaries, Thasos (1961) and Kastoria (1969),
descending into an unfamiliar Greece, replete with shadows, demonic presences,
and dark primitive rituals, in an attempt to find the underlying emotional texture
of human culture in its most pristine, pre-civilized authenticity.
His first feature film, Sky (Ouranos, 1962), was one of the most peculiar
anti-war movies ever made: based on recollections in the personal letters,
stories, and diaries of veteran soldiers from the Greek-Italian war of 1940,
it captured the fear of loss, the incomprehensibility of fighting, and the
strange emotions of heroic self-negation and altruism. In the spaces between
the anonymous heroes and the fear of death, Kanellopoulos depicted the
complex realities of history, the immense beauty of the natural world, and
the uncompromising moral resolve of the common people. The sheltering
sky embraced everything and everyone, creating the mythic dome against
which human anxiety could be projected, sublimated, and immortalized.
Kanellopoulos was the first director who totally abandoned the luxuries
and comforts of the studio, letting the camera roam in the open without a
single point of reference or any sense of orientation. The use of widescreen
deep focus and long sequence shots enabled the characters to fuse with
the grand spectacle of nature and to become elemental forces themselves.
Ironically, an Italian’s camera, Giovanni Varriano’s, framed with almost
transcendental depth the otherness of creation, engulfing the grandeur of a
human existence in agony and elation.
With his first feature movie, Kanellopoulos explored humanity before

the original sin by depicting the abiding innocence in the human soul, and
in the process revealed himself as a unique film-maker whose vision was
analogous to that manifested in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930), in
Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) or The Mirror (1975) and even in Terrence
Mallick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and Alexander Sokurov’s contemporary
cinema of transcendental contemplation. Like them, Kanellopoulos explored
the extremely puzzling moral question of human goodness and kindness. “I
believe in the goodness of humanity,” he said. “I believe in the saint, who is
full of love and affection and nothing can change it.”22
Kanellopoulos produced only two more movies during the 1960s,
both of which were distinct for their minimalist photography, sparse
dialogue, and emotional subtlety; his Excursion (Ekdromi, 1966) is one of
the most sensual visions of human relations ever produced, a celebration
of ephemeral happiness, a mesmerizing exploration of the mystery of the
human senses. Through the use of static shots, he creates a suggestive and
illusive atmosphere, depicting how a passionate love triangle experiences the
contradictions of desire and the dichotomies of the human heart. The story
of two soldiers in love with the same woman and the questions of loyalty and
friendship that this raises presents in its full maturity the central theme in
Kanellopoulos’ film-making: love-trust-death.
Kanellopoulos is one of the few directors who privileged image over
word: he was not afraid to let silence dominate the screen and the story. With
sporadic and minimal dialogue, woven together by the expressionist music
of Nikos Mamagakis, the script of his movies followed blurry, hazy, and
static images, creating an air of strangeness, distance, and awe. Kanellopoulos
was able to transform the faces of actors into indecipherable fragments of a
paradise remembered: and he became the only Greek director who confronted
the Freudian uncanny as a diffused natural reality and as the primeval ground
of existence, which could break through the conventions of civilized life.
With Kanellopoulos, the most brutal experience, the experience of
evil in war, was “derealized” by his empathic and compassionate camera.
Through his work, cinematic experience received absolute unity, oneiric
dimensions and profound density—one can indeed claim that he was the
first director to explore the formal possibilities for a radically new aesthetic
representation of the real. He was also the director with whom the crisis
of representation that modernism had addressed in Europe with Nouvelle
Vague and Antonioni found its first elaboration in the Greek visual tradition,
but in a unique way which needs to be situated in the wider context of world
cinema, especially next to Yasujiro Ozu and the experimental American
tradition by Maya Deren.
Kanellopoulos’ cinematic gaze was deeply introspective, perpetually
turned towards the nostalgic recreation of a lost innocence in search of a state
of grace. It was comprised of understatements, enigmas, and situations in

abeyance. His last successful film was his underrated Parenthesis (1968). Based
on the play Still Life by Noel Coward, it was the story of a man and woman who
meet briefly at a station after their train breaks down. It is his most stylized
and static film, since only two actors appeared for 84 minutes, expressing and
experiencing the whole gamut of human emotion, from lust to sympathy,
repulsion to empathy, and disgust to intimacy. As Kostas Karderinis wrote:
His heroes do not have names or characteristics. They are not interested in
such details, since they simply have six hours to share. That was the time
that the train stopped for repairs in Thessaloniki, the city of the unknown
man, the train that made them meet and the train that was going to
separate them again, after this brief deviation in their life.23
The rest of the film is a long monologue by the female protagonist as she
remembers and relives the lost experience: “You didn’t ask for my name
neither did I . . . Now that the dream came into us and became our reality,
I dreamed that I went back there, it was winter, but no . . . I didn’t find you
. . . but I found that brief parenthesis that brought us together . . .” The film
rests in the camera’s hovering over the minute details of objects, flowers, and
images that made that experience possible and which are now an indelible
part of the woman’s identity. Mamagakis’ music, based on the shrill sounds
of the mandolin and the cembalo, provide a rich emotional background for
such a transforming and guilt-laden encounter.
Kanellopoulos’ later movies, The Last Spring (I Teleutaia Anoixi, 1972),
The Chronicle of Sunday (To Hroniko tis Kyriakis, 1975), and especially
Romantic Note (Romantiko Simeioma, 1978), unfortunately ossified his
unique style into self-referential projects, which should have been short films
Takis Kanellopoulos, Excursion (1966). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
but which Kanellopoulos expanded in a desperate attempt to tell a story that

simply no longer existed. In Romantic Note he dispensed altogether with
plot line and used the camera as the eye of an innocent bystander, looking
here and there, unfocused and unattached and salvaging from oblivion and
trivialization only fleeting experiences.
In 1980, Kanellopoulos released his last film Sonia, an elegiac farewell to
a whole way of being and to a style that by then resembled a relic from the
past. In an era of loud political statements, he abstained from all public decla-
rations: the visual whispers were overpowered by the tumultuous rhetoric of
ideologies. Yet the intimate theme of an ephemeral and affectionate love
affair between a lonely young woman and a married middle-aged music
teacher was treated with religious compunction, sympathy, and tenderness—
and for this very reason passed unnoticed.
After 1980, Kanellopoulos stopped making movies altogether and
remained a man apart, a hermit whose vision of cinema as an individuating
project was never realized; yet his early films belong with the best films ever
made in the country. His style was unique and unparalleled, and explored its
own possibilities in only a few movies, which when considered as a whole
make the most complete and consistent oeuvre of Greek cinema, emulated
only by that of Theo Angelopoulos.
Commercial Successes and Contested Aesthetics

In the 1960s, a number of good and challenging films were made which
deserve special mention. These are unclassifiable in the sense that they
stand out from the hundreds of comedies and melodramas produced
each year between 1960 and 1967 (about 450 films in total) for their
unique aesthetics and social significance. They are also isolated cases
because their directors, despite their considerable skills and vision, either
abandoned cinema altogether, or fell into the traps of commercial cinema,
and later of television, and never produced anything else of equal value.
Some left the country after 1967 and made movies or television drama
mainly in France, as was the case with Roveros Manthoulis and Dimitris
Kollatos.
Vassilis Georgiadis’ comedy Wedding Greek Style (Gamos ala Ellinika,
1964), with its effective script by Maria Polenaki, inventive cinematography,
and sparkling music remains a classic. The film’s opening credits are some of
the most artistic in the history of Greek cinema. Its story is about a young
couple struggling to buy a “comfortable” apartment; around this a stinging
satire of the middle class is constructed, with the main female character
(Xenia Kalogeropoulou) struggling to reconcile the reality of an educated
modern woman to the traditional role of women in the kitchen: “Why
did I get married?” she exclaims in despair . . . “If they had told me from
the beginning that instead of fine arts I would end up studying the art of
cooking, I would never have believed it! I replaced my paint brushes with
kitchen ladles . . . ”
Gregoris Gregoriou’s 201 Canaries (Ta 201 Kanarinia, 1964) must also
be mentioned for its ingenious structure, spontaneity, and hilarious wit. The
film opened as a Brechtian “theatrical” exercise, for all characters entered the
stage and presented themselves before getting involved in the plot. It was an
unexpected experiment with theatrical and cinematic forms, fused through
the ingenious jazz sounds of Yorgos Katsaros’ score and a script with punchy
dialogue by Nikos Tsiforos and Polyvios Vasileiadis. Actors improvised and
sang without making any attempt to hide their inability to sing. Despite
its rather conventional ending, the film subverted the expectations of its
viewers with respect to the acting by inviting them to become part of the
action, with humor and exuberance, in one of the most radical reinterpreta-
tions of cinematic mise-en-scène.
Two comedies by Dinos Dimopoulos must also be mentioned; Ms
Director (Dis Dieuthintis, 1964), featuring a hilarious performance by Jenny
Karezi, dealt with the issue of equal opportunity in the workplace. It was an
exhilarating spoof on changing family values, expressing new perceptions
of gender and social ideologies with ebullient wit and whimsical drollness.
Dimopoulos’ next film, A Crazy Crazy Family (Mia Trelli Trelli Oikogeneia,
1965), was also a great comedy with riotously funny characters, sparkling
wit, and unforgettable punchlines. Dimopoulos, working then for Finos
Films, sent the movie to laboratories in France for the processing of its
vibrant and almost pastel colors, which contribute to its “absurd craziness”
and to the cartoonish quality of the characters themselves.
Culturally, the film depicts how the conflict between the new morality
of the 1960s and the traditional values of the 1950s led to a renegotiation
of ideas, practices, and the limits of authority within patriarchal families.
The always forgetful mother, a real “fruit-cake,” played superbly by the
great actress of ancient tragedy, Mary Aroni, who could tolerate anything
in order to be left alone with her friends, was one of the most complete and
impressive characters ever produced in Greek cinema—a character out of a
play by Oscar Wilde or even Eugène Ionesco.
Also important is Dimopoulos’ psychological melodrama-thriller I
Accuse Humans (Katigoro tous Anthropous, 1966), which used a gripping
script by Nikos Foskolos, true-to-life photography by Nikos Kavoukidis, and
magnetic music by Yannis Markopoulos. The film shows Dimopoulos at his
best, full of narrative force and visual intensity.
After the compelling realistic drama, Division (Dihasmos, 1965), Errikos
Andreou’s Him and Her (Ekeinos kai Ekeini, 1966) was an unexpected
cultural fantasy of sheer escapism, permeated by pagan sensuality, complex
psychological conflicts, and emotional violence. Indeed, it was a strange
Freudian parable about the conflict between ego and super-ego set on a
hippy resort in Crete. A woman from the high bourgeoisie abandons every-
thing for a simple life in a remote village close to nature and the elemental
life of natural people, but after feeling “in danger” (expressed through
dreams and hallucinations), returns to her boring and artificial existence.
Karl Heinz Hummel’s photography, with its masterful alternation between
color and black and white, creates an emotional commentary of the action,
juxtaposing two opposing mental landscapes, and in some ways emulating
Lassally’s Zorba. Yannis Markopoulos’ music counterbalances the sensuality
of the images with folkloric warmth and tonal simplicity.
Yorgos Skalenakis’ Queen of Clubs (Dama Spathi, 1966) was a fasci-
nating psychological drama, suffused with the anxieties of the period,
as two handsome men, played by the famous playboys of the 1960s,
Spyros Fokas and Thodoros Roubanis, compete for the heart of a seductive
woman (superbly performed by Elena Nathanael). The film, screened at the
Chicago International Film Festival of 1969, is set in the medieval city of
Nafplion and presents with reserve and distance the extremely tense sexual
energy between three characters as the psychological triangulation blurs the
objects of each character’s desire. Its slow pace, effective acting, and richly
detailed photography make this film a good example of the balance between
commercial cinema and art film made for the tourist industry, fusing the
strong sensuality of the 1960s with the reserved mentality of mainstream
values. It is quite remarkable for its concealments, inversions and evasions.
Sokratis Kapsaskis’ The Hot Month of July (O Zestos Ioulios Minas, 1966),
a film that spoke with neorealist directness, was a magisterial mise-en-scène
of a strange love story between a hustler and a married woman. The film
has one of the best scripts of Greek cinema, by Kapsaskis himself, and its
dialogue is replete with punchy epigrammatic lines and highly suggestive,
mostly sexual, connotations. It is an atmospheric film (not exactly a film
noir), full of frustration and cynicism, reminiscent of many American films
of the period especially by Samuel Fuller, and depicting the dark realities
of human greed and desire that lurk beneath the glamorous veneer of the
tourist island of Rhodes.
Kapsaskis (1928–2007) was a unique case, who abandoned cinema
after this film and turned to literature. Some of his comedies, such as The
Bridegrooms of Eutichia (Oi Gamproi tis Eutichias, 1962), as well as his urban
melodramas, such as The Last Temptation (O Teleftaios Peirasmos, 1964) and
Bitter Life (Pikri Zoi, 1965), are minor classics. Special mention is deserved
by his early film Love Stories (Erotikes Istories, 1959), based on three different
stories, it is one of the best examples of psychological realism mingled with
stinging social criticism. His Thirst for Life (Dipsa gia Zoi, 1964) was also an
interesting but overinflated melodrama, the Greek Rebel Without a Cause,
which explored family dynamics and gender identity. Despite their comic or
melodramatic facade, most of his films have as their underlying theme the
inability for communication and connection, implying a tragic vision of life
in contemporary society, not unlike Antonioni’s in his early films.
Roveros Manthoulis’ Face to Face (Prosopo me Prosopo), a biting social
satire with a distinct visual idiom and disjointed narrative inspired by the
French Nouvelle Vague and Jean Luc Godard’s films, was probably one of
the best movies of this period. Released in 1966, one year before the dicta-
torship, it looked like an aesthetic and moral enigma in the development of
cinematic art in the country. Manthoulis created a new filmic time which
did not work with flashbacks but with the simultaneous juxtaposition of
past and present, of the German occupation and the contemporary affluent
society of the Athenian nouveaux riches, of Greek migrants in Germany
learning German and Germans executing Greeks in 1943, of English soldiers
shooting Greeks in 1944 and Greeks learning English 20 years later. Amid
such temporality, an impersonal voice comments: “Oh, Greek food, how
many German soldiers have you nurtured!” while an intertitle falls with the
German inscription: “German soldier, do not give your food to the Greeks
because they get strong and will strike you back!”
The movie was a filmic experiment with time and space through a
Godardian use of camera and narrative. After the film’s release, Manthoulis
had to escape to France, and his cinematic contribution was put on hold for
the next ten years. However, his movie paved the way for a new approach
to filmic time, montage, and editing, something that the new generation
emerging after 1970 will take seriously into consideration.
Another important film from those two memorable years (1965 to
1967) was Dimitris Kollatos’ The Death of Alexander (O Thanatos tou
Alexandrou, 1966). It was an independent production by Kollatos himself,
who had already produced two short films. The story was about a young
man dying of leukemia in hospital. As he is on his deathbed he asks his wife
to make love to him, an act which becomes the catalyst for the emergence of
memories from his childhood and adolescence.
The film was one of the best explorations of mortality in Greek cinema.
Through close-ups and static frames, Kollatos depicted death and its effects
on the living, as the body deteriorated while the mind was still active and
full of life. Yannis Markopoulos’ music with its stark austerity enhanced the
painful emotions of the protagonist with subtlety and discretion. This was
one of most humane and humanizing films ever made, a film that elicited
genuine and authentic emotions from its audience through its depiction
of the relentless cruelty of death as it affects an ordinary, unexceptional,
common man. It was the cinematic equivalent of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan
Illyich and represented another unique case in Greek cinema. Shortly after
making the film, Kollatos fled to France where he became extremely contro-
versial with his revisionist depiction of resistancialisme.
Something new was undoubtedly crystallized with Alexis Damianos’ Until

the Ship (Mehri to Ploio, 1966), the first movie to address the traumatic emotions
of the migration experience through a camera of almost documentary vérité, full
of cruelty, detachment, and brutality. Damianos (1921–2006) had not studied
cinema, and his films seem to delve into cinematic representability rather than
constructing clear forms of representation. With this film and the next he
reshaped Greek cinematic language precisely because he explored the limits and
the potentialities of the camera, infusing his stories with electrifying subtexts
and challenging discoveries. With him, filmic representation lost its empathic
and emotive expressiveness; it confronted the audience with uncomfortable
images, tense conflicts, and unlikeable characters. As Maria Katsounaki wrote:
He constructed his own idiom over the background of ethnography and
melodrama. Merciless light, terrifyingly forceful images, phantasmagoria,
and symbolism merge with wild naturalism. The elan vital of his films
was based on earthy materials, and on cruel and unrefined poetry. He
constructed his one cinematic syntax.24
Damianos’ movie introduced a new filmic temporality: narrative time

was genuinely slow, silences punctuated the minimal and mostly trivial
dialogue, the camera moved closer and closer to the human face, and the
body became the symbol of an absent memory, unable to be self-aware and
to fathom its historical moment. The film is about immigration and what is
left behind while the great unknown of a new life in Australia looms before
the characters as both hope and exile. Through three interwoven stories,
Damianos explores the changing feelings of the protagonist as he moves
towards a new life: the horror of what is left and the promise of the new
are expressed through understatements, evasions, and silences. Damianos’
austere visual language avoids the sensationalism of a music score that
Alexis Damianos, Until the Ship (1966). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
enhances emotions and instead uses music sparsely in order to underline the
silences in the dialogue or announce themes that emerge in the three stories
that make the film.
The film rejects all forms of emotional plethorism and naturalistic
excess. Through its very simplicity it depicts the reality of displacement
and loss, as the protagonist leaves an unfriendly home to emigrate to an
unknown land. The last story brims with sensuality and sexual tension in
some of the most explicit scenes of Greek cinema, and is underpinned by
a deep sense of tragedy and despair. The emptiness of its settings and the
geometrical lines of its composition make this film the forerunner of the
cinematic style that was to reshape Greek cinema after 1970.
A number of movies produced around the end of 1966 and with the
intention of being released early the next year were not given permission by
the dictatorship imposed in April 1967. Some were released after 1974 and
are now considered among the best films made both for their de-centering of
narrative and for their depiction of new forms of subjectivity. Among them
was The Shepherds of Disaster (Oi Voskoi tis Simforas) by Nico Papatakis
(1918–2010), an expatriate living in France. This was an important film with
regard to its unmitigated and violent realism. A love affair in a Greek village
between a shepherd and the daughter of the landlord leads to their public
deaths after they elope during Easter. The film offered a ruthless representation
of the oppressive family in a rural society, the class system, the hypocrisy of
the Christian Church, and the internalized inferiority of the villagers. It was
a powerful artistic statement of extreme and shocking realism, as the camera
focused on every detail of brutal oppression and destruction, reminiscent
of the Brazilian Glauber Rocha’s Marxist aesthetics, combining religion and
folklore in a “revolutionary amalgam” of conflicts and contradictions.
The second movie, Open Letter (Anoihti Epistoli), which was
given permission in 1968 (and was screened in 1969), was by Yorgos
Stampoulopoulos and received the International Critic’s Award at the
Locarno Film Festival. (Walter Lassally was again the director of photog-
raphy.) The story revolves around a love affair between a young man from
the wealthy aristocracy of Athens and a radical young teacher whose
dedication and idealism help the protagonist to grow up and mature. The
simplicity of the narrative and the transparency of its composition made this
film one of the first expressions, or intimations, of the New Greek Cinema.
The third banned movie was Dimos Theos’ Kierion (1968), based on the
assassination of the American journalist George Polk in 1948. In the film,
an American journalist who goes to Athens to investigate the secret dealings
between politicians and oil companies is found dead. His Jewish colleague
who is incriminated is also found dead and then all witnesses who knew
them. Another journalist tries to find answers while surrounded by a wall of
secrecy and fear; yet nothing is revealed or exposed.
The film was an atmospheric and bleak depiction of how a totalitarian

regime operates—by hiding clues and by making reality miraculously
disappear. Theos produced a Kafkaesque film, claustrophobic and opaque,
in order to recreate the climate of fear that dominated Greek society as it
veered towards the dictatorship. Photographed with expressionist intensity
and sombre simplicity, the film was released after 1974 and ever since has
been considered one of the most seminal texts on political oppression.
The film that really had to be banned was Nikos Koundouros’ Vortex,
or Medusa’s Face, which was to be released only in 1978. The film’s artistic
experimentation and visual radicalism, however, place it firmly within the
grand revolutionary movement that swept through the arts in the 1960s for
a radical de-definition of artistic production both in European cinema and in
the American underground.
The story concerns three men and a woman who stay on a Greek island
to wait for the fourth man of their group, who is missing and who they fear
has been assassinated. The game of suspicions about who killed him makes
their relationship tense, full of anger and violence and, at the same time, full
of sexual panic. The face of the woman, who bears the Babylonian name
Astarte (Ishtar), overpowers the male defense mechanisms and fills them
with violent desire and guilt.
In the film we see the first ever homosexual character being depicted
with depth and sensitivity, as well as in an existential panic over the horri-
fying fear of rejection. The movie was also the first to film, with rather
shocking innocence and alarming frankness, the heterosexual act in full
transparency and complete nakedness. “Destiny?” asks one of the characters.
“No,” the other replies, “simple geometry.” The aesthetics of the film are
minimalistic, comprised of geometric lines converging and diverging, not
unlike forms and lines in primitive art. The sexual energy exuded by the
tense engagement between the actors pulsates from the first scene to the last.
Nikos Koundouros, Vortex (1967). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
It is strange how Koundouros managed to maintain such affective strength

throughout the film with elliptic dialogue in English and outlandish music
by Nikos Mamangakis.
Koundouros very aptly summed up the aesthetic merits of his film when
he observed:
It was a totally esoteric movie, personal, closed, and more than any other
film by me it resembles painting, to the point that the absence of external
movement and the elliptic dialogue forces the viewer to find refuge in the
reading of the image . . . Humans and walls, bathed in the blinding light,
under the merciless sun, seem as though they have no contour . . .25
Undoubtedly, this is a “closed masterpiece” something between Andy Warhol

and Pier Paolo Pasolini, an art-house film by all means, whose aesthetics
upset and unsettle through its overt opposition to all forms of convention
and conformity. After its release in 1978, it looked like an enormous alien
meteorite thrown into the ocean of unimaginative political films that had
swamped production—and obviously by then Koundouros had opened a
new chapter in his cinematic language.
Conversely, Michael Cacoyannis released his internationally produced
comedy The Day the Fish Came Out (Ti mera pou ta psaria vyikan stin steria)
starring Candice Bergen, which has to be remembered if not for its humor, then
for its distinctly emblematic costumes and quirky retelling of a real incident.
Some good films, however, were made under strict censorship after
1967. Iakovos Kambanellis, in collaboration with his brother, actor Yorgos,
released the film The Canon and the Nightingale (To Kanoni kai to Aidoni,
1968), one of the most interesting works of the period. Based on three
stories, two from the Italian and German occupation of Greece and another
from Cyprus during the struggle against the British, the film was a moral
fable about the futility of war, as well as a subversive exploration of what
happens in the minds and hearts of the men who wear military uniforms.
Girls under the Sun (Koritsia ston Ilio, 1968) by Vassilis Georgiadis was
a sensitive and stylish depiction of how a Greek shepherd (played superbly
by Yannis Voglis) falls in love with a Swedish girl (played with emotional
and cultural distance by Ann Loberg). The music by Stavros Xarhakos is
one of the best music scores ever composed, fusing traditional rhythms with
electrical guitar sounds. The film paved the way for a number of good and
bad imitations of its story, which eventually led either to promotional films
about Greek tourism or to soft-porn adventures on Greek islands.
Kostas Zois’ Silhouettes (1967) is a sensitive “private story” about the last
day that a divorced woman spends with her child before her former husband
takes custody. The film explores patriarchal authority, as implemented
through the legal system, with immense softness and gentility, as though the
story was shown through the eyes of the child.
Another good film by a veteran was Gregg Tallas’ underrated spy action
film Assignment Skybolt (or Spies in the Saronic Bay, 1968). Tallas displayed
his talent and artistry in the relentless unfolding of the story through
incredibly vibrant technicolor and a masterful movement of camera by
Lassally. An international cast supported local actors and the film, being the
last that Tallas made in the country, must be discovered as the last testament
of a director who, unfortunately, was to spend the rest of his creative career
(he died in 1993) making bad television serials and B-rated horror films.
A unique film in the corpus of Greek cinema was Yorgos Skalenakis’
Byzantine Rhapsody, or Imperiale (1968). It won two Golden Globe Awards
for best actress and best music, but despite this international recognition,
did not sell many tickets at home. The main actors Theodoros Roumbanis,
a stunning international playboy, and the sensual Betty Arvaniti recreated
the last days of the world around the year 1000 in Byzantium. The enamored
empress leaves her palaces and her emperor in Constantinople and finds
refuge in the lonely tower of her lover, so that they can die together. But
the end of time does not arrive and, reconsidering her folly, she returns
to her imperial residence. The story is simple but effectively put together,
with impressive costumes and a gripping dialogue, and set in authentically
medieval castles. It was the first time we had a film about Byzantium that was
devoid of idealization and characterized by considerable historical accuracy.
It was unfortunate that Roumbanis’ project for more historical dramas from
Greek history didn’t eventuate.
Another Skalenakis film, The Island of Aphrodite (To Nisi tis Afroditis,
1969), was a fascinating historical drama set in Cyprus during the struggle
for independence from Britain. Cypriot freedom fighters abduct a young
and innocent British soldier in order to exchange him for one of their
imprisoned comrades. It is an excellent political thriller with a magnificent
performance as the Cypriot matriarch by the great theatrical actress Katina
Paxinou (in her first and last Greek cinema appearance). The scene where
two mothers, the Cypriot and the British, meet is one of the most touching
moments in Greek cinema, as the nobility of motherhood and the emotional
anxiety of both women break down the barriers of political circumstances
and establish a perennial symbol for the suffering of the innocent. Mimis
Plessas’ music score is epic in its orchestral polychromy and antithetical
tonalities. At the end of the film, as the British execute the Greek freedom
fighter and the Greeks liberate the British hostage, the emotional energy of
the music explodes into a mournful monophonic tune of tragic magnitude.
Vangelis Serdaris’ Robbery in Athens (Listeia stin Athina, 1969) was an
accomplished and masterful attempt to reinvent film noir by infusing it with
a new sense of filmic temporality through an elongation of time, a slowing
down of action, and a prolonging of silences (not unlike Jules Dassin’s 1955
Rififi). In his film debut, Serdaris explores the underworld of Athens with
remarkable honesty, psychological characterization, and impartiality. His

camera discreetly pans in and out to capture an unpredictable contrast
between internal and external space, employing expressionist techniques,
which transform the urban landscape into a surrealist nightmare.
Unfortunately, the film didn’t receive the attention it deserved, not even
for its delirious music by Nikos Theodosiadis. Given also the fact that some
of the most important representatives of the new cinema contributed to its
making (Theo Angelopoulos, Pandelis Voulgaris, Dimos Theos, and others),
one could claim that Serdaris’ movie was one of the main links between
the commercial cinema of the 1960s and the aesthetics of the New Greek
Cinema that was to emerge several years later.
Petros Lykas’ The Girl of Number 17 (To Koritsi tou 17, 1969), which won
all major awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival that year, was a gripping
psychological drama about psychiatric practices, sexual repression and the
morality of the medical profession. Lykas’ film was an apt metaphor for
totalitarian regimes and the authoritarian personality that classifies human
types through abstract categories and societal expectations. In a sense, this
was the most Foucauldian film of Greek cinema, as Andreou’s Nightmare was
the most Lacanian. Sophia Roumbou, as the psychiatric patient Anna who,
after being sexually assaulted by a male nurse, kills him and escapes to the
city only to repeat the crime, gives a superb performance with introspection
and restraint, and without uttering a single word. Plessas’ score effectively
recreated an alarming atmosphere of fear, incomprehensibility and anxiety.
Lykas was one of the most popular editing masters of Greek cinema; his
approach to montage avoided emotional excess and stylistic affluence. In
this film, he worked with extreme minimalism and simplicity, localizing a
dominant social reality of neurosis and insanity. His montage and the photog-
raphy by Hristos Mangos make this film a seminal text about representing
madness and repression. Unfortunately, Lykas directed only one more film
before being seduced by television.
Stavros Tsiolis’ excellent film
noir Panic (Panikos, 1969) must also
be mentioned for its accomplished
narrative rhythms, minimalistic settings,
and great acting, especially by Spyros
Kalogerou. It was a film in the best
tradition of Henri-Georges Clouzot
and Jean Pierre Melville, with strange
subversions and inversions—and despite
its strong melodramatic tenor, the film
was made with subtle poetic sensibility,
Stavris Tsiolis, Panic (1969). Greek Film addressing the themes of moral choice
Archive Collection. and existential guilt.
Vassilis Mauromatis’ Shadows on the Sand (Skies stin Ammo, 1970)

was an interesting blend of detective story and love affair set against
the backdrop of the Aegean islands and with a good script by Iakovos
Kambanellis and an evocative music score by Yannis Spanos. Finally, Nikos
Tzimas’ Astrapogiannos (1970) was about a folk hero fighting against corrupt
landlords at the beginning of the twentieth century, and distinguished itself
for its narrative force and dynamic confrontations (techniques that Tzimas
would later employ in his left-wing political melodramas).
Together with these films, we must mention the proliferation of short
films and documentaries during the 1960s, which gave the opportunity to
emerging directors to learn what they could from experience. The tradition
of short films goes back of course to the beginnings of Greek cinema.
After the war, Rousos Koundouros, Vassilis Maros, Yannis Panayotopoulos,
Nestor Matsas, and others established a distinct visual morphology on
social events, landscapes, local festivals, and historical personalities. In the
1960s, when filming became easier, many more followed; among them were
Kostas Ferris’ Your Eyelids are Shining (Ta Matoklada sou Lampoun, 1961),
Fotos Lambrinos and Demos Theos’ 100 Hours of May (Ekato Ores tou
Mai, 1963), Dimitris Kollatos’ Olives (Elies, 1964), Dimitris Augerinos and
Loukas Papastathis’ Occasions of No (Peritposeis tou Ohi, 1965), Lampros
Liaropoulos’ Letter from Charleroie (Gramma apo to Charleroie, 1965),
Pandelis Voulgaris’ Jimmy the Tiger (1966), Tonia Marketaki’s’ John and the
Road (O Yannis kai o Dromos, 1967), Thodoros Angelopoulos’ Transmission
(Ekpompi, 1968), Tonis Lykouresis’ The Mosquito (To Kounoupi, 1969),
Mihalis Papanikolaou’s Medea 70 (1970), all quite distinct within a diverse
production of at least 400 short films in less than ten years.
Most were documentaries about recent historical events (Italian invasion,
occupation, Civil War, and so on), but films with a story also had consid-
erable presence. Immigration became a dominant theme in these short films,
as well as the new urban landscape and the looming political crisis. Most of
the films documented the history of the period, especially under the dicta-
torship, together with the changing urban realities, the destruction of old
houses for the hasty construction of apartments, and the suburban sprawl on
the outskirts of industrial cities such as Piraeus and Elefsis. Angelopoulos’
Transmission was distinct for its “quirky” use of “candid camera” while
Papanikolaou’s Medea 70 recorded with almost clinical precision the deterio-
ration of a couple’s relationship within a landscape of urban squalor, sexual
frustration, and utter poverty.
With so much creative energy diffused into so many different genres,
it was obvious that something novel was emerging. The cinematic language
constructed by Gaziadis, Tzavellas, and Cacoyannis was undergoing a
profound visual crisis: the continuities of the story and the mis-en-scène
were not simply questioned but on many occasions abandoned altogether.
The aesthetics of closed form and the confined space as determined by the
studio were now imprisoning the camera and withholding new potenti-
alities of expression. The unity of image, word, and sound, which had been
achieved over a period of 30 years, started to implode under the weight of
its own completeness. Indeed, the critical issue with these films was that
they had achieved an almost perfect form; as a consequence, the density of
representation and the compactness of composition began to collapse. What
was needed was an opening-up of form, a gradual but relentless dismantling
of the achievement itself—and it was already happening.
Drawing from Lucien Goldmann, we could suggest that cinematic
language was undergoing a process of “de-structuration” due to the new mental
structures that had emerged with society’s evolution towards its industrial
stage. Koundouros blurred the distinct contours of forms; Kanellopoulos
relocated action in the human mind; Kyrou depicted the indeterminate nature
of human emotions; Manthoulis abandoned serial narrative altogether; Kollatos
de-glamorized the moral pretensions of the nouveaux riches; Damianos
reformed the representation of lived temporality; Theos attacked the Greek
self-perception of a transparent and luminous reality. The makers of short
films rediscovered historical reality and represented it as a highly imaginative
construct, yet with immediate political consequences. Obviously, the codes
of the past, of what was to be called Old Greek Cinema, were not simply
questioned but blatantly rejected, and a new visual language was gradually
forming that was still exploring its own representations, themes and spaces.
Between 1964 and 1967, most cinematographers seemed to have
abandoned the safety and allure of the studio; and all of them started
filming on location again, under the strong Mediterranean glare, moving
the camera in a lifelike manner and rejecting the entrenched achievements
of the postwar golden age of cinematic production. And yet, although the
accepted codes slowly collapsed and eventually lost their meaning, their
dominance was secured with the rise and commercial domination of
popular melodramas.
The Rise of Urban Melodramas and Musicals

Greek melodramas had proliferated since the 1930s, but in their
overwhelming majority they were emotionally numb and formally
substandard. Nevertheless, some were interesting as social texts, because
thematically they presented the perspective of oppressed women, orphaned
children, and the elderly. Despite the fact that they ended by reaffirming the
normative ethics of patriarchal society, as it was shaped by the ideological
hegemony of the petit bourgeoisie, it is useful to remember that at the
heart of these films there had always been the freedom of women, gender
questions, and family issues.
Melodrama was the preferred spectacle for the villagers who left their
homeland and became displaced proletarians in the big city. In melodrama,
urban masses discovered raw, unconceptualized and unreflective emotions,
which expressed more than any abstract symbol or historical analogy their
own feelings of rejection and marginalization. So, their directors avoided
experiments with form or storyline, often dispensing with the editing room
altogether. The movement of the camera was minimal and photographic,
the frame was structured like a family portrait, and the space composition
was without details or characteristic markers. There was only one dominant
mode: that of the mournful elegy for a lost organic unity.
However, as the visual crisis was intensifying through the continuous
overexposure of the genre, Greek melodramas became extremely formulaic
and dull; not simply derivative, but generic and lifeless. In the early
melodramas, the viewer could identify with the story and empathise with the
predicaments of its protagonists. The mass production of melodramas during
the 1960s simply destroyed any sense of connection between the audience
and the screen: the story was far below the expectations of the viewers who
had been oversaturated with copies of the same story; the only thing that
changed was the background: urban, rural, or historical. Such stereotypical
repetitiveness had started to take its toll on the industry by the mid-1960s.
Meanwhile, as more movies were being produced, audiences remained
the same in terms of numbers. The comedies of the period lost their
ethographic function of depicting a society in transition from the customs
of a rural mentality to the structures of an urban and capitalist organi-
zation of time and space. Most of them regurgitated the specific image of
certain actors or referred to previous movies by them. It was almost as if
the continuous production of interconnected light-entertainment movies
was preparing the way for the arrival of its main opponent, television, which
was introduced in 1966 and which by the next year had started claiming its
primacy for the dissemination of entertainment programs.
The huge commercial success of melodramas forced one of the most
important directors of Greek neorealism, Stelios Tatassopoulos, to produce
his own When the Bells Toll (Otan Simanoun oi Kambanes, 1964), which was
to inspire an impressive number of artificial, boring, and kitsch melodramas.
As a genre, they promoted a cinematic language of soft “pseudo-realism”
which, after the end of commercial cinema, found refuge in television. It
was realism without any reality. Even when serious social issues such as
drug addiction, madness, or police corruption were represented, the films
left untouched the structures that had created them and failed to explore
their impact on the character involved. Certainly, however, there were some
notable exceptions to this rule.
The central director of the genre was unquestionably Yannis Dalianidis
(1923–2010). After his initial successful comedies, he started working with
Finos Films in 1961. During his long collaboration with Finos, Dalianidis
directed the best melodramas, comedies and the best and only musicals
in Greek cinema. He made around 60 films and 15 television series, all of
which remain extremely popular. He released his best melodramas during
the 1960s, constructing an interesting narrative style, something between
Douglas Sirk, Frank Capra, and Otto Preminger, but without their striking
architectural space or stinging social critique. Nevertheless, in most of his
good films Dalianidis was the quiet modernizer of cinematic iconography.
He had an impeccable sense of camera movement. His long shots, close-ups,
and jump cuts were among the best in Greek cinema; as well as his sensitive
and sculptural understanding of spatial composition, black and white
lighting, and the actor’s movement. He must also be credited with seamlessly
incorporating rock and roll music into his films without succumbing to the
dominant moralistic attitude about the alien origin of the music of 1960s
youth culture.
His films Downhill (Katiforos, 1961), Law 4000 (Nomos 4000, 1962),
Vertigo (Illingos, 1963), Story of a Life (Istoria mias Zois, 1965), Stephania
(1966), The Past of a Woman (To Parelthon Mias Ginaikas, 1968), and others
distinguished themselves for their rapid emotional swings, fast narrative
pace, effective alternation between internal and external spaces, evocative
music scores, and, on most occasions, very good acting. His early urban
melodramas exhibited the finest qualities of an accomplished director, who
used the camera effectively, in soft and sensitive black and white shots, and
who always remained in control of the story and its emotions. Vertigo was a
film analogous to The Shock Corridor (1963) or The Stolen Kiss (1964)—with
passionate performances by the unselfconsciously sexy Zoi Laskari, as the
girl who escapes from home after being abused by her stepfather.
With his early film noir, written by Yannis Maris, Without Identity
(Horis Tautotita, 1962), Dalianidis was one of the very few directors who
dared to explore the mystery of goodness in the human soul without senti-
mentality and pathos and through the unpretentious and sophisticated
representation of guilt and redemption. In his films, there is no place for
real evil—his bad characters are good in disguise. They behave badly out
of a deep-seated inferiority complex or because they are naughty children.
Dalianidis expressed a profound and religious humanism, enveloping all his
characters as suffering sinners in affection, empathy, and compassion.
Furthermore, he was the absolute master of effective storytelling: his
films were both atmospheric and exciting, offering good entertainment and
lucid thinking. But their real value lay in what they disguised rather than
in what they disclosed. Laura Malvey once noted that through emotional
identification and catharsis, melodrama functions as a “safety valve for the
ideological contradictions centered on sex and family,” an observation that
suits Dalianidis more than any other director.26 Most of the films mentioned
explicitly dealt with adolescent sexuality, family oppression, violent sex,

social exclusion, and internalized violence. In some, incest was implied,
in others, homosexuality, and in most of them a crisis of authority was
expressed through aggression, hatred, and self-loathing. Some of his films
can be seen in the way that we watch Rock Hudson’s movies today: as femin-
izing men and masculinizing women, in a covert game of inverted sexual
psychodynamics.
Dalianidis’ tendency was to reverse everything: the delinquent boys
in Law 4000 displayed an incredible sexual body-electric when they were
together, while they looked cold and distant when in the company of girls.
In Stephania, the female body was not simply sexualized and fetishized, but
raped and violated. The representation of male animalistic sexuality here
assumed almost neurotic proportions, showing the first serious change in
the representation of masculinity in Greek cinema. The same can be said of
his underrated Tears for Electra (Dakria gia tin Ilektra, 1966), a suspenseful
and gripping modern retelling of the ancient myth of the Atreides house,
with hauntingly neurotic performances by Mairi Hronopoulou and Zoi
Lascari as mother and daughter. In The Story of a Life (1965), we find an
almost Marxist visual essay on the social “sur-plus value” of the female body.
Dalianidis’ dramatic musical Naked on the Street (Gimnoi sto Dromo,
1969) was a brilliant experiment with narrative and music while presenting
a tragic story. Unfortunately, it was so unsuccessful that Dalianidis never
experimented with the medium again. In his late war drama Those who
Spoke with Death (Aftoi pou Milisan me ton Thanato, 1970) we can see
his most ambitious and formally attractive work. The narrative pace was
engaging, the characters complex, and the atmosphere tense. Dalianidis here
foregrounded emotions and historical circumstances, creating an operatic
extravaganza of sentimental profusion and overdramatized patriotism by
Yannis Dalianidis, The Story of a Life (1965). Courtesy, Finos

Films. Greek Film Archive Collection.
using over-saturated colors and large fresco-like shots—yet in his usual

secretive way, with strange erotic subtexts and repressed hysterias always
looming in the background.
Such subtexts were very strong, and permeate most of Dalianidis’ films,
but due to censorship they could not be revealed. More importantly, the
prevalence of these subtexts was also due to self-censorship, which was
adopted as a defense mechanism in order to avoid controversy and not
to provoke the dominant morality—since family audiences were the main
target audience for his producers. His films were full of gender confusion,
erotic symbolism, and tense sexual anxiety—and must be studied carefully.
The consistent representation of submerged identities in his films must
be seen as the continuing legacy to Greek cinema of this commercially
successful director.
In his later films, and in his so-called cult trilogy The Jackals (Ta
Tsakalia, 1981), The Turn (I Strofi, 1982), and The Dangerous ones—A Protest
(Oi Epikindinoi-Mia Diamartiria, 1983), Dalianidis allowed a sensitive,
guilty, and lustful homoerotic gaze to wander over the half-naked body of
handsome actors like Panos Mihalopoulos, thus creating a shadow theatre
of the conflict between macho and feminized masculinity (as sensitively
expressed by Stamatis Gardellis), with the women acting merely as catalysts
for the valorization of contemporary patriarchal ethics. In his under-
rated last film Life Sentence (Isovia, 1988), the hidden themes of feminized
masculinity, disguised gay identity, sexual violence, and especially phallic
fear are more obviously manifested in the ambiguous masculinity of Nikos
Papadopoulos. However, by that stage Dalianidis was more a director for
television and his ability to establish frames for the big screen seemed to
have been lost.
The melodramas and television serials produced, scripted and directed
by another popular film-maker, Nikos Foskolos (b. 1927), can be viewed
from the same perspective. Foskolos wrote the scripts for many films by
Dalianidis, Andritsos, and Georgiadis, as well as for his own films. His radio
serials, especially those with an anti-communist message, were extremely
popular in the 1960s. During the early 1970s, he directed television serials,
one of which, The Unknown Warfare (O Agnostos Polemos), was the most
popular program on Greek television with 90 percent ratings during its peak
in the early 1970s.
With his melodramas, Love and Blood (Agapi kai Aima, 1967), Zero
Visibility (Oratotis Miden, 1968), I am Dying Every Morning (Pethaino kathe
Ximeroma, 1969), and In the Name of the Law (En Onomati tou Nomou,
1970), Foskolos addressed the burning issues of Greek society and history
through a stark, gritty, and sombre realism, and in suggestive black and
white photography. His main themes were the castigation of government
corruption, the exposure of fraudulent practices by the rich and powerful,
and, finally, the unveiling of the entrenched social immorality. In Zero

Visibility, he generated a memorable performance by Nikos Kourkoulos as
he exposed the practices of ship magnates who, in order to make money,
sank their old unprofitable cargo ships, while indifferent to the impact of
their actions on the lives of the sailors. The famous scream, “No more coal!”
expressed in one of the nightmarish hallucinations of the main character has
acquired legendary status amongst the cinephiles of the country.
In the Name of the Law was also one of the very few films that dealt
with the plight of traumatized Greek soldiers who had taken part in the
Korean War. The post-traumatic stress disorder that those forgotten soldiers
suffered found in this film its most poignant and touching representation.
Unfortunately, his scripts could be excessively didactic and lack ellipsis,
which made dialogue too long and acting theatrical, as though performances
were geared towards high school students. In Captives of Hatred (Aihmalotoi
tou Misous, 1972), his most accomplished endeavor in color, Foskolos
addressed post-traumatic issues for the repatriated Greek diaspora after
the civil war in the Congo, with convincing psychological characterization
through a well-written script, great camera work by Yorgos Arvanitis, and
haunting music by Yorgos Hatzinasios. Zoi Laskari’s acting was admirable
while Kostas Carras’ performance reached the heights of good tragedy.
Foskolos’ greatest success came with the Vouyouklaki mock-epic
Lieutenant Natasha (Ipolohagos Natasha, 1970). The film, while the most
successful blockbuster in the history of Greek cinema, was highly spurious
ideologically and extremely reactionary politically. In the story, Vouyouklaki,
sent to Dachau by the Germans, manages to maintain her shining blond
hair, glowing skin, and immaculate make-up. The whole film, almost
120 minutes, was essentially a vicious commercial advertising dyed blond
hair! Lieutenant Natasha, thanks to Foskolos and Vouyouklaki, is the Pink
Flamingos of patriotic movies. For some
reason, verisimilitude never seems to
work in this film; everything is artificial
and contrived, nothing is commen-
surate with itself: it is a work of shocking
insincerity and pretense—yet the most
successful, commercially, to this day.
Conservative in politics, Foskolos
produced what the state privileged as
official and mainstream “genuine” Greek
mentality: exclusivist nationalism,
traditional family values, and strong
Nikos Foskolos, Lieutenant Natasha (1970). patriarchal authority. There are indica-
Courtesy, Finos Films. Greek Film Archive tions that he understood the problems
Collection. of his society; and, indeed, if there was
sexual confusion in Dalianidis, in Foskolos we see a deep ideological bewil-

derment, expressed through regression to an imaginary universe of ethical
certainties and moral absolutes. All family problems are overcome, social
questions are solved, and personal conflicts resolved if people “give hands to
each other;” if, that is, people consent to being reconciled under the banners
of family, motherland, and dignity. His works were those of a reactionary
moralist, who could not tolerate ambiguities, or see the gray areas of human
nature—and, as such, they are very important samples of cultural texts
that articulated the conservative reaction against the radical politics and
subversive aesthetics of the 1960s and the 1970s—a position which he later
reinforced with some of his most popular televisions soapies.
Another important director of this genre was Vassilis Georgiadis (1921–
2000) who made about 20 films before working exclusively for television
after 1974. Among them was The Mother’s Curse (I Katara tis Manas, 1961),
a kind of folk opera (or a form of Greek western) with dramatic conflicts set
in impressive locations. In Rage (Orgi, 1962), he explored family dynamics
through the relationship between two sisters, but despite good perfor-
mances, the film was rather incomplete and uneven.
With Red Lanterns (Kokkina Fanaria, 1963), Georgiadis attempted
something more ambitious and interesting, as he explored with romantic
empathy and deep humanism the underworld of prostitutes and pimps in
the brothels of Piraeus. The film represented Greece at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1964 and was one of the few Greek films that found distributors
for the United States. With his next work Blood on the Land (To Homa
Vaftike Kokkino, 1964), he even reached Hollywood where the film was
nominated as Best Foreign Film. It was an excellent production with an
adventurous script by Nikos Foskolos, effective cinematography, and almost
operatic music. There is still something appealing and attractive in this film
in spite of its distressingly self-conscious acting.
The Seventh day of Creation (I Evdomi mera tis Dimiourgias, 1966)
ventured beyond the stereotypical commercial drama of the period and
explored in an almost neorealistic style the everyday difficulties of a young
couple as they decide to marry in a society plagued by unemployment
and poverty. In his dream for a better life, the young man submits a devel-
opment plan to the cement industry. He remains optimistic until his plan
is rejected. He never says anything to his wife and every day pretends to go
to work until an accident brings the dark illusion to its tragic end. Also, in
Appointment with an Unknown Woman (Rantevou me mian Agnosti, 1968),
one can admire an evocative sense of space, vivid photography, and realistic
characterization. This is one of the very few dramas without a happy ending,
exploring family dynamics with passion and empathy.
Georgiadis’ Love for Ever (Agapi gia Panta, 1969) must finally be
mentioned. With a script by two of the most important film-makers of the
next generation, Stavros Tsiolis and Nikos Nikolaidis, the film grapples with
class differences. Through the innocuous love story between a poor pianist
and a wealthy woman, Georgiadis investigates class issues and social preju-
dices with subtle humor and penetrating psychological sensitivity.
After his superb Amok, Dinos Dimopoulos released Lola (1964), a
film with great performances by Jenny Karezi and Nikos Kourkoulos, with
a moving script and memorable music. A number of his other films, like
Society Zero o’clock (Koinonia ora Miden, 1965), Concert for Machine Guns
(Kontsero gia Polivola, 1967), and Asphalt Fever (Pyretos Stin Asfalto, 1967)
were really effective dramas with emotional conflicts and fast-moving
narrative. Asphalt Fever, in particular, was an enthralling film noir, which
explored the nocturnal aesthetics of a cityscape, with magnificent perfor-
mances by Yorgos Foundas, Jenny Roussea and Spyros Kalogirou. The music
by Mimis Plessas is still one of the most interesting scores composed for the
screen, attaining the proportions of a grand symphony.
In 1969, Dimopoulos started working with Aliki Vouyouklaki and
made three unparalleled blockbusters: The Lady and the Tramp (I Arhontisa
kai o Alitis, 1968), The Teacher with the Golden Hair (I Daskala me ta Hrisa
Mallia, 1969), and The Fairy and the Brave Lad (I Neraida kai to Palikari,
1969). The more ambitious their projects, the less satisfactory seemed the
final result—despite Dimopoulos’ sensitivity with colors and lighting, the
choice of location, and the overall affectionate atmosphere surrounding his
protagonists, there was a gaping hole at the heart of these films: by then,
Vouyouklaki could not act! She was a victim of her own stardom and thus
victimized everybody around her. All her films from this period were narcis-
sistic postures in front of an imaginary mirror. Yet people loved her, watched
her films, and made them the highest grossing in the history of Greek
cinema. But the more successful she became, the less convincing became
her acting, and, unfortunately, Dimopoulos was one of her most sympathetic
casualties.
Generally speaking, the central problem with these Vouyouklaki
melodramas was that they condensed narrative time to such a degree that
they created a completely artificial emotional response, a self-contained
reflex reaction that evaporated with the finale of the movie. Such short-
lived emotional responses were used by the censorship of the period in
order to promote a new symbol of identification, the victim as a cultural
hero (especially the female victim), thus reflecting the official version of
“authentic” Greek cultural mentality. (The same symbol will return later
under unexpected circumstances.)
In 1963, another production company, Klak Films, was established,
declaring that it would make films for the “Greek family.” Apostolos
Tegopoulos (b. 1936) was the producer who chose the actor Nikos
Xanthopoulos (b. 1934) to be the “beloved child (or artist) of the people.”
They made many atrocious melodramas together, mostly about poor indus-
trial workers, even poorer girls falling in love with cruel wealthy womanizers,
or immigrants leaving behind their sweethearts, their mothers or their
children; most of them achieved success at the box office through their
sugary sentimentality, imitations of successful stories, and relentless use of
heartbreaking mournful songs. (In 1968/69, Klak Films produced 12 films;
in 1969/70, 13 before gradually decreasing towards its ultimate demise in
1972.)
Tegopoulos’ The Odyssey of an Uprooted Man (I Odysseia enos
Xerizomenou, 1966) was an overwhelming four-hour melodrama of
Bollywood proportions about the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The film ridiculed
the tragedy and pathos of the events surrounding the Catastrophe, as it repre-
sented them through a crude and facile primitivism, filling the gaps of the
script with sentimental songs and bizarre improbabilities. (The scene where
Xanthopoulos confronts a “bear” in a remote forest still remains one of the
funniest moments in Greek cinema.) The link between the personal reality
of the actor and his imaginary personas on screen forced Tegopoulos to
cancel Xanthopoulos’ contract after the latter announced that he was getting
married: the “child of the people” should belong to “mother Greece” and not
to a specific woman, and that put an end to Xanthopoulos’ stellar career. His
collaboration with Tegopoulos had managed, though, to construct a special
understanding of national identity and masculinity. Dimitris Eleftheriotis
stated:
The “Greekness” of the national identity (certainly in its cinematic
melodramatic form) did not revolve around a confident sense of belonging
to a powerful and self-sufficient nation but depended on emotional bonds
between people who “make do” under adverse conditions—as the song
suggests, to be Greek (or Indian) means to possess a heart but not much
more.”27
Tegopoulos reinvented his career after 1972 when he made a number of

soft-porn films, like the highly successful The Fever of Pleasure (1974), which
targeted not the morality of Greek Christian families but only the voyeuristic
urges of their male members.
The music scores in the movies produced by Klak Films in particular
tended to detract attention from the story, and indeed from performance,
and also failed to enhance the emotional response as music had, for instance
in Stella or Lola. Their tunes were monotonous, their lyrics repetitive, while
performances were stylized, manneristic, and lifeless. With the excesses of
Klak films, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the movie melodrama
itself had depleted the expressive potential of its structure and was in dire
need of radical formal innovations in order to retain its audience. However,
most popular melodramas today look like parodies of real movies and, as
such, they can be used as models for a thorough analysis of how genres
lose their semantic value through over-exposure, replication and excessive
self-referentiality.
Another interesting genre of the period was the musical. Lydia
Papadimitriou has written a detailed study of the popular ones of the
period.28 Some of these films presented interesting experiments with form
and content. Papadimitriou points out that, “the formal and generic eclec-
ticism of the Greek musical was paralleled by its cultural hybridity.”29 Some
musicals are distinct for their expressive colors, spectacularly revealing
costumes, and stylistic geometry. Dalianidis’ Something Sizzling (Kati na
Kaiei, 1963), Rendezvous on Air (Rantevou ston Aera, 1965), The Blue Beads
(Oi Thalassies i Chadres, 1966), and Marihuana . . . Stop! (1970), as well as
Sakellarios’ My Aunt the Hippy (I Theia mou I Hipissa, 1970), depicted a
country in marked transition, full of the contrasts and paradoxes of a tradi-
tional society which was crying out for new forms and means of expression.
More than anything else, these musicals represented a cultural physi-
ognomy full of heterogeneity and diversity. They juxtaposed different
cultural experiences, responding to the demands of an equally diverse
audience, experiences which on screen complemented each other instead of
falling into an antagonistic disunity. Greek film musicals, like other musicals
worldwide, seemed to stop being produced in the mid-1970s, but maintain
their popularity to this day. Silicon Tears (2001) stands out as an attempt at a
revival of the genre. However, as Papadimitriou stressed, “The films are ideal
for pastiche appropriations and camp readings, and their multiple layers of
cultural referencing render them pleasurable to revisit and reconstruct.”30
The proliferation of melodramas, though, did not produce a coherent
visual language that could be modified to attract new audiences. As more
foreign films that took risks with the medium (such as independent American
films) were successful, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the general
public, just as much as the intellectuals, was in growing discord with the film
industry. The imposition of the dictatorship in 1967 postponed the eruption
of such dissatisfaction for several years, not only through strict censorship,
but mainly through the production of films that manipulated and capitalized
on lingering collective traumas.
Under the Eyes of the Dictators

The rulers of 1967 sponsored many populist works that glorified the army
and its officers as the only protagonists that could change adverse realities by
protecting the nation and its national territory. The citizen was the eternal
victim while army officers endeavored to deliver the nation from its very
many external and internal enemies. Most popular dramas during the dicta-
torship presented an atmosphere of fatalism, which supposedly permeated
the historical adventures of Greek society. Everything was beyond the

comprehension and the conscious (and responsible) action of the individual.
The latter, devoid of agency and volition, emerged merely as a plaything of
the blind and overwhelming forces of change.
The dictatorship used cinema to promote the army officer as the single
cultural hero, to disseminate a nationalist mythology about the recent past,
and to idealize the army’s contribution to social stability. Many movies of
the period did address social issues but only in an innocuous manner as
individual adventures and minor episodes, which were redeemed by the
“impartiality” of the state and the “benevolent” presence of the military
authorities.
After 1967, severe censorship was imposed on all public spectacles,
with special emphasis on the strict adherence to “patriotic” scripts through
anti-communist sagas and the production of films promoting a spirit of
“ethno-conviction.” Most of the films produced in this period had war
themes (56 movies over seven years) based on the Italian, German and
Bulgarian invasions; but when they touched upon the occupation, all refer-
ences to left-wing resistance were completely erased.
Nationalist propaganda went hand in hand with anti-communism.
Most films were mainly about the heroism of the Greek army that had fought
against Germany, and the communists during the Civil War. In these films,
army officers showcased all their self-sacrificing patriotism, superior moral
virtues, and, ultimately, their messianic mission to save the nation. Espionage
movies depicting the communist infiltration of the political system after
the Civil War as undermining the country’s freedom and prosperity while
destroying its close friendship with America were very popular.
The Greek-American James Paris produced most of these patriotic
films with the abundant financial and technical assistance of the Greek state.
The main theme of Paris’ films was the perennial motif of betrayal, a motif
that needs to be examined not only sociologically but psychoanalytically
as well. The dictatorship’s censors perceived visualized history primarily
as legend, as a de-historicizing exercise in the fabrication of memories
through which the oppressed audiences of the period could find relief while
discharging their repressed feelings of anger and frustration. Oppression
also led to repression, emotional and sexual, and to an atmosphere of loss
and absence that was filled with excessive sentimentalism and narcissistic
self-victimization. Representations of women as the passive and “available”
victims of rape by invaders, who maintained their inner dignity in the face
of acts of violation by reciting patriotic verses, were so dominant that they
later became stock parodies for comedy and satire. For, despite its masculine
defenders, the nation was feminine by gender—so all Greek women had to
be protected: by defending them, the nation remained unspoiled!
Movies like Dimis Dadiras’ No! (Ohi!, 1969), Kostas Karagiannis’ The
Brave of the North (Oi Gennaioi tou Vorra, 1969) or October 28th, time 5.30
(28 Octovriou, ora 5.30, 1970), and Georgiadis’ At the Battle of Crete (Sti
Mahi tis Kritis, 1970) were propaganda films in the same way that British
war movies were propaganda. They promoted, through schematic charac-
terization and totally skeletal plot, a fanciful image of Greek history, full of
evil invaders, sinister traitors, and conniving foreigners. The crux of the film
was usually the moment when Greek soldiers died as heroes with epic music
playing in the background, as in No!, or when Greek women were raped by
invaders, as by Bulgarian irregulars in The Brave of the North. They were
all twisted glamorizations of a death-cult mentality conveyed in a perverse
and manipulative style—plus displaced sublimations of sexual violence and
transgression in the mind of the audiences themselves. Rape scenes were
much anticipated and evoked more and stronger emotional reactions than
any other part of a film!
Not all propaganda films, however, were crimes against good taste:
Dimis Dadiras’ At the Frontiers of Treason (Sta Sinora Tis Prodosias, 1968)
tried to create a Greek James Bond, bursting with sensuality, plot twists,
and relentless action. Despite its obvious political agenda regarding double
agents, femmes fatales and communist infiltrations, it is worth watching
today as the ultimate testament to the official ideology of the dictatorship.
The fact that the empty parliament building was used as a military court-
house was a very interesting statement about the way in which the dictators
presented the memory of democratic institutions.
The same can be said of Hristos Kiriakopoulos’ The Highway of Treason
(I Leoforos tis Prodosias, 1968), which was about a communist double agent
from behind the Iron Curtain whose twin brother was a virtuous and ethno-
loving army officer. The film was a compelling political thriller full of fast
action and plot impossibilities in totally fictitious historical settings. Later, it
became the model for the most popular television series of the dictatorship,
The Unknown Warfare, directed by Nikos Foskolos. Both this and At The
Frontiers of Treason were subsequently parodied mercilessly.
Gregoris Gregoriou’s The Last of the Commitadje (O Teleutaios ton
Komitaztidon, 1970) was also another anti-communist film produced under
the pretext of depicting the occupation of northern Greece by Bulgarian
forces; yet it can be seen with interest to this day for its suspenseful story
and passionate performances—strong proof of the aesthetic and political
versatility of its director.
Finally, the film that must not be overlooked as quintessential propa-
ganda is Errikos Andreou’s Give Your Hands (Doste ta Xeria, 1971). The
film’s plot revolves around the predicament of two childhood friends who
find themselves on opposite camps during the Civil War. Their dramatic
conflict is part of an enthralling storyline (as long as one does not take it too
seriously) and is accompanied by magnificent music. The film ends with the
proclamation, “We are Greeks and despite our ideology we must give our
hand to each other for reconciliation and for a better life in our country.”
Given the fact that many Greeks were at that time either in exile or in prison,
such didacticism was highly superfluous!
Overall, most films produced during the period were visual strategies
for subjectification, especially as their “power and identity” war imagery
formed part of a concerted and systematic policy to control and discipline
dissent and difference. As Dana Nolan has argued in her study of American
war movies, “The discourse of the war effort encourages a microphysics
of power in which citizen spies on citizen, where everyone lives under the
scrutiny of a relentless look.”31
The film which most consolidated, consummated, and, indeed, assas-
sinated the army officer as a valued cultural hero was the widely popular
The Brave Die Twice (Oi Gennaioi Pethainoun Dio Fores, 1973) by Takis
Vouyouklakis. The film was absolutely shameless in its glorification of the
virtues of army officers; however, it is historically important as it marks the
transition from the big screen to television. By then, ticket sales had started
dwindling dramatically. 1968 was the record year when film production
reached its peak: 117 films were released (excluding shorts and documen-
taries) and an astounding 137 million tickets were sold. After 1968, when
television was broadcasting nationally, attendance started decreasing by
almost 15 percent annually. As Yannis Bakogianopoulos observed:
In 1971, tickets to Greek movies were reduced by 30 percent in Athens
alone. While in 1968 in the wider area of Athens-Piraeus and suburbs,
around 20,000,000 tickets were sold, that number had fallen down to
1,500,000 by 1974. By 1977 it fell down to 400,000.32
Television entered the home of the working class and brought into its living
room the air of contemporary life as represented in blockbusters mainly
from the United States.
In the early years of television, the most popular shows, together
with sports events, were American serials such as Combat, Bonanza, Star
Trek, Lost in Space, Mission Impossible, and The Fugitive. Mostly American
films were screened while only one third of the program (six hours in the
beginning and after 1969 twelve hours per day) was made up of Greek
comedies, serials, and news bulletins. As the time frame was extended,
progressively more and more directors were needed for the production of
television series, game shows, and news programs. Nikos Foskolos, Yannis
Daliannidis, Takis Vouyouklakis, Gregoris Gregoriou, Vassilis Georgiadis,
and many others made the ultimate leap from the big screen to the small—
with disastrous results in most cases. However, many film production
companies were reluctant to make television programs: Filopimin Finos
rejected television and denied any relation with it. Eventually, this denial led
to the demise of Finos Films in 1977 and to the end of a whole era of film
culture.
While television was making its impact felt, film production continued
unabated. Despite the pro-American policies of the dictatorship, American
films were not commercially very successful between 1968 and 1974, as the
Hollywood studio system was experiencing a structural crisis. The screening
of “youthpix” films about campus revolutions and unorthodox lifestyles
involving sex and drugs was not particularly liked by Greek censorship; so
the movies were either banned or only allowed in limited venues in Athens
or Thessaloniki.
In a very strange twist of international movie trade, the second most
popular melodramas of the period originated in the arch-enemy state of
Turkey, despite the fact that, after anti-communism, the next pillar of the
dictatorship’s nationalist ideology was staunch and relentless anti-Turkism.33
Between 1969 and 1974, the names of Turkan Soray and Hulya Kocyigit
were as popular as those of Aliki Vouyouklaki and Martha Vourtsi among
an extremely nationalistic Greek audience. Indeed, the differences in plot,
performance, and setting were so minimal that even language did not seem
to be a barrier between the common sensitivities that presumably divide the
two people. (Turkish audiences had already been seduced by Vouyouklaki’s
charm, with two of her most popular comedies dubbed into their own
language.)
Turkish melodramas depicted landscapes “familiar” to Greek audiences.
For instance, the children of the 1922 refugees recognized the memories of
their parents by seeing in cinema the places that for them were images of
nostalgia, myth, and legend. The popularity of these films also indicated a
crisis in cultural orientation, as the dictatorship, having no real domestic
reaction was rapidly and without plan and social consensus industrializing
the economy and unwittingly destroying traditional lifestyles and values.
Furthermore, their popularity revealed a strange self-questioning about
belonging, together with a distinct psychological ambivalence towards Turks
themselves, inherent in the elusive identity of all post-Ottoman societies.
The success of this Yeşilçam Cinema externalized the mixture of
attraction and fear that Greek audiences felt towards the Turkish Other,
given the fact that a substantial part of Greek historical experience cannot
be understood without reference to the Turkish presence. It was a kind
of narcissistic projection of the “I love you and I hate you” psychological
ambivalence that seems still to dominate Greco-Turkish mutual perceptions.
On the other hand, common cultural memory was enhanced by common
structures in social organization and parallel cultural dilemmas regarding
the issues of belonging and identity that permeated both cultures. These
films encoded the same patriarchal ideology by enforcing stereotypes about
feminine behavior and gender roles. As Gonül Dönmez-Colin observed, the
films presented specific types of femininity: “Turkan Soray, the oppressed

sexual woman; Hulya Kocyigit, the oppressed asexual woman; Filiz Akin,
the well-educated bourgeois woman; and Fatma Girik, the honest ‘manly’
asexual woman.”34 As typical feminine characters, these can also be found in
Greek cinema and sometimes in strikingly similar representations.
Ultimately, these melodramas humanized the “bloodthirsty” Turk and
presented an image of suffering and redemption that resonated with the
deepest psychological needs of Greek audiences. They also framed strong
“family resemblances” in the way that they represented social roles, like
motherhood, ethics, and social class, questioning the patriarchal structure of
Mediterranean societies. Greek audiences saw in Turkish dramas a reflection
of their own image and that made them feel flattered and bewildered. It was a
deep disappointment to everyone that when the events of July 1974 erupted
with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, following the Greek coup, the import
of such films ended abruptly. Meanwhile, a whole new chapter in the history
of Greek cinema was already in full swing.
C h a p t e r F ou r
❦❦
The Formalist Moment: The

Inward Gaze and the New Greek
Cinema (1970–1981)
Self-reflexivity and the Cinematic Eye: New Greek

Cinema (1970–1974)
W hen Theo ( Thodoros ) Angelopoulos’ Reconstruction (Anaparastasi,
1970) was released, the existing industry of commercial cinema lost its social
and cultural legitimacy—and in a few years even its commercial success.
Angelopoulos’ movie reinstated an oppositional way of looking at the new
realities that had emerged within a society under political oppression; and
he did so without reverting to explicit political melodramas, as Costa-
Gavras had done earlier with his political thriller Z, or to any other form of
Hollywood or French narrative structure.
The film worked through its silences, subtexts, and the invisible struc-
tures that dominated a Greek landscape, which until then was screened as
full of light and color, as a site of euphoric bliss and self-realization. It was
as if cinematic language had abandoned the emotional empathy of classical
cinema and had returned to the stark and almost abstract ideograms of the
silent movies. Indeed, it was as if all formal representation had returned
to the austerity, simplicity, and elementarity of archaic art. There was no
montage, no obvious editing, no jump cuts, no tracking shots: the camera
stood still as a recorder of what is, of the way it is, and of the way we see it.
The unexpected sense of an obvious and self-evident truth being presented
to us, as we experience it every day, was the ultimate moral revelation in
Angelopoulos’ visual language in the first ever anti-illusionist film made in
Greece.
143
Its story was simple. A migrant returns from Germany to his village where
his wife and her lover kill him and bury his body in the basement of his own
house. People start asking what happened, the police intervene and the culprits
are arrested. The final scene is one of the most impressive visual frescoes in
cinema: the women of the village attack the wife with words and stones as she
is taken away to prison. A Greek folk song is heard by way of a farewell.
The story was a retelling of “Oresteia” (a myth that will recur in a grand
scale in Angelopoulos’ masterpiece in 1975). The shock of the film’s simplicity,
immediacy, and directness was so strong, that it demolished the aesthetics
of the previous two decades and was reconnected with the visual language
of the silent cinema. We are reminded here of the mountainous landscapes
in Gaziadis’ Astero (1929). Vassilis Rafailidis called Reconstruction “the first
‘grown-up’ film of Greek cinema. The first that managed to transcend the
stage of impulsive primitif experimentations or of an aesthetic borrowed
from other arts.”1
Angelopoulos, indeed, introduced a new way of seeing the Greek
landscape. The setting of the movie, a remote mountain, represented a
radical departure from the blue and white extravaganza of the Aegean
iconography, designed to attract bored intellectuals and inflate the senti-
mental romanticism of tourists. Dark shadows and black backgrounds made
the actors move with fear and horror through an implied crime scene.
With this film, individuals lost their depth, their psychological agency,
and became an appendix to the invisible archetypes underpinning time, or
were seen as animals crawling over a landscape of unfriendly, even cannibal-
istic, mountains. The chiaroscuro dominated all forms against the archetypal
natural background, which simply stands there—immovable, emotionless,
and indifferent. With its soft and almost imperceptible movement, Yorgos
Arvanitis’ camera was like an innocent bystander to this small yet powerful
drama. No sunlight fell on human faces; only rain and dark clouds covered
Thodoros Angelopoulos, Reconstruction (1970). Greek

The Formalist Moment: The Inward Gaze and the New Greek Cinema 145
with their eerie presence the scene of the original crime. Angelopoulos used
only amateur actors in the film; they succeeded in creating an atmosphere
of tension, anxiety, and fear without any sentimentality or pretension. The
film, with its deceptive simplicity, slow action and unassuming settings, was
a loud indictment, a Munch scream, against the death of community and
the loss of the political. Angelopoulos’ images reformed almost instantly the
mind of its viewers, who realized how artificial and false the whole cinematic
idiom of the 1960s had been.
Reconstruction marked “the formalist moment” in Greek cinema, since
in this film we do not simply watch a story and a powerful “re-enactment”
of a murder, but we are initiated into the experience of a cinema that reflects
on its ability to represent reality without any of the devices of emotional
rhetoric. Angelopoulos’ black and white movie made absent color an invisible
commentator on the action. The simplicity of the story and its unique
narrative structure gave the movie its radical formalism, which avoided the
oratorical excesses of Eisenstein’s montage or the sentimental exuberance
of the American tradition. In a sense, behind its austere language, a touch
of magic realism could be detected, as the camera rolled over the landscape
with a sense of strangeness, similar to the approach of Yilmaz Güney’s Umut/
Hope, released the same year in Turkey. As Gönül Dönmez-Colin argued
about Guney’s film, “One may seek of magic realism in Guney’s preoc-
cupation with images of borders and centers.”2 Angelopoulos took such
a border to its extreme liminality by having the characters interact in the
emotional vacuum of a timeless community.
However, Angelopoulos’ movie only spearheaded the appearance of
many more films that were to change the orientation of Greek cinema
for good. This movement has been called the New Greek Cinema and
it reinvented the art and the industry of film-making in the country.
Reconstruction was followed by an explosion of a creative energy that accel-
erated the consolidation of the reform movement.
Six years after his first movie, Alexis Damianos produced his master-
piece, Evdokia (1971). He transferred the new gaze onto the urban landscape
and the new strange relations and emotions which had emerged after the
industrialization and the abandonment of the countryside. As one critic
noted, with this movie, “life entered relentlessly into Greek cinema.”
Through scenes of brutal and unpolished realism, the camera intruded
violently into the space of the actors emerging as one of the central “actants”
of the plot. The private love affair between a prostitute and a soldier was
watched and supervised from everywhere: even in their most intimate
moments, these two young people were not alone. The invisible structures
which defined their social position, and the expectations of their peer groups,
were with them in their thought and desire. Beyond the symbolism of the
story, the real protagonist in the movie was the barren and unfriendly urban
Alexis Damianos, Evdokia (1971). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
landscape of a society that knew no authentic bonds and which substituted

emotions with social utility. Damianos’ camera was dangling as if in a state
of constant dizziness and confusion. Society enacted its rituals of belonging
according to accepted norms and roles: the young couple transcended them
and so they were doomed. Shortly after their wedding, the soldier is forced to
leave and the girl returns to her profession. The dream of union, mutuality,
and love vanishes in the loneliness of the urban desert, into which they are
both thrown, in silent despair. The film ends with a truck as it runs away in
the dark slowly towards the carnivorous city.
Evdokia represented another radical departure from the established
language of Greek cinema with its austere clarity, narrative simplicity, and
visual homogeneity. Damianos dissolved the cinematic gaze down to its
geometry, focusing on the peripheral and the marginal, and narrating an
alternative history of Greek society from below. The political background
was absent and yet everywhere. The absence of politics was made manifest
through a deep communication breakdown, covered superficially by ritual-
istic behavior, the perfunctory performance of social roles, and the inability
to see the other as a living embodiment of desire. The characters reflected
a society at a suffocating dead end, unable to act or even react; abandoned
to face alone conventions, customs, and norms. Prisoners of their class and
mentality, they remain trapped within a social structure without defense
mechanisms, their individuality expendable in an impersonal social order of
invisible normalizing structures.
Damianos avoided sensationalism or sentimentality. Although the film
is about a passionate love affair, there are no sex scenes; sex has become an
alibi in the attempt at connection and reciprocation. Yet, just as in the last
scenes of his previous film, it brims with sensuality, with the half-naked
bodies of the man and the girl together, experiencing the innocence of Adam
and Eve in their private space: their fall took place when they entered society.
As John Papargyris observed:
Evdokia is a film which is extraordinarily original and frank; it is an excep-

tionally straightforward film in that it displays obvious tendencies towards
cinematic realism without actually demonstrating a coherent compliance
with the axioms of this approach.”3
Its lack of compliance established the tradition of the open form in Greek
cinema that was to become the dominant means of cinematic representation
for the next 15 years until the death of the New Greek Cinema. Overall,
Damianos’ movie was an impressive and provocative moral tale about Greek
society—as Evdokia with Reconstruction together started a new chapter in
Greek cinematic history.
However, what both movies lacked was humor, and that was exactly what
gave to Dinos Katsouridis’ What Did You Do in the War, Thanassis? (Ti Ekanes
ton Polemo Thanassi?, 1971) its great popularity, commercial success, and,
indeed, a different visual language of dramatic tension and comic catharsis.
The movie was screened the same year as Evdokia and immediately became
popular because of the emotional identification with the main character, the
Greek John Doe, who, was struggling to survive day by day of the German
occupation, through deception, mischief, or small acts of unremarkable
heroism. This survival instinct made the character so lovable by bringing out
the best and the worst of his mind. Thanassis Vengos (1927–2011), a great
comic actor, a successful fusion of Buster Keaton’s profound humanism and
Louis de Funès’ exciting hyperactivity, gave a face to the social mentality that
dominated the urban middle class of this period: unreflective yet sympathetic,
passive yet with a strange sense of justice, terrified but with the certainty that
things will get better. Despite the many problems with censorship and the
lack of any assistance from the state, the film was an accomplished metaphor
for oppression and hope, one of the most important political comedies made
in Greece after The Germans Strike Back.
Dinos Katsouridis, What Did You Do in the War, Thanassis?

(1971). Greek Film Archive Collection.
Katsouridis’ camera, based on the nostalgia of soft black and white

contrasts, reconstructed a historical period, with very obvious contem-
porary parallels, in which a sense of moral concern dominated the minds of
ordinary people: even if they were hungry, they were not going to deceive
anyone; even if they were tortured, they were not going to reveal names; even
if they were to be executed, they were not going to lose faith in humanity. As
Stratos Constantinidis observed: “The struggle for freedom is presented by
Katsouridis as a daily affair in a series of ‘little’ acts of defiance (as by Froso)
and ‘great’ acts of endurance (as by Thanassis).”4
The film was the great commercial success of the year and, although
Katsouridis does not belong to the New Greek Cinema, his film captured the
atmosphere of foreboding and anxiety that permeated Greek society during
the years of the dictatorship.
Meanwhile, between 1970 and 1974, the New Greek Cinema came
into being like a fully armored Athena. Despite ubiquitous censorship,
a number of extraordinary movies were made. Angelopoulos’ Days of
36, (Meres tou 36, 1972), Pavlos Tasios’ Yes, Certainly, But . . . (Nai Men
Alla . . ., 1972), Pandelis Voulgaris’ Anna’s Engagement (To proxenio tis Annas,
1972), Tonia Marketaki’s The Violent John (Ioannis o Viaios,1973), Kostas
Aristopoulos’ The Place of The Skull (Kraniou Topos, 1973), and Kostas
Ferris’ The Murderess (I Fonissa, 1974) spearheaded a gradual transition to
a cinema of formal self-questioning by depicting complex characters and
indeterminate situations formed within ambiguities and contradictions.
Young producers, educated and politically minded, like the wealthy art-lover
Yorgos Papalios, provided the new directors with the funds and the freedom
to experiment with the medium. With their personal style and iconography,
the new directors reinvented cinematic culture, creating a distinct cultural
movement around the production, dissemination, and experience of films
while inaugurating a new politicized interpretation of films as “social
artifacts” with a strong political “message”. Within these five years such
“political” cinema took over film production while competing with the rising
popularity of television and the plethora of soft porn movies. These political
movies were to dominate film culture for the next ten years, imposing their
own hermeneutical principles on the whole history of Greek cinema.
New Greek Cinema not only introduced new themes and new styles
to the making of films. It also changed the way a story was filmed by
establishing new camera angles, settings and mise-en-scène. The camera
took on a new role and reorganized the visual space of action. Instead
of simply recording a story told through continuous images, the camera
took risks, fragmented the story through jump cuts and fast editing and
by elongating diegetic time, while indiscreetly entering the act of represen-
tation itself. Music became minimalistic, settings were out in the open, while
acting avoided verisimilitude by incorporating the Brechtian techniques of
defamiliarization and distancing. Theatrical elements in acting resurfaced

through stylized and self-conscious performances; the directorial point
of view became the totalizing unifier of action and, finally, scriptwriters
provoked reactions with their irreverent dialogue, challenging established
institutions and ideas, targeting in their critique institutions like the family,
church, and state apparatuses.
Depending on the different directorial styles, their approach is eclectic
and somehow impressionistic. Angelopoulos, for example, insisted on master
shots, lengthy takes, and minimal montage, while Voulgaris worked with
faster narrative, medium takes, and heavier editing. Marketaki consciously
re-created the conventions of film noir, in Hitchkock style, as reinvented by
Claude Chabrol. The same can be said about Dimos Theos, especially in his
“police documentary” Kierion, while Tasios and Ferris rearranged naturalist
settings and linear narrative by introducing fast transitions and camera experi-
ments that intensified the emotional energy of their stories. Finally, it seemed
that the French auteur approach to cinematic production was becoming the
dominant principle in the interpretation of the film’s message. Certain films
from the period established and consolidated the new movement by investi-
gating stories and themes that had been forbidden until then.
Angelopoulos’ Days of 36 explored, from within the oppression and
persecution of the 1967 dictatorship, the political machinations leading to
the oppression and persecution of the 1936 Metaxas fascist regime. The film
was slow and insular, almost detaching the viewer from any empathy with
its story. Angelopoulos used every narrative and stylistic device to present
the fear and horror of a society without freedom. After the assassination of a
union leader, suspicions fall on an ex-police informer who is in disfavor with
the regime. He reacts by holding hostage a politician of the right, but the
police and political establishment under absolute secrecy assassinate him,
without allowing him to defend himself.
The movie’s atmosphere was claustrophobic, gloomy, and foreboding;
the colors cold and unsympathetic; the use of music ironic and distancing.
Angelopoulos, one of the few Greek directors to have reflected on and talked
about his visual aesthetics, noted in response to a question on the elliptical
style of his movie:
It’s one way to go beyond naturalism, as Dreyer used to say. The ellipse is
a tremendous option for the spectator to become the film-maker’s partner
in the creative process. It also offers a kind of “Brechtian alienation” that
depends not only on the position of the camera, but also on the structure
of the film. Every film is made up of a number of individual blocks that—
to use Brecht’s definition—are autonomous, but they really depend on
each other. The point, evidently, is to follow an almost naturalistic course
in order to better underline the realism of each sequence.5
Angelopoulos created a new style of constructing political films, in

opposition, as he noted, to Costa-Gavras’ Z, which was distinct for its clear
demarcations between good and bad with no gray areas of ambiguity. “My
films,” Angelopoulos said, “are trying to be more hybrid, without a beginning
or an end. I attempt to introduce a sort of ‘anti-suspense’ ritual, something
of the kind Oshima created in Death by Hanging . . .”6 Indeed, Oshima’s
style fused effectively with Jean-Luc Godard’s visual idiom and the sense
of filmic temporality that we meet in Antonioni’s early works converged in
order to create one of the most innovative and radical attempts to represent
a story on screen. Even though audiences did not respond at the box office,
Angelopoulos’ contribution was immense in breaking down the preten-
tious artificiality and ossified mannerisms of classical cinema, as inspired
by Hollywood and even the Soviet montage tradition. It was the looming
crisis of representation that Angelopoulos’ style addressed, and, despite
its excessive introspection, Days of 36 is a film that experimented with
cinematic language and paved the way for new forms of storytelling.
Tasios’ film Yes, Certainly, But . . . is an underrated work, a psychological
thriller with fast pace, sexual tension, and effective dialogue. The film has
a more traditional structure and unfolds a story through flashbacks with
immediacy leading to an emotional catharsis. The story is about a divorced man
exposed to pornography and sexualized images of women, who, as a conse-
quence, cannot make love with affection and intimacy to his lover and has lost
all connection with his ex-wife. In his despair, he tries to rape her, but she resists
and he kills her. The end comes with his suicide as he jumps off a tall building.
The lucid colors and clear frames of the film show Tasios’ skill in
composition and editing. His film implicitly criticized a perception of
masculinity that dominated Greek society by presenting its protagonist
(the sensitive and introspective Phanis Hinas) as a man in despair, a
Pavlos Tassios, Yes, Certainly, But . . . (1972). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
prisoner of the social persona of the normal macho heterosexual that he

could not be. The imprisoned male animal didn’t project his frustration
and anger against the world but against himself—the only way out of
the prison is to destroy the mind that constructed it. The film has strong
psychoanalytic references and could be analyzed for its critique of mascu-
linity and heteronormativity.
Tasios is one of the few directors with explicit moral concerns
throughout his career. His next film, The Protectors (Oi Prostates, 1973) was
an interesting biography of the greatest modern Greek painter Konstantinos
Parthenis, which focused on the human aspects of an artist’s life and the
problems it generates especially as his “legal” family shuts into a mental
asylum the girl who gave him love and inspiration. We must also mention his
melodrama The Rivals (Oi Antiziloi, 1968) for its vertiginous narrative pace,
strong homoerotic subtexts, and frenetic music by Hristos Mourabas; a film
that deserves more attention and study.
The movie Anna’s Engagement by Pandelis Voulgaris (b. 1940) entered
private space and broke down the barriers between inside and outside,
articulating a political statement out of it. In this film, family became the
imprisoning institution, the focal point of all authoritarian power, and the
birthplace of all neuroses. The young servant girl who wants to marry an
outsider is convinced by her adopted family not to do it, so, she returns to
the family home to experience security through self-imprisonment. The film
subtly explores the transformation in her mind as she begins to understand
what is happening around her: the realization of her position in her immediate
social environment emphasizes her internalized oppression and inferiority.
Voulgaris’ camera is discreet and pensive, entering cautiously into the
mind of his character. His protagonist, played with impressive austerity by
Anna Vagena, unveils her own personal history as an aborted rite of passage
to maturity. She is also a symbol of a generation dominated by the authority
of the great and imposing “myths” of the past, as she becomes a willing
victim to an autocratic reality which destroys her dignity and selfhood—an
apt metaphor for Greek society as understood by the New Greek Cinema.
Tonia Marketaki’s strange film noir The Violent John dealt with “the
problematic hero.” It also problematized the ways in which power and
insanity go hand in hand, depicting a universe of delusional criminal
darkness in which the individual is totally lost, depersonalized through
self-alienation and thus turning to crime in order to survive its own insig-
nificance. The film was a mixture of noir aesthetics and documentary style,
indicating for the first time the new aesthetics of television presentation.
Marketaki was the first director to attempt a creative fusion of the two codes.
With slow pace, in suggestive black and white, the film explored not
simply the mind of the violent criminal, but also the violence that society
imposes on his mind. It was both a political and a psychoanalytic film,
Tonia Marketaki, The Violent John (1973). Greek Film

Archive Collection.
exploring the epistemic regimes that a repressive society uses in order to

control and dominate. The mind of the violent criminal epitomized the
structures of a society permeated by violence, frustration, and internalized
horror. The existential anomy represented by the protagonist was not a conflict
between him and his environment: anomy was born out of his inability to meet
the expectations of his society and confront his feelings of inadequacy and
insufficiency as he experienced his self in the context of a drab and soulless city.
In Kostas Aristopoulos’ The Place of the Skull, Jesus’ journey to Golgotha
is employed to present the contemporary predicament of an abandoned village
as people stage a passion play. Aristopoulos’ low-budget film was his response
to Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1967) and probably his Oedipus
Rex (1968), and employed Brechtian defamiliarization techniques in order to
foreground the political aspect of Jesus’ crucifixion. Instead of being crucified
at Golgotha, the villager who impersonates Jesus enters the new place of cruci-
fixion, the factory. Despite the many awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival,
the film was banned after the reactions of the Greek Orthodox clergy.
Nikos Zervos and Thanassis Rentzis’ Black-White (Aspro Mauro, 1973)
was a film based on the contrast between the easiness of the totalitarian
regime, which the silent majorities prefer (black) and the rebellion against it
(white) as experienced by the young people of the day. The film was uneven
but crucial for the consolidation of the aesthetics of the new cinema.
Thodoros Marangos’ Take Your Places (Lavete Theseis, 1973) was another
important exploration of the drabness and the insipid routine of everyday
life as experienced by factory workers. The film employed mostly neorealist
techniques to explore the deep feelings of alienation and self-estrangement,
giving special emphasis to the militarization of everyday life.
Most of these films had as their principal theme contemporary situations
and current issues. Prompted by an urgent need to explore the immediate
and pressing actualities of the ordinary, New Greek Cinema established an

almost documentary style to depict urban realities and political oppression.
Kostas Ferris had started his career by making some interesting comedies,
but after he moved to Paris, where he met Volker Schloendorf, Werner
Hertzog, Barbet Schroeder, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and others, he
accepted a more experimental and radical form of film-making.
His first major film was the adaptation of one of the greatest Greek
novellas by Alexandros Papadiamantis, The Murderess (1974). The book is
about an aged woman who in a moment of “heightened awareness” decides
that infant girls should be killed after their birth so that they will never
experience the injustice and oppression of their patriarchal society. Such a
Dostoevskian story was predominantly a mental drama, a tragedy that took
place mostly in the mind of the woman, who played God, giving and taking
back life. Ferris explored the inner mental space as his camera penetrated
borderline states of mind. The cinematic eye delineated a mental process,
zooming in and out the mind of a deranged individual trapped in circular
self-justification without redemption or catharsis. Ferris transformed a
story set in the nineteenth-century Greek countryside, when the practice
of female infanticide was a common secret, into a parable about a desperate
individual’s reaction to the overpowering forces of society.
His use of color and deep focus to enter the mind of his protagonist
adds another level of signification to the filmic text itself. It was the mental
image of a distorted reality. It was not the mind that was distorted; it was
the reality itself, as social and political construct imposing distinctions
based on gender and determining destinies for individuals without their
consent. Furthermore, his experiments with camera angle, color (as the
movie oscillates between black and white and natural color images), and the
blurred borders between illusion and reality make this film one of the most
Costas Ferris, The Murderess (1974). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
innovative and radical adaptations of a literary classic—a discreet fusion

of classical storytelling and avant-garde aesthetics. Maria Alkaiou, as the
murderess, gave an almost metaphysical depth to the depiction of mental
madness, as though madness itself was the divine law punishing her crimes.
Furthermore, the New Cinema movement brought radical changes to
the production, dissemination, and social function of film-making. Most
films were not made at the studios of major production companies. They were
independent productions privately funded—sometimes by wealthy friends
as in the case of Angelopoulos—without any state assistance and outside
the main distribution system. Even their screening at cinemas was mostly
due to personal connections and affiliations. Yet from 1973 their presence in
the public sphere, especially after they started winning major awards at the
Thessaloniki Film Festival, started becoming obvious and undisputed.
These films enabled the director to replace the producer or the star actor
as the main “gaze” behind the movie. The dominance of the auteur tradition
became more prominent; the director became the omniscient eye behind
the narrative threads of the film. Consequently the filmic text encoded a
personalized view of the world, focusing on the dissemination of power at all
levels of social life, as a conscious attempt to negate the official mainstream
“collectivist” understanding of social experience, cultural memory, and
identity politics.
By representing the structures of power that permeated the consciousness
and the unconscious of their characters, the new directors wanted to raise
awareness of and even to denounce established “truths” and to incite action.
By doing so, they avoided all forms of psychologization, melodrama, or
emotional plethorism. The conflict between a human being and its social
environment was depicted in its ordinary manifestations: as an inability
to find personal fulfillment, emotional reciprocation, or interpersonal
understanding rather than as grand moral dilemmas, heroic acts or super-
human virtues. The anti-Hollywood aesthetic of the movement would be its
dominant parameter until its demise.
Furthermore, the new cinema framed a completely new “hero”: not the
common man or the sympathetic rascal, but the unintentional criminal,
the confused bystander who rejected the positive values of society and felt
existential dysphoria within the negative values of his subconscious. From
Angelopoulos’ assassins to Ferris’ transcendental murderess, it was the
conditions around criminal behavior that interested the new directors. It was
not the criminal as a human being, but the crime as the end result of many
imponderable factors beyond the understanding or control of the specific
character that the directors wanted to represent.
Within the scope of such films, the auteur practice was not an extrav-
agant eruption of individualistic sensibility or the personal fantasy of
a gifted artist. On the contrary, it externalized the individual’s struggle
against political oppression and the one-dimensional uniformity of capitalist

commodification and mass depersonalization. At the same time, most
of the films of the New Greek Cinema, while carrying by all means the
stamp of their individual director, were collaborative projects, as groups of
people worked together to contribute to each other’s efforts under extraor-
dinary circumstances. Theos’ Kierion and Marketaki’s The Violent John
are the ultimate examples of such collaborative work which redefined the
production style of cinema, until the state took over production in the 1980s.
Furthermore, the directors brought the filming process out into the
open. Despite the fact the in the 40s and 50s the absence of studios was the
main obstacle to the consolidation of the industry, by the late 60s, studios
had imposed their own code of practice on the creative process and had
stifled the imaginative use of space, sound, and form. By bringing the filming
process outside, the new directors rediscovered new landscapes, chromatic
atmospheres, and sonic moods in which to place their stories and contest
official versions of social and cultural perception. Angelopoulos, for example,
discovered the rainy, lush, mountainous Greek inland, especially in Epiros,
Macedonia, and central Peloponnese. The urban landscape now created a
dark and foreboding atmosphere and state of mind rather than being an
actual architectural setting. The expectations of the audience also changed;
the oversaturation of cinemas with slapstick comedies, war melodramas, and
fustanella stories, seemed to have led to their ultimate demise.
On the other hand, so much warmongering and hero worship at the
cinema formed a stark contrast with the totally unheroic and completely
farcical social reality defined by the dictators: there was nothing grand or
noble in the administration of the Greek state or in its leaders. The only
heroic achievement that each citizen could aspire to every day was to hold a
job, provide his or her family with the necessities of life, and have sex.
The New Greek Cinema talked about these mundane and prosaic things
of life—their attainment and/or their absence. The new directors based
their vision on their daily experience of their lived reality of endless humili-
ation. And although they invested their efforts with theoretical schemes and
ideological discourses, the central truth of all of their works was the lack of
freedom of expression, in political, sexual, and existential self-determination.
The core theme of the New Cinema was what such absence determined in
terms of personal and social identity as preconditions for living.
Certainly, we should not make the error of elevating the director as
the only force behind these changes: film culture as a whole had changed.
Furthermore the function of cinema as a socializing space, and as an alter-
native public space, was coming to an end with the rise of television. The
privatized vision of the world introduced a much more personal view of
history and society, an individuated re-enactment of lived experience and
personal identity.
Directors like Angelopoulos, Voulgaris, Damianos, Marketaki, and

Theos responded to the new conditions of production by reinventing the
cinematic eye, each one in their own way, and despite the fact that their self-
reflexivity sometimes indicated a certain intellectualism and elitism, their
contributions renewed and reinvigorated the film-language of oppositional
aesthetics. Their diversity and openness articulated a mature and pluralistic
visual idiom that was to be appropriated by individual directors over the
next 20 years as their common semantic code of reference—even when they
rejected it.
Together with the new movement, a number of important more tradi-
tional films were produced up until the fall of the Junta. Michael Cacoyannis,
living outside Greece, released his sumptuous production of Euripides’
tragedy The Trojan Women (1971) as an international co-production with
a mixed cast starring Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas,
and Genevieve Bujold. Despite all intentions, this was one of his weakest
films: great shots, effective editing, and suggestive close-ups, but overall the
mixture of stylized movements and pictorial naturalism did not support the
solemnity and gravity of the story. As Pauline Kael observed in an interesting
review about “the makeshift style of the film”:
The movie appears to be impoverished and stagy . . .Everything in The
Trojan Women is outdoors, and yet the movie is claustrophobic, because
the locations . . . have no connection with each other, other than they were
stage sets replacing each other.”7
Nor did the photography have the structural depth or rich texture we
found in Electra. Katherine Hepburn’s Hecuba does not have any emotional
depth, while Bujold as Cassandra is lacking in awe. The naturalism of
strong and vibrant colors simply undermines the emotional impact of the
tragedy, while the chorus is inactive, with most actors not knowing what
to do. Cacoyannis inundated a classical tragedy with Hellenistic, almost
Roman, sentimentalism—by simply betraying his own sublime abstraction
of Electra.
Errikos Andreou’s Papaflessas (1971), a historical drama about the life
and death of one of the most popular heroes of the War of Independence
in 1821, was the closest that the Greek film industry has come to a big
Hollywood blockbuster. It was a lavish co-production by Finos Films and
James Paris and was shot on location, in opulent studio settings, and with
magnificent costumes. The film had distinct narrative patterns, and avoided
sentimentality and jingoism, despite the fact that it was very “patriotic”,
as the dictatorship would have demanded. The story of how an idealistic
revolutionary priest is transformed into a manipulative bureaucrat while
having an illicit love affair was rather risqué from its inception. Furthermore,
his death by the Egyptians looks more like an act of personal despair than of
military defeat. Very good performances were given by Dimitris Papamihail

and Katia Dandoulaki, together with the rest of the cast—even Turkish
characters are shown with empathy and respect. Kostas Kapnisis’ score, with
its operatic, almost Wagnerian tunes and complex orchestration, deserves
more attention.
Yannis Dalianidis’ historical drama The Rebellious Commoner (O
Epanastatis Popolaros, 1971) successfully reconstructed the past on the
island of Zakynthos in a fascinating social drama. Nikos Foskolos’ Abuse of
Power (Katahrisi Exousias, 1971) had a good narrative pace and an excellent
performance by Nikos Kourkoulos. Vassilis Georgiadis’ That Summer
(Ekeino to Kalokairi, 1971) was also a sensitive depiction of a love affair
between a divorced couple, as the woman is dying of a terminal illness, with
suggestive music by Mimis Plessas. Finally, Yorgos Zervoulakos’ Lysistrata
(1972) is one of the best film adaptations of ancient Greek comedy, with a
fast narrative pace, an irreverent sense of humor and implied criticism of the
“militarization” of Greek society. The music by Stavros Xarhakos is also an
interesting fusion of diverse sounds from the film tradition, modern rock,
pop, and classical motifs.
In 1971, Maria Plyta released her final film The Unknown Woman
of the Night (I Agnosti tis Nihtas), and Stavros Tsiolis his gripping social
melodrama The Urban Jungle (I Zougkla ton Poleon), before abandoning
cinema for many years. Panos Glikofridis also released his comedy with
Thanassis Vengos, Holidays in Vietnam (Diakopes sto Vietnam) which was
severely censored and banned. The same fate awaited Dinos Katsouridis’
Thanassi, Take Up Your Gun (Thanassi, Pare to Oplo Sou, 1972), a sequel
to his previous film, with an overtly political message that provoked strong
reactions from the dictatorship. Vagelis Serdaris’ A Matter of Life and Death
(Zitima Zois kai Thanatou, 1972) was an absorbing thriller, based on a
detective novel by Yannis Maris, which despite its non-political character,
was distinct for its artistic mise-en-scène and pacy narrative development.
Dimopoulos’ Marshland (O Valtos, 1973) must also be recognized as
an impressive work of traditional cinema, with passionate performances,
a complex script, and frantic music by Yorgos Hatzinasions. We must also
mention the cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis (b. 1942), who, despite his
initial involvement with commercial cinema would work almost exclusively
in the new cinema as expressed by Angelopoulos.
Every year between 1970 and 1974, an average of 70 to 80 films were
produced; most of them melodramas, comedies, and the rising industry
of the period, soft porn. It was clear that Greek cinema was declining, and
the commercially successful films were using and abusing a well-tested
formula. Aliki Vouyouklaki was on the front line of this demise; with her
films becoming more repetitive, self-indulgent and formulaic, she gave
audiences an excuse to remain at home and watch television serials. Despite
its commercial success, her Maria of Silence (I Maria tis Siopis, 1973)8 by
Dalianidis brought an end to the commercial industry.
The New Greek Cinema didn’t produce any box office successes, but it
was to these works that the urban audiences turned for renewal and change.
When the dictatorship collapsed in July 1974, the creative explosion that
had been restrained by censorship and persecution resulted in strange and
long-term consequences.
Meanwhile, in its contradictions, the dictatorship had amended the
existing laws going back to 1961, and with new legal arrangements in 1973,
gave more emphasis to the artistic aspect of film-making over the industrial
one. It divided films into two categories: protected and subsidized films. It
also gave incentives for the production of quality films by returning part of
its taxes to the producer while at the same time subsidizing films to cinema
owners for public screening. The existing legal entity within the industry
ministry for cinema was renamed the Greek Film Center, and its director
was the great but retired Giorgos Tzavellas. It remained under the Ministry
for Industrial Development until 1978.
A New Discourse about Film Culture

By now, educated urban middle-class audiences were ready for a deep change
in their cultural habits given that television had started producing serial
melodramas like The Unknown Warfare (O Agnostos Polemos, 1971–1974)
and The Unknown Traveller (O Paraxenos taxidiotis, 1972–1973) with
immense success. Their popularity, however, proved to be their doom as
well. Plots were sketchy and characters abysmally one-dimensional. Such
facile and crass realism turned the audience’s attention to new ways of
representing reality. The break with the dominant idiom of commercial
cinema was rather inevitable as the new film-makers were articulating their
conceptual categories in an almost programmatic way.
In the meantime, international pressure forced the dictatorship, after 1971,
to relax some of its censorship laws and to give a certain degree of freedom
to the film industry to start major experiments with form, scriptwriting, and
cinematography. It was the first time that under conditions of limited freedom,
a new discourse on cinematic experience and production was established in
specialized journals and newspapers with a momentum that was to last for
many decades. Indeed, one could claim that the existing conceptual forms that
dominate cinematic discussions today had their origin in this period.
Urban audiences now turned to the New Greek Cinema, which had
already started to have an impact on the industry. The middle class, which
was well-established by then in the cities, was exposed to ideas from France,
the USA, Germany, and Italy in regard to the social function of cinema and its
status as art. Together with the cine clubs established in the early 1950s, new
art cinemas like Studio and Alcyonis screened contemporary world cinema
with retrospectives on all genres and by directors from all over the globe.
Newly founded film journals like Contemporary Cinema (Sihronos
Kinimatografos, 1969–1982) presented the reflections of contemporary
European film-makers and provided the forum for some extremely inter-
esting and, unfortunately, often personalized debates about cinema. This
particular journal gave birth to and consolidated an intellectual momentum
that became more intense after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 and
continued for decades. It was written by specialized critics who could appre-
ciate film as a distinct and autonomous artistic expression with its own
vocabulary and principles. Critics like Vassilis Rafailides, Tonia Marketaki,
Yorgos Korras, Kostas Sfikas, Lakis Papastathis, Frida Liapa, Maria Gavala,
Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Mihalis Dimopoulos were at different times
on the editorial board of Contemporary Cinema and their contributions
changed the way that films were understood and evaluated.
The journal promoted a sharp difference and antagonism between
“commercial cinema” and “creative cinema” or “the politics of the creator;”
advocating predominantly the auteur tradition, although in a rather ad
hominem way, since, from the directors of the movement only Angelopoulos
could be seen as belonging to such a tradition. In this respect they carried
on with the debate from the 1960s which identified, as Maria Chalkou points
out, there are:
Four vital elements as prerequisites for a valued Greek national cinema:
the “quality”/“artistic,” “real,” “popular,” and “national,” which were inextri-
cably linked and resulting in one the other. Greek national cinema should
be “quality” in terms of content and technique as well as of authorial view;
“real” in its thematics and representational styles; “popular” in its content
and familiarity to the audience; and finally “Greek” in its theme and, if
possible, form.9
Despite their exposure to French theory—more of André Bazin and less of

their contemporary Christian Metz—the contributors to the journal never
articulated a comprehensive theory about the cinematic creator. At the same
time, they rejected almost everything else produced by “bad commercial”
cinema, in a manner that verged on the pathology of a provincial elitism.
Nikos Kolovos (1938–2005), one of the most prominent theorists of
Greek cinema, observed:
It is paradoxical, but since the beginning of the 70s till the end of the 80s
when New Greek cinema was born and matured, the theory of the creator
(auteur) was never appropriated, discussed, or analyzed systematically in
Greece . . . Instead an inarticulate and empirical understanding of “the politics
of the creator” was adopted by many representatives of the new cinema . . .10
However, as Hristos Vakalopoulos observed:

The journal Contemporary Cinema . . . refused to become an agency of
interpreters. Its efforts moved towards the construction of a discourse
parallel to that of the film, something extremely difficult.11
The journal also, under Vassilis Rafailidis, applied to the Ford Foundation
in 1971 for a grant and received the substantial amount for the time of
3 million drachmas. With the funds, the journal purchased cameras and
other equipment. These offered a unique opportunity to new film-makers to
produce their short films with modern machines, and indirectly contributed
to the promotion of the new movement. As Rafailidis wrote, justifying the
donation from a suspected agent of the CIA:
We made ten short films, participated in the production of two feature
films by Marketaki and Sfikas, and more importantly we purchased a
complete series of expensive machinery necessary for makings films.12
However, the grant itself raised a furious debate about the “moral legit-
imacy” of accepting money from the imperialist Americans and the hateful
class enemy, preparing a wave of vulgar populism that was to dominate the
public domain after 1981.
After 1974, Thanasis Rentzis’ Film was also a theoretically inclined
journal with its distinct format and a radical reinterpretation of the filmic
experience that brought to the discourse the experimental mode of Russian
formalism and futurism. Rentzis, one of the most innovative thinkers on the
production and interpretation of films in the country, theorized on “how
poetic transformation and political struggle go side by side.”13
In 1978, Makis Moraites published the journal Cinema, which under
different editors and content emphasis continues to be published today. In
Thessaloniki, Screen (Othoni) appeared the next year, followed by Cinema
Notebooks (Kinimatografika Tetradia). Journals like Camera (1984), Cine
Fantastiko (1983), Metropolis (1985), Anti-Cinema (1992), and Cinema and
Communication (2000) kept the debates about the social function of cinema
alive during a period of marked decline in audience attendance and the
transformation of discussions about cinematic experience into incompre-
hensible theoretical jargon.
Ideas from many sources, filtered through the newspapers and journals,
ended the rather impressionistic, more or less political and ad hoc film
reviewing that had dominated film criticism for decades. At the same time,
these magazines gave to official institutions such as the Thessaloniki Film
Festival a set of alternative aesthetics which was to be heard through the
audiences’ and critics’ awards. Most of the contributors to the journals
were influenced by the ideas of the French Cahiers du Cinema, but also by
American cinema or Russian formalism, and grafted onto the empirical
tradition of mainstream reviewing some extremely interesting theoretical

questions about film-making—not only with regard to its content, but also to
its form, genres, and codes of representation. Psychoanalysis and semiotics
became popular after 1975; but overall, film criticism in Greece, as every-
where else, is an eclectic and anarchic hybrid of many different approaches.
Special mention must be made of Vassilis Rafailidis’ theoretical contri-
bution with what he called “cine-construction” (filmokataskeue), which he
defined as his own method of reading a filmic text. His approach is summed
up by the following statement:
A film is either good or bad not just because we like it, but because its form
reveals an easily diagnosed constructive intention on behalf of its creator.
The “architectural plan” on which the film is based is embodied in the film
itself and this is what we must find.14
Also important is Nikos Kolovos’ work on the sociology of cinema and his
more theoretical approach to cinema, with his main thesis that, “fiction and
documentation in cinema do not copy reality; they reduce it to filmic image,
sound and speech; to a fragment of a different order of things.”15
But the personality that stands out in the field is that of the historian
Yannis Soldatos, with his sustained and meticulous dedication to all aspects
of Greek cinema. His work, despite its very personal character and the
fact that it is based on the interpretation of cinema through its historical
evolution, should be the starting point for any further exploration of the
field. His publishing house Aigokeros has been the single most important
research centre on cinema in the country, a veritable university in film
studies, saving from oblivion important works of Green cinema.
Newspapers had and still have their own film review section with
influential reviewers like Tonis Tsirbinos, Kostas Stamatiou, Ninos Fenek-
Mikelidis, Yannis Bakogiannopoulos, and the younger generation with
Michel Dimopoulos, Hristos Bramos, Dimitris Koliodimos, Andreas Tyros,
Achilleas Kiriakidis, Tasos Goudelis, Vassilis Kehagias, Vaggelis Kotronis,
Ilias Kanellis, Yannis Fraggoulis, Maria Katsounaki, Dimitris Haritos, Yannis
Zouboulakis, Thodoros Soumos, and Thodoris Koutsogiannopoulos, all of
whom approach movies as art-works in themselves and not as byproducts of
other arts dependent on technology, personalities, or funding.
Special mention is deserved by the cosmopolitan reviews and essays by
Pericles Deliolanis. The contribution by Yorgos Tzitsios through the journal
Cinema is also noteworthy. Dimitris Koliodimos’ work on the history of
Greek cinema is of permanent value. Finally, of special importance are the
passionate and idiosyncratic film reviews by Dimitris Danikas.
Each critic naturally gives emphasis to different aspects of a film and
its evaluation—there are no common ideological or aesthetic trends among
them. Some focus on what is depicted in terms of social relations, gender
issues, and sexuality; others on representational forms and on the script,

acting, or mise-en-scène. Yet one must stress that quite often many reviewers
judge films in black and white terms that do not allow for a creative dialogue
between them and film-makers.
Some great films have many faults and shortcomings, while many bad
films contain many good aspects and cinematically functional elements.
For example, many films by Angelopoulos, especially from the 1980s, give
the impression of a hasty or even clumsy exploration of a new cinematic
language, but overall, through their “architectural plan” they form a complex
unity that transcends their partial limitations. Unfortunately, as happened
with Rafailidis, many critics seize the opportunity to entertain spectacular
musings about Greek identity and history, and films are used to prove a point
or to convey a specific interpretation of a real or imagined Greek experience,
in a way that encases their meaning in a singular rhetoric, thereby excluding
ambiguity and difference.
Until recently, many films of popular cinema were looked upon with
contempt, ignoring the very important socio-cultural significance that “bad”
actors, like Aliki Vouyouklaki for example, or “bad” films, like the comedies
by Thanassis Vengos or many films by Dalianidis, might have. As cultural
artifacts, Dalianidis’ films deserve closer study with regard to their ideology
and aesthetics. The same can be said of the propaganda films made between
1967 and 1974 which must be taken more seriously as political documents
and ideological statements. Fortunately, in recent years a more positive
approach has been taken to the old commercial films and their genuine
humor, carnivalesque exuberance, naïf aesthetics or latent socio-cultural
encodings.
In 1976, films critics established the Pan-Hellenic Union of Cinema
Critics (PEKK), whose chief aim was to build bridges between film-makers
and their audiences. It publishes an annual review of all Greek films,
organizes retrospectives, and assists cine clubs throughout the country in
promoting Greek and international cinema. It has also established a special
prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
Despite its turbulent ideological inner conflicts, the union has played
a positive role in making discourse about cinema relevant to the social
changes in the country. Only recently, academics have started to take a
serious interest in cinema history and aesthetics within the framework
of film studies or media studies programs. But it is imperative that a
tertiary education institution on Greek cinema should be established for
a more systematic research into its history, personalities, and audience.
Worthy of mention however are certain academic works on the history
of Greek cinema by Professor Eliza-Anna Delveroudi and especially her
massive study on the representation of young people in popular postwar
movies (Young People in the Comedies of Greek Cinema). We must also
mention the studies on the relationship between public sphere and

cinema by Maria Komninou, the research on representations of history by
Maria Stassinopoulou, the exploration of sexual diversity by Constantine
Kyriakos, the studies on New Greek Cinema by Yannis Skopeteas, the
subversive “queer’ reading of specific films by Dimitris Pananikoloau.
Finally, the relationship between history and cinema has been explored
with passionate dedication for many decades through important historical
documentaries and films by Fotos Lambrinos, a director of considerable
distinction and achievement.
In the last ten years, a substantial part of film criticism and reviewing
takes place in blogs and other websites, which give ample opportunities for
a more holistic approach to the cinematic experience by including film clips,
or engaging in a dialogue with other viewers, and making criticism still more
democratic and inclusive.
The Rise of Soft Porn

The great antagonist of the New Greek Cinema was not the totalitarian state
but something closer to the experience of the cinema mystique. Sexuality
was always forbidden in Greek cinema, as in most countries after the
1950s. Hollywood had already introduced in 1934 the famous Hays Code,
which hindered cinema as a whole from dealing overtly with the question
of sexuality. General Metaxas’ laws prohibited sex scenes as much as they
prohibited political themes.
Of course, Greek cinema had had its nude moments since Laskos’
Daphnes and Chloe (1931), while Tzavellas’ Counterfeit Pound (1955) also
had a scene with full female nudity. As we have seen, Greek male audiences
were intimidated by female nudity yet attracted to it, since women were
nearly always represented either in a sublimated fashion, as angels who
suffered in purity and dignity, or as fallen angels, who in depravity and
squalor longed for a male redeemer, to domesticate them in the kitchen.
However, some films from the late 1950s and early 1960s started
questioning this state of affairs. Tallas’ Ayoupa (1958) confronted the
audience with explicit sexual provocations; yet his attempt to depict female
sexuality as part of personal identity was too far ahead of the standards of
a society in which women could only be perceived as victims. So the repre-
sentation of a woman taking sexual initiatives was soon relegated to the
depiction of sexually active women as whores, whose bodies were the easy
prey of the male gaze. Yorgos Zervos’ The Lake of Desires (1958) contained
bold and violent sex scenes that caused considerable problems to its distri-
bution. Both films inaugurated a long tradition of low-budget movies with
very explicit content which caused many intellectual headaches for left-wing
ideologists, and just as many problems for the censors.
The system that was implicitly accepted was that of limited release in
selected venues, which in the long run screened only “sexually explicit”
movies under the rating “Strictly Inappropriate.” Such labels functioned as a
further stimulus to the male population to watch such “inappropriate” films,
especially in suburban areas. During the 1960s, prestigious luxury cinemas,
like Rosi-Clair—which was one of the first cinemas built in Athens—
gradually screened only porn films in order to compete with the rising
dominance of television, while porn cinemas existed in specific suburbs,
submerged in the anonymity of populous cities.
Another undercover system was concocted by producers and cinema
owners in order to “enhance” the sexual content of the films but avoid the
restrictions of the censors. Soft porn films, or skin flicks, were screened
as rated by state censorship; but, during the screening itself, some extra
scenes were added with more explicit material, with different actors and
in different settings. This addition (tsonta in the vernacular) became the
main characteristic of these films and as an extension of the cinema venues
themselves.16
From 1970 until the early 80s, when the industry itself evolved to
hard-core porn, with violent sex scenes, rape, incest, bestiality, and more;
around 180 movies were made which became legendary for their titles,
their actors, and their dialogue. Lust and Passion (Kiriakos Mauropanos,
1960), The House of Lust (Yorgos Zervoulakos, 1960), The Perverts (Kostas
Stratzalis, 1963), The Nets of Shame (Errikos Andreou, 1965), The Sinful
Women of the Night (Dimitris Galatis, 1966), Gabriela the Whore of Athens
(Yorgos Papakostas, 1966), and Sinful Gypsy Women (Lakis Kazan, 1969)
paved the way for an unexpected proliferation of sexually explicit movies
which thrived under the stern and strict supervision of the dictatorship.
From 1969, an average of 20 to 30 films were made each year, some of
them box office successes. For example, in the most political year of 1975,
Angelopoulos’ and Koundouros’ groundbreaking films were selling fewer
tickets than the venerable Women Lusting for Sex, Honey on Her Body, My
Body on Your Body and Her Lustful Body!
In these films, the script was more or less nonexistent and the acting
was appalling. They were usually filmed on an island in order to be sold
internationally, and their cost was extremely low. The actors were of diverse
origin, background, color, and sexual orientation; some, like the voluptuous
Gizela Dali, the carnivorous Tina Spathi, the demanding Anna Fonsou, and
the insatiable Kaiti Gini were professional actors or singers. (Some of them
later became fanatical Christian nuns to atone for the sins of their careers.)
Among the studs ruled the semi-divine Kostas Gousgounis who became
a household name for two generations. His shaved Telly Savalas-like head
(though he was presented as the Greek Yul Brynner), his famous surreal (and
totally unrelated to the action) punchlines, his abysmally bad acting, and
Costas Gousgounis in In the Trap of Crime (1972) Credit:

DVD
his animalistic sexuality transformed him into a legendary figure, a peculiar

“subcultural” personality, with style of his own and a distinct performance of
vernacular humor. His famous movies Sex at Thirteen Knots (Sex 13 Mpofor,
1974) and The Pervert (O Anomalos, 1975) have been elevated to cult status
and are screened today at special festivals or conferences as examples of
authentic popular culture. Other men worked under pseudonyms like Tely
Stalone (the “biggest” Greek ever recorded, the Athenian John Holmes),
Kostas Bokolis (the local Ron Jeremy), Pavlos Karanikolas (the “longest
Greek” ever), or were imported like the African-American Jimmy Belarike,
a black stud whom no one ever saw naked; the French stallion Georges
Christof, with a predilection for anal pleasures; and the elusive Bob Belling
who made cinematic history with his lustful penetration of a little goat!
The main director was Omeros Efstratiadis, who had produced some
heartbreaking melodramas in the previous decades. Efstratiadis’ soft porn
films were made for the international market and were released in two
versions. One was for local consumption, without explicit sex, but with lots
of titillation, and sometimes starring important mainstream actors. Another
version, with explicit sex scenes, was made for markets like Denmark,
Sweden, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, and the Greek cinemas in
Astoria, New York. (Of course, most of them were reimported, sometimes
dubbed in other languages.) His famous film Diamonds on Her Naked Body
(Diamantia sto Gymno kormi tis, 1972) has been elevated to cult status, if not
for its silly script, for the famous actors from classical theatre taking part.
Efstratiadis’ films offered what the tourist industry had named “the
three Ss” (summer, sex, souvlaki), and were made on Greek islands with
international casts from Germany, Denmark, the United States, Canada, and
Brazil, thereby establishing the market of sex tourism that was to flourish
throughout the 1970s until the arrival of HIV/AIDS.
The actors were mainly heterosexual, but after the mid-70s, male
homosexuality became fashionable, as men were “experimenting” more,
while lesbian stories seemed to be the ultimate aphrodisiac for some hetero-
sexual men. In homosexual porn films the “passive” partner was depicted as
an effeminate screaming queen with an insatiable thirst for rough sex with
hairy, oily, and foulmouthed Mediterranean men.
Another characteristic of these soft porn films is that they never depicted
full male nudity; with the penis penetrating everything and everyone, but
without ever being seen. Only in the early 1980s did such nudity become
acceptable and desirable for the mainly heterosexual audience, especially
after the import of films of John Holmes, Ron Jeremy, Lexington Steele,
and other legends of the genre. At that point, a strange figure appeared as
the key director, producer, distributor, and pimp, who remained not only
anonymous but totally unknown, using the nickname Berto, as homage to
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.17 His obscure personality (nobody
has been able to identify him with certainty to this day), is in itself material
for cinema. “The Great Berto” made most of his commercially successful
films with his own production company, Elite Films, for the home-video
market and as such it was impossible to rate them officially or even to
measure their success. As they were made for private consumption, they
became more hard-core, lacking in the sparkling humor that had made them
acceptable as “cult” pleasures until then. This change led to the death of the
skin flicks and the popular culture surrounding them.
Certainly we must see the proliferation of porn films within the wider
context of sexual liberation that engulfed the industrialized world from the
1960s. Greek porn films belong to the golden age of the genre worldwide
and were “inspired” by the success of films like Boys in the Sand (1971), Deep
Throat (1972), Emmanuelle (1974), and later the cult classic Debbie Does
Dallas (1978). Their titles have become proverbial: I Accuse My Body (1969),
The Circle of Viciousness (1971), Mirella, the Flesh of Pleasure (1973), Perverts
Since Their Birth (1974), Lesbian August (1974), Naked Sting (1975), Playing
in Two Beds (1975), Mikaella, the Sweet Temptation (1975), Six Pervert
Women Ask for a Murderer (1976), and more. Some of these films deserve
attention with regard to the “cultural encasement” of sexuality they encode
and for what appears incidentally in them. The financial success of some of
the films is rumored to have funded the production of the good films of the
period, thus indicating the indirect ways the margins can assist mainstream
culture.
Together with their provocative depictions of homosexuality, trans-
sexuality, and lesbian sex, some also had a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor
and self irony. On other occasions, explicit sex disguised an implicit social
message or ridiculed specific government policies. The funniest parts in
these films were parodies of mainstream movies or actors. The first explicitly
soft porn film made by the respected director Vangelis Serdaris, The Girl and
the Horse (1973) with Anna Fonsou, is considered the most “artistic” film of
the genre, with lots of psychological conflicts and an attempt to connect it
to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus. On the other hand, many venerable
and artistic actors and actresses of mainstream cinema and theatre seem to
have been involved in soft porn films—it is rumored that even the epitome of
sexual innocence, Aliki Vouyouklaki had taken part in a film that has never
been found.
The Greek soft porn industry was also an attempt to deceive censorship
and to entertain the sexually repressed male population. The allure of
transgressive sexuality is always present in the psychodynamic horizon of
patriarchal societies. The representation of the female body as an open field
for the aggression of the male gaze was the ultimate outcome of the unwanted
realization that women could be sexually proactive. As such, the commercial
success of the porn industry should be seen as the anxious male reaction to
the female emancipation movement and the rise of new ethical codes of soft
masculinity. It also must be seen as satisfying the phallic curiosity of hetero-
sexual men, the hidden desire to see another penis, as a personal affirmation
of masculinity and virility. Dimitris Koliodimos observes that”
Many porn films foreground “pure sex” and present a “repressed” sexuality
by the bourgeois patriarchal society . . . that is a sexual act which is
considered as “perversion,” “irregular,” or “unhealthy.” In these cases such
representations take on, without being necessarily “positive,” a special
character for the viewers who enjoy such pleasures and express similar
sexual behaviors in their lives.18
The phallocentric aesthetics of these films and the absence of a feminist

critique of their consumption are some of the contextual parameters for
understanding the code of practice of this industry. Yet no one can deny the
extremely funny, ironic, and sarcastic, almost carnivalesque celebration of
sexual pleasures that some of these films encoded, in a society that struggled
officially to regulate sexuality and control desire. The religious sensibility of
Orthodoxy avoided demonizing the body or condemning sensuality; but it
did its best to disguise and conceal its nudity. These films exposed the body
and revealed its allure. They situated the private in the public realm of illicit
consumption and underground enjoyment. Overall, we could suggest that
these films are more or less irreverent Aristophanic comedies structured
around the subcultural use of language rather than porn films.
Nico Mastorakis’ Island of Death (or Cruel Destination, or The Devil’s
Children, 1975) must be mentioned here because it highlights another trend
in the sexual psychodynamics of the period. In it, male and female perverts
from Western Europe visit pristine Greek islands, exterminate all other
intruders, and meet with retarded local shepherds, realizing their inner
fantasies of being ravaged by a modern Satyr. The film was notorious for
the scene in which the English pervert, painfully performed by Bob Belling,
penetrated a goat, in order to commune with the elemental purity of natural
life. The movie demonstrated the androcentric character and sexist ideology
of pornography, and especially of the enfant terrible of Greek television Nico
Mastorakis.19 Whereas the camera stripped naked and raped the female
body, the penis was never exposed. (Perhaps because the actors were very
shy!) As with most Greek porn films of that early period, the film fetishizes
the female but de-eroticizes the male body and retains its phallic mystery
and narcissistic self-satisfaction.
Overall, early soft porn films exude a kind of strange innocence, and
the actors seemed to really enjoy what they were doing on screen. Behind
the sexual buffoonery and the verbal absurdity, viewers can see a certain
jouissance, a mixture of pleasure and pain, as, through their sexual excess,
these films acted out the guilt and joy of transgression. It was a rebellion not
only against the “system,” or religion, or tradition, but against themselves,
manifested through a sense of the guilty pleasure offered by a freedom
privately won in the dark. In the cult classic The Voyeur (O Idonoblepsias,
1984) we see two macho males—one of them the deity called Gousgounis—
greeting each other before their shared sexual escapades begin: “Master,” the
younger man says, “you taught me everything . . . In my glorious sexual career
I learnt everything through your films which I watched at Rosi-Clair!” The
master with cool, gusto, and pride responds, “Oh yes, those were the days;
pure and ethical, when all porn films were based on Christian tradition and
patriotic Greek ideals!” In a sense, his pronouncements were a worthy farewell
to an industry that had served the motherland well in more than one way . . .
The Fall of the Junta

After five years in power, the declarations of the dictatorship regarding
social stability and prosperity became painfully meaningless and, in the
end, dangerous. Their slogan “Greece of Greek Christians” (Ellas Ellinon
Christianon) had lost its nationalistic appeal even for the most conservative
parts of the population. The inefficiency of military men to govern, the
internal squabbling between low- and high-standing officers, and ultimately
the persecution of all opponents through imprisonment, torture, and exile
made the military government lose its credibility domestically, despite its
populist economic policies (loans to all without interest, abolition of existing
debts for farmers, expansion of public sector, and so forth).
In an attempt to regain trust and legitimacy, the colorful dictator Yorgos
Papadopoulos initiated a cautious return to parliamentary democracy.
In May 1973, a rebellion of naval officers, mostly faithful to the exiled
King Constantine, provided Papadopoulos with the justification to abolish
the monarchy, organize a plebiscite requesting approval for a presidential

democracy, and appoint the decommissioned politician Spyros Markezinis
(a former film critic) as the prime minister, giving him the mandate to
prepare a new constitution and organize multi-party elections.
Meanwhile, Papadopoulos’ refusal to assist the Americans in their
support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 alienated
him from his protectors, while the oil embargo of the same month created
for the first time serious financial problems for a regime that had proudly
advertised its economic achievements. At the same time, the looming inter-
national crisis of the stock market crash, high inflation and a collapsing
monetary system in the US after the Watergate scandal, destabilized the
Greek economy. As a remedy or a distraction, the new constitution was
drafted, but the people’s growing dissatisfaction intensified the opposition to
the dictatorship.
On November 14, 1973, students took over the Polytechnic at the centre
of the Greek capital and held a rebellion which lasted for three days—an
event that was to assume legendary dimensions and create a mythology
of relentless “resistance” against the dictatorship. Especially after its fall in
1974, the new political establishment used its imagined or infrequent real
resistance (antistase) to the regime as the main credential for accessing
power—while in reality the most important members of the resistance either
found themselves politically homeless or were persistently ignored, or finally
out of self-respect retreated in the background.
In a state of panic, the dictatorship sent in the army with tanks and an
indeterminate number of students (around 50, according to the most reliable
sources) were killed. The ensuing havoc gave the opportunity to hardliners
within the army to overthrow Papadopoulos and impose their own rule for a
period of nine months. During this period, nothing happened in the country
while the international scene was undergoing dramatic changes. The new
dictators, inexperienced, ignorant, and incompetent, simply intensified their
persecution of the opposition and fanned nationalist emotions, especially
against Turkey. Yet they desperately needed a “national victory” to restore
confidence in the regime.
Their opportunity was found in Cyprus, an independent republic with
two main communities, which had coexisted with considerable unease since
1964. The import of nationalist ideologies, and of aggressive activists from
both Greece and Turkey, had led to war in the previous decade, when the
Turkish-Cypriots were by force restricted to exclusive enclaves. By 1973, an
uneasy truce existed between the two communities, despite the attempts
by the president of the Republic Archbishop Macarios to find a solution
acceptable to both communities.
The feeling of imminent disaster in Greece began to consume the public.
In July 1974, the inability of the army to govern evolved into a real tragedy,
with their insane intervention in Cyprus. In early July a coup was organized
by the Greek army and Macarios’ presidential palace was attacked, with the
explicit intention of assassinating him. He escaped, but the Athens Junta
imposed as the new president Nicos Samson, a paranoid and murderous
nationalist who, after exterminating his Greek opponents, was planning to
massacre the Turkish-Cypriot minority (15 percent of the population) and
declare the desired union with the Greek motherland. This gave the pretext
to the Turkish government, it too in search of a “national victory”, to invade
the island, completely annihilate the unprepared Greek-Cypriot defense,
expel 200,000 people from their homes and divide the island, thereby
creating a major political anomaly for European integration to this day.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, the terrified dictators and “heroic” army
officers simply vanished or took the first airplane out of the country. For
several days there was no government until the old right-wing former prime
minister Constantine Karamanlis was invited to return from Paris as the
“saviour” of the country, the new “ethnarch” who was to create order out
of chaos. The Restoration of the Republic with the reinstatement of parlia-
mentary democracy in July 1974 is the most important political event in
postwar Greek history and deeply affected the development of cultural life
and, of course, of cinema. Despite recurrent financial problems, the period
after 1974 has been the most stable, peaceful, and creative era since the
establishment of the Greek state.
The Restoration instigated an incredible fermentation of creative forces
which had remained dormant until then. Censorship was relaxed, the
Communist Party became legal again; while the return of exiles made possible
the establishment of a mass cultural movement reluctantly supported by the
state but overwhelmingly endorsed by the majority of the population. Film
clubs proliferated and cinemas enjoyed the last years of their immense
popularity, although by this stage they had already lost a considerable
percentage of their viewers to television. The social energy generated by
the fall of the dictatorship lasted for almost ten years and created some of
the best movies of Greek cinema, boosting local production in all kinds of
cinematic genres.
1974 and the Great Transition

The Thessaloniki Film Festival of 1974 was a landmark in the country’s film
history. It was called the “Festival of Rebellion” and ended with the absolute
denunciation of its value by audience and participants alike. Yet it was an
occasion for both radical explosion and celebration of newly won freedom.
For the first time, film-makers felt that they were in control of their art and
that they could take the medium wherever they wanted. Banned movies
were screened freely, while new artistic tendencies became obvious and
demanded recognition. The first year after the dictatorship was so dominated
by documentaries and experimental films, it seemed as if narrative movies
had become instantaneously obsolete and spurious. After 1974, we see a
remarkable collapse of narrative representation even in commercial cinema,
a collapse which reflected the questioning of all narratives that had until then
legitimized the social and political structures of the country.
In most documentaries, there was no script or set of questions; the
camera moved and recorded almost unintentionally how ordinary people
understood political upheavals, social tragedies, and finally themselves.
Most were brilliant cinematic achievements by any standards. It was the
first time that social formations were not seen as ethnographic case studies
or as prettified innocent relics of archetypal realities, but as class struc-
tures, as relations of power and control, as configurations of invisible yet
powerful communicative networks between individuals and their condi-
tions—individuals who struggled to define themselves and determine their
position within the larger picture of Greek political and social economy. The
representation of ordinary people taking their destiny into their own hands
was in itself an act of emancipation from the oppressive and suffocating past
as well as from preconceived notions about national, cultural, and personal
identity.
For many months after July 1974, one could see in action what Cornelius
Castoriadis called the “instituting radical imaginary,” as the collapse of the
dominant social order led to the search for new significations and new
symbolic languages regarding the articulation of historical experience,
personal identity, and cultural memory. Many artists stopped looking at
reality as a metaphysical given to be imitated, reproduced, and represented.
By breaking away from such restrictive and “closed” understanding of
creative action, they explored imaginative constructs which allowed the
emergence of new patterns for the visual schematization of experience.
Although many efforts focused on the de-institution of old and
dominant significations, by criticizing their ideology, a number of these
new “propositions” struggled to constitute radical reinterpretations of
history and society. They employed not rationalist conformity or ideological
cohesion, but imaginative recreations of temporality, space, and collective
experience through the singularities of their own individual being. Nikos
Nikolaidis, Theo Angelopoulos, and Costas Sfikas, as well as Thanasis
Rentzis, Antouaneta Aggelidi, and Tonia Marketaki, drastically rearticulated
the methods of visual perception that had dominated cinematic language
until then. They established the imaginative schemata that brought to promi-
nence undisclosed aspects of experience by elucidating them and rendering
them signifiable.
Unfortunately, this imaginary eruption lasted only a few years, as
the new conservative government, which won three successive elections,
didn’t break with the past but found a comfortable accommodation with it,
replicating its ideological obsessions and reinventing its oppressive mecha-
nisms. The institutionalization of cultural production suppressed the radical
reimagining of collective and personal identities which had emerged when
the authoritarian state had collapsed. Furthermore, left-wing parties, in
particular the newly legalized Communist Party, contributed greatly and
gravely, to this process of institutionalized control over creative action,
indeed over the rebellious subjectivity, by imprisoning individual imaginary
within the confines of ideological dogmatism and party allegiance. The
willingness of many artists to conform raises questions about them and their
work, while the consequences of such conformism were to become apparent
in the next decade.
The documentaries of the period nonetheless presented a radically
new thematology. Soon after July 1974, Yorgos Tsemperopoulos and Sakis
Maniatis released their political documentary Megara (1974), a challenging
experiment in cinema direct. Takis Hatzopoulos screened Gazoros Serron
(1974), a documentary about the life of tobacco workers in Macedonia in
the tradition of cinéma-vérité. In 1974/5, documentaries were made on the
Polytechnic uprising in 1973, on the Cyprus tragedy, the dictatorship and
the Restoration of the Republic. Among them, Cacoyannis’ Attila 74 must
be mentioned as one of the best documentaries on such a contentious issue,
as it presented in a balanced way what happened in Cyprus during the
Turkish invasion. Koundouros’ The Songs of Fire (Ta Tragoudia tis Fotias)
and Leuteris Haronitis’ July 24th, 1974 (Eikosi Tesseris Iouliou ’74) must
also be included as they encapsulate the immense optimism and rebellious
spirit of the period, particularly during the first weeks after the fall of the
dictatorship.
Significant political documentaries were also made by the so-called
“Group of 4,” consisting of K. Hronopoulos, Y. Hrissovitsianos, S. Zahos, and
Th. Skroubelos, entitled The New Parthenon (O Neos Parthenonas, 1974); and
by the “Group of 6” (D. Gannikopoulos, I. Zafeiropoulos, G. Thanasoulas,
Th. Maragos, F. Oikonomides, and K. Papanikolaou), called The Struggle (O
Agonas, 1974), both about social and political conflicts in the country from
the 1950s to 1970s. Nicos Kavoukidis’ documentary Testimonies (Martyries,
1974) was also an emotional recording by the film-maker himself of the
three days of student uprising in 1973. Within the same climate of opinion,
Jules Dassin’s Rehearsal (Dokimi, 1974) was an experimental re-enactment
of the uprising. Dassin constructed a cinematic tragedy by recreating the
actual events through a documentary style punctuated by narrative, songs,
and commentary—an extraordinary achievement, a vanguard visual essay
on historical reconstruction.
Together with the highly political documentaries of the period, a
number of unexpected experimental films also appeared. Kostas Sfikas
(1927–1999) released his totally abstract movie, his “visual philosophical

essay,” as he called it, Model (Montelo, 1974). The film had no story or script
and explored how capitalism transformed humans into machines, taking
inspiration from Marx’s Capital. It was a stunning visual experiment given
the very limited technological means of the period. Sfikas rejected cinematic
representation and aspired to create what he called “dialectical materialistic
cinema.”
Later the same year, he released his most ambitious and accomplished
work Metropolis (1974), which explored the way in which great cities were
taken over by the capitalist system, gradually creating false consciousness
in the mind of their inhabitants. The film structure was based on the
reworking of still photographs, explained through narrated texts by Rainer
Maria Rilke and Marcel Proust, with background classical music juxtaposed
with the synchronicity of cultural memory. Sfikas replaced motion with
immobility and explored the meaning of cinematic experience through
spaces that framed nothingness and stillness. The film was a dazzling display
of non-narrative cinematography, based on stills from the old French journal
Illustration, constructing an almost apocalyptic cosmology on the effects of
capitalism on civilized life. Sfikas should be considered as one of the most
important experimental film-makers worldwide, whose films must be placed
alongside those by Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas.
In the same genre, Thanasis Rentzis released his Bio-Graphy (1974),
which explored the rise and triumph of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth
century through the cultural privileging of individualism. Double exposures,
heavy editing, jump cuts and the montage of collisions, based on old
gravures and etchings, made this film a seductive surrealist extravaganza.
Costas Ferris also made his Prometheus in Second Person (Poromitheas se
Deftero Prosopo, 1974), a hyper-real exploration of the creative imagination
through the themes, language, and images of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.
The most interesting film of the year came from the most anti-political
director of the period. Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ The Colours of Iris (Ta
Hromata tis Iridos, 1974) was a bold statement against political movies and
the first surrealist experiment with narrative and color in Greek cinema.
In the midst of the ideologization of everything, Panayiotopoulos boldly
declared that all political directors were “ideological smugglers” and that his
film depicted another kind of “cinematic realism.” He said:
I make a film in which the encounter with reality does not take place
through realistic places, realistic personalities, or realistic situations, but
through cinematic places, personalities, situations. In brief, I make a
cinematic film which aims at grafting realism onto life.”20
In the same vein, Nikos Nikolaidis (1939–2007) released his Euridice B.A.
2037 (1975), which explored the Underworld into which Euridice was
thrown to wait for Orpheus; “B.A. 2037” was her code number in the
Underworld where she could not remember anything or anyone, even
Orpheus, despite all his efforts. This was another anti-realistic film which
paved the way for Nikolaidis’ mature works.
Nikolaidis and Panayiotopoulos were unique voices raised in opposition
to the domination of the political over the existential. Throughout their
careers they shaped new forms of oppositional aesthetics that were to disrupt
the post-Restoration optimism about what constituted cinematic language
and the role of cinema in contemporary societies. More importantly, both
directors, together with other experimental creators, “problematized” the
dominant narrative about reality by constructing “non-logical” narrative
idioms, permeated by the surrealist “marvellous” and by a special concern
for non-linear forms of representation.
In the same direction, although released the next year, Andreas
Thomopoulos’ masterful and jocular Aldebaran constructed an imaginary
city with inhabitants from social margins. The movie was a poetic and
surrealistic exploration of the Athenian landscape through the eyes of a
“hyper-lexist” poet, a rock musician, and a prostitute, and introduced fantasy
and imagination as the principles of the cinematic visual space—a totally
different way of looking at the reality of the urban centre with the strange
subcultural communities living between the cracks of social legitimacy.
Two feature films of stark realism from 1974 are also worth mentioning.
Tasos Psarras’ For Insignificant Reason (Di’ Asimanton Aformin) was about
the lives of tobacco workers in the 1950s as they struggled to establish their
union. This was film of dire and austere realism depicting social conflicts
with sensitivity and powerful images. As an unexpected oddity from the
past, Panos Glikofridis’ The Trial of the Judges (I Diki ton Dikaston was a
good narrative film, despite its strong theatricality, about the trial of the
leader of the Greek Revolution Theodoros Kolokotronis in 1834. The film
was released after the fall of the dictatorship at a very opportune time, when
Andreas Thomopoulos, Aldebaran (1976). Greek

court cases against the dictators were being raised. Court procedures against
the officers who tortured citizens and the leaders of the dictatorship itself
later became documentaries by Theodosis Theodosopoulos with consid-
erable box office success.
The year of the Restoration of the Republic was permeated by euphoric
chaos, irrational hopes, and uncontrollable optimism. All kinds of cinematic
genres were tested and radical experiments with the medium were taken. It
was as though in six months Greek film-makers were attempting to construct
their own Nouvelle Vague, Cinema Novo, Czech New Wave, New German
Cinema, and the American Underground, among others, all at once. The
camera abandoned the safety of the studio, the director, the security of a
stable script and actors, the assurance of an accepted style of performance;
and in unison asked, indeed demanded, the audience to abandon their own
viewing conditioning and the friendly aesthetics of commercial cinema, the
Hollywood tradition, and the French Cinema du Qualité, and to immerse
themselves into inaccessible and sometimes incomprehensible avant-garde
creative outbursts. In the beginning, audiences seemed to respond—moder-
ately. But such creative frenzy could not last long and could not be consumed
by everyone. Furthermore, the Herculean labor of reforming aesthetic
regimes and viewing habits by homogenizing all cinematic idioms into
a singular “political” unified language had strong elements of a looming
cultural autocracy by a specific kind of artistic representation and its corre-
sponding hermeneutics.
In the beginning, the prospect looked appealing. If we look at the
sales of 1974, from an overall production of 34 films, four from the tradi-
tional “commercial” cinema sold a considerable amount of tickets. Filippos
Fylaktos’ war melodrama Pavlos Melas had 432,989 admissions (heavily
promoted by the dictatorship; the film disappeared after July); Glikofridis’
The Trial of Judges had 98,299 admissions; Dalianidis’ comedy My Love
Wua-Wua (Agapi Mou Oua Oua) had 94, 945, and Thallassinos’ A Law
Abiding Citizen (Enas Nomotagis Politis) had 69,100. Errikos Andreou’s
Soul and Flesh (Psihi kai Sarka), with 89,000 admissions also made a
moderate international career employing the Hollywood tradition of a
gripping political thriller spiced with electrifying sexuality. The rest were all
soft porn, which dominated both production and consumption that year: 21
porn films were screened with 800,000 admissions overall.21
This seemed to have only slightly changed in the next year. Despite
the dominance again of porn films (six erotic films are among the ten most
successful in 1975), a strange political film had more admissions than any other
production. Theo Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players (O Thiasos) topped the
list with an impressive 205,000 tickets. Its success was unexpected because the
film was almost four hours long, its narrative was complicated and slow, and it
seemed to present its subject matter from a specific left-wing perspective. No
other political movie of the New Greek Cinema would ever be as successful.
Its legacy was to overshadow the development of Greek cinema in a way that
is both admirable and puzzling. In a way, The Travelling Players synthesized all
experimental efforts and traditional practices of Greek cinema and converged
them into a unified language, which was dense, solid, and self-sufficient.
1975: The Year of the Masterpiece

While still working under the dictatorship, Theo Angelopoulos managed to
get permission to make a film based on Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy Oresteia.
The topic looked very patriotic, and despite its usual “tragic” themes of
betrayal, patricide, and matricide, the censors found it to be a perfectly good
Greek project. What Angelopoulos had in mind of course was something
unexpected and, to a certain degree, unpredictable. It was filmed with the
assistance of the Greek army and the local police who thought throughout
that they were contributing to the production of an ancient tragedy.
Angelopoulos screened his four-hour grand epic The Travelling Players
at Cannes and received the Critics’ Award, since the conservative Greek
government thought it too left-wing to represent the nation. The movie
was a challenging consummation of experimentation in form and content
and introduced a Bergsonian temporality which seems to have permeated
Angelopoulos’ other movies. It was also the film that made Greek cinema
noticed for the first time internationally and which made Theo Angelopoulos
a European director, quite often compared with Miklós Jancsó, Michelangelo
Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Angelopoulos’ gaze was not simply a visual idiom confined by locality
and circumstances, but indeed a totally new language for the representation
of history, which incorporated Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical concept of “distan-
ciation” within the Aristotelian poetics of telling a complete story that leads
to psychological catharsis. Despite its considerable length, which caused
skepticism when it was released, it was an incomparable achievement,
probably the best European film of the 70s, when experimentation with form
and representation was prevalent, while American Cinema was undergoing
a similar transition through the new cinema of John Cassavetes, Martin
Scorsese and the early Francis Ford Coppola.
The film is a hybrid epic, something between Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation (1915) and Miklós Jancsó’s Red Psalm (1971). It reinvented narrative
practices by fusing past and present timelines, interrupting action in order
to report what happened in the past, fragmenting all forms of linear
story development—essentially demolishing official versions of history with
narrative discontinuity. Yet it is probably the most difficult-to-like master-
piece in world cinema—opaque, introspective, and dense. It created its
own specular reality, a film apart from all others—slow, didactic, and frosty.
Theo Angelopoulos, The Travelling Players (1975).

Courtesy, Theo Angelopoulos. Credit: DVD
Angelopoulos did his best to break down all conventions of representing

history, reality, and characterization on screen. He employed long takes,
abolished montage, immobilized the camera, slowed down action, and made
dialogue artificial, self-conscious, and almost superfluous. Space became
one-dimensional and depthless. Angelopoulos forced the camera to move
slowly, either across the scene or panning away from it with an indifferent
solemnity and icy detachment. Stylized acting and overt theatricality made
the viewer unable to empathize with the characters or the story, although
somehow the representation of collective suffering became itself a powerful
symbol of contagious emotional energy.
Angelopoulos also used cold and distancing colors to instigate a further
Brechtian de-identification between his viewers and his actors, and indeed
between the actors and their roles. Colors erected a barrier between action
and audience and expunged any notion of empathy or compassion. A
consciously theatricalized movie, it rejected all forms of psychologization and
individualized versions of collective experience. In one incredibly icy scene,
the fascist youth takes off his clothes and poses naked in front of the camera.
His nudity is not sexualized or even erotic; it is one of the most embarrassing
and awkward representations of the human body ever depicted in cinema.
No desire can be projected onto his body; no desire is exuded from his
body. It is the mortification of all feelings imposed by power, hidden under
impeccable uniforms, which underpins such scenes. Angelopoulos is one
of the very few directors, Tarkovsky probably another, who totally rejected
Freud’s interpretation of human history as the corporeal self-awareness
which leads to Hollywood style individualism. In an unexpected way, this is
the masterpiece of structuralism, since everything is reduced to omnipotent
and imperceptible structures that are imposed by power or by the desire for
domination.
Angelopoulos added another dimension, the mythological, by struc-

turing his movie around the ancient myth of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, both as
a pretext and as a hyper-text. So, his movie, while corresponding to a lived
experience of recent history, also functioned at the level of mythic symbol.
It is about the trauma of history, and the consciousness of history as a
constant loss of innocence. “I came from Ionia, over the sea, where did you
come from?” one of his main characters asks before being executed by the
Germans. The interplay between history and fiction made the film equally
puzzling. Despite everything being meticulously researched and based on
actual events, the characters create a stage and the whole film takes place on
a stage or in front of one. The underpinning idea of history as performance
is one of the most important suggestions we find in the film. Robert A.
Rosenstone observed that:
Angelopoulos may provide a kind of invented history, but taken together
his films are . . . works of enormous complexity that are at once medita-
tions on the past and explorations of what has been repressed by official
discourse.22
Angelopoulos suggested a totally new way of representing and under-

standing history as collective experience and felt temporality, and not simply
as events linked by causation.
The polarity between the innocence of human existence and the guilt
about the structures created by humans is a deep and somehow confusing
antinomy in Angelopoulos’ works. His reluctance to give any psychological
depth to his characters makes them lose their historicity, and they are
transformed into ideotypes and detemporalized forms: they have a topos,
but their time is ahistorical. This antinomy becomes more obvious later
when Angelopoulos turns to individual histories in order to examine the
Theo Angelopoulos, The Travelling Players (1975).

historical experience of the common people. But in this early period, his
characters do not develop any emotional strength or inner life—they are
not characters but historical forces, agents of action and energy, catalysts
that move the story in different directions. They are so in order to deal
with the lingering traumas and tensions of the past. As Aimilia Karali aptly
concluded:
In his Travelling Players Angelopoulos becomes the rhapsodist of memory
(of a memory forbidden, rejected, stubbornly preserved, morbidly believed,
of a memory that should have been forgotten. He used it in his film in
diverse forms: cultural (myths, popular theatre, folk painting), active
(songs, narrations, confessions, proclamations), subjective (recollections,
convictions, individual and collective fantasies). His main aim was the
activation of memory as a factor in the present and not as antiquarian
remembrance. As an artistic work, The Travelling Players constitutes a
political act which does not relate solely to the historical time it talks
about, or in the time when it was made. It belongs, as Spyros Asdrahas, has
said, in the “genealogy of our contemporaneity.”23
Almost 40 years later, the film retains its radical aesthetics in a way that
begs for more detailed and closer analysis. It seems that Angelopoulos has
brought together the great experiments with time and space, from Bresson,
Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, to Welles, Godard and Jancsó, by rejecting
montage and editing, and by letting his camera simply “attest” to the events.
It was, as Bresson said, “production of emotion determined by a resistance
to emotion.”24
Today, one could also add a layer of irony that we find emerging from
the idealism of a generation that sacrificed everything to the altar of failed
gods, in a way analogous to the other Marxist phantasmagoria of the period,
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975). At the end of The Travelling Players, the
defeated revolutionary recites verses by the famous Greek anarchist poet
Mihalis Katsaros, while overlooking the city: “I will remain in my rags, as
the French Revolution bore me, as you my mother Spain gave birth to me, a
dark conspirator.” He speaks with force and despair about the “submission
to the dreadful power” and that “an ordered life” is a nightmare while they
were promised “a lame freedom again.” We must ask today whose power he
was referring to: the coercive force of the capitalist system or the terror of
Stalinist Soviet Union?
The film was a revolutionary reflection on the forces of history, an
exploration of the social utopia that had to remain an imaginary homeland.
Instead of attempting to glorify the endurance of the Civil War fighters,
this was a film about the necessary projects of political renewal and social
regeneration and the sacrifices they entail. It was a film stating principles,
like the Declaration of Human Rights, and as such it remains one of the
most important political statements ever made—in the age of late capitalism,
the era of generalized conformism—through cinema. In a society without
opposition, this film completed and consummated the tradition of opposi-
tional aesthetics that undercut cinematic production in Greece.
Finally, Angelopoulos’ film was one of the very few Greek films which
have had an international impact; it consolidated some of the central
principles of the Third Cinema and its postcolonial self-articulation as well
as of art cinema around the globe. Dennis Hanlon explored “dialectical
transculturation,” describing what he called:
. . . thematic similarities between Angelopoulos’s film and Javier Sanjinés’
Clandestine Nation. Both films look back on traumatic periods of dicta-
torship and attempt to rescue and reconstruct a national history and
identity. In The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos presents a history of the
left in Greece between 1939 and 1952 that had been erased from the record
by a succession of right-wing governments. Sanjinés gives visibility to the
indigenous majority of Bolivia whose presence is effaced by the dominant
discourse of meztizaje.”25.
As Andrew Horton stated, “Angelopoulos’ dialectical vision is one of a

multiplicity of realities existing within each single image, moment and
character.”26 Because of its density, the film has to be dismembered to gain
accessibility and wider recognition, but if there ever was a film to express
more than anyone else Gilles Deleuze’s “chronosigns” and their semantic
networks, this must be it. The circular time of Angelopoulos’ film establishes
completely different semantic fields within the actual image, not for their
reference to reality but as a “function of remembering, of temporalization:
not exactly a recollection but ‘an invitation to recollect.’”27 As such, this is
a world-cinema film, providing an alternative understanding of history for
the autonomous subaltern in its struggle for distinct visibility and singular
voice.
1975–1981: Uneasy Days of Freedom

As we have seen, political liberalization gave almost complete freedom
to directors to experiment with cinematic form and content, despite the
fact that laws relating to cinema changed only after 1981. It also revealed
a wide variety of idioms that vied for funding and popularity in a contest
that sometimes, because of factionalism and personal rivalries, degenerated
into the loss of common ground that had unified film-makers regarding
their common enemy—state censorship. Censorship still remained in this
period, but it relaxed its grip on production and scriptwriting. This gave
opportunities to established directors to revisit accepted or imposed percep-
tions regarding the lingering traumas of the recent past, such the Asia Minor
Catastrophe, the Civil War, and the invasion of Cyprus, and to younger film-
makers to experiment with form and script in unprecedented ways.
As a consequence, the conflict between commercial and art cinema
resurfaced in the mid-1970s and unfortunately led to the demise of both.
Audiences turned to television more and more. By 1980, cinemas had lost
50 percent of their audience, and the production of movies was reduced
substantially despite state assistance through the Greek Film Center.
Indeed, state assistance was so extensive that Rafailidis observed that
between 1975 and 1985 film production “de facto 100 percent belonged
to the state.”28 As the state controlled Greek Film Center started receiving
more funds for the production of new films, the old independent studio
system was dying out.
In January 1977, Philopimin Finos died. He had produced the most
important commercial movies in the postwar period, and he had staunchly
refused to make any programs for television.29 His death was to mark the
end of an era in production, distribution, and exhibition patterns in the film
industry. However, a new independent production company was established
by the ambitious businessman Mihalis Lefakis, Greca Film-Lefakis, which
was to make some of the best films in the following 15 years.
Between 1976 and 1980, a number of interesting films were released,
although their number was gradually decreasing. At the same time, the
differences were starting to become obvious. Angelopoulos took his idiom in
unpredicted directions, whereas Voulgaris was soon to develop a new style
reminiscent of a more traditional narrative cinema. Marketaki produced very
few movies and one television serial while Tasios turned to a more “popular”
cinema with strong ethico-political agendas. Damianos was to withdraw for
almost 20 years. Despite their “intellectual” dominance, the directors of the
New Cinema never produced a big commercial success while, due to the
growing competition with television, film production decreased rapidly.
Fewer than 10 feature films were made in 1976, 7 in 1977, 12 in 1978,
11 in 1979, and 14 in 1980. Each year meanwhile, at least 30 to 40 porn
films were made, as well as a number of documentaries and short films.
Ticket sales for these films were extremely low: the first in sales were porn
films, followed by slapstick comedies. Some “unusual” films, for example
the last two by Kanellopoulos, were never released to cinemas. In 1976,
eight films in the top ten list of commercial success were porn movies.
Only Pantelis Voulgaris’ Happy Day with 61,000 admissions and a comedy
by Thanassis Vengos with 248,000 can be found on that list. In 1977, five
of the top ten were porn, while Angelopoulos’ The Hunters topped the list
with 105,000 admissions. In 1978, a number of good films appeared on
the list, namely Panayiotopoulos’ The Lazy People of the Fertile Valley with
117,000 tickets, but all other films had very limited commercial success. The
next year was dominated by slapstick comedies and porn films, with the
exception of Andreas Thomopoulos’ A Laughing Afternoon with 136,000

tickets and Nikolaidis’ The Wretches are Still Singing with 47,000 tickets. In
1980, the top ten was dominated by comedies and porn, with the exception
of Tzimas’ political thriller The Man with the Carnation, which sold the
startling number of 620,000 tickets, and Tasios’ Request with 200,000 tickets;
whereas Angelopoulos’ grand epic Megalexandros had fewer than 70,000
admissions.30
It was obvious that ticket sales were plummeting and with them the
number of films produced, despite the hefty assistance provided by the state,
after 1978, with the new framework of funding and administration for the
Greek Film Center. One could also wonder on whether the success of certain
political films was only circumstantial due to the strong politicization of
the period, which rejected with disdain everything that the old cinema had
produced. Such atmosphere did not seem to tolerate any non-political films
or even any non left-wing, Marxist inspired aesthetics. Such deep politici-
zation would soon take its toll.
Meanwhile, these five years were extremely crucial as new styles were
tested and new representations became dominant. Pantelis Voulgaris’ Happy
Day is a movie that, through the starkness of its photography and the
barrenness of its landscapes, is probably to this day the best cinematic
rendering of the sterility of the dictatorship. The film was also commercially
successful, despite its slow pace and detached narrative. Its success captured
the need of the era to objectify its traumas and discuss them in the public
sphere, as it explored with empathy and compassion the brutalization of
prisoners by their guards and the gradual loss of their humanity. Also in
1976, Tasos Psarras’ May reconstructed the events of the great strike by
tobacco workers in May 1936 and their brutal suppression by the Metaxas
regime, with historical accuracy, albeit with a strong melodramatic tenor.
A number of good documentaries must also be mentioned, especially
Lambros Liaropoulos’ The Other Letter (To Allo Gramma), and Lambros
Papadimitrakes and Theklas Kittou’s Cyprus, The Other Reality (Kipros i
alli pragmatikotita). Also two experimental films were of critical signifi-
cance: Demos Theos’ The Process (Diadikasia), a political allegory about
rebellion and suppression, and Kostas Aristopoulos’ Letter to Nazim Hikmet
(Gramma sto Nazim Hikmet), an illustrated letter to the oppressed people of
Turkey and other countries. The great comedian Thanassis Vengos released
Thanassis in the Country of the Slap (O Thanassis stin Hora tis Sfaliaras),
a film made in two “contrastive” parts by two different directors (Dinos
Dimopoulos and Panos Glikofridis) which explored with humor and satire
the life of ordinary people under the two dictatorships of 1936 and 1967—it
was the most commercial film of 1976.
In 1977, three great documentaries were released which reassessed
social realities in the country. Yorgos Antonopoulos’ Mantoudi Euboia
’76 (Evia Mantoudi 76) explored the causes of the long strikes by factory
workers. Maria Papaliou’s The Struggle of Blind People (O Agonas ton Tiflon)
presented a major expose of the way that institutions affiliated with the state
and the church, exploit the predicament of blind people. Pope Alcoule’s
Women Today (Oi Gynaikes Simera) was the first ever sociological inves-
tigation of the position of women in Greek society through interviews
and in-situ research. The experimental film Studies on the Same Theme
(Parallages to Idio Thema) by Antouaneta Aggelidi explored the signifi-
cance of representation itself, especially the representation of women, in an
attempt to investigate the impact of images on the human mind.
After receiving a huge amount of funding and technical assistance from
the Greek state, Michael Cacoyannis adapted Euripides’ tragedy Iphigeneia
(1977) which completed his trilogy, but, unlike his Electra, was heavy with
the Hollywood aesthetic of the grand spectacle, loud performances, and
hyperbolic emotional conflicts. It was the last Greek film to be nominated
for an Oscar until Dogtooth in 2010. Manousos Manousakes’ The Archons
(Oi Arhontes) was a surreal and absurd parable on the oppressive mecha-
nisms employed by a ruling elite of politicians, army officers, priests, and
diplomats. In it, ordinary people experience and define themselves not as
citizens but as inferior subjects reacting against their status only in their
dreams or in borderline states of social and personal conflict. Drama and
comedy converge in this film, which despite its cinematic crudeness, was
emblematic of the debates of the period. It won the special prize in the
Anti-Festival of Greek Cinema which was organized for the first and last
time against the official Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1977. A similar film
which caused a political uproar when it was screened on television was
Nikos Alevras’ Bullets fall like a hailstorm (and the wounded artist sighs)
(Peftoun oi sfaires san halazi kai o pligomenos kallitehnis anastenazei). Its
bizarre and provocative hallucinations explored in a surrealist manner the
alienation and complacency that were to dominate Greek society in the years
to come.
A good film of gritty but optimistic social realism was Pavlos Tasios’
The Big Shot (To Vari Peponi). The film explored the gradual alienation of an
innocent young farmer from his self and those around him as he struggles
for success in the big city. His gradual disconnection from reality makes him
live in an illusory world, which collapses after he gets married and must
work to earn his living. This simple story about an ordinary individual was
a fascinating morality tale about personal identity, social commitment, and
self-perception. The film continued the ethical project which was unfolding
in all of Tasios’ films, by depicting the moral nature of all decisions when
humans succeed in recognizing each other’s existence.
Angelopoulos screened his mystifying political film The Hunters (Oi
Kinigoi), which received the first prize at the Chicago Film Festival in 1977.
Theo Angelopoulos, The Hunters (1977). Courtesy, Theo

Angelopoulos. Credit: DVD
The new democratic government denied him funding, a practice that was
to become characteristic of all parties in power, who controlled the Greek
Film Center. With this film, Angelopoulos inaugurated his practice of
co-productions, especially with television channels from Italy, Germany,
and France, a practice that would soon elevate him to the status of a major
European director. His film was an extraordinary artistic achievement in so
far as it extended the visual language of The Travelling Players and reinvented
“historical verisimilitude” by establishing new camera angles, rearranging
photographic composition, and recasting styles of acting. The plot was made
around a simple premise: celebrating New Year’s Eve, a party of wealthy
hunters discovers in the mountains of northern Greece, preserved in ice, the
dead body of a communist fighter from the Civil War. The body becomes the
catalyst for the fantasies, phobias, and panics of the bourgeois class to emerge
and be re-enacted as if on a theatrical stage, showing the “inauthenticity”, the
“heteronomy,” and the “unreality” of the Greek political establishment.
The most interesting aspect of the film was its visual style; based on
yellow, green, and ochre colors, it created a cold distance between the viewer
and the story, a chilly separation from any kind of empathy or identifi-
cation with the characters. It was as if Angelopoulos deliberately kept his
viewers away from the film, as its story unfolded in an icy remoteness. This
is essentially a director’s film, a compact visual laboratory for all aspiring
film-makers who need to study such bold experiments before attempting
any form of filmic representation. One could claim that a new theory of
visual perception is needed in order to make justice to the fundamental anti-
realism that we encounter in this film.
It was also the film that ended Angelopoulos’ so-called “history trilogy”,
which explored the history of modern Greece, as the topos of a profound
disparity between society and state, as the space of an ongoing conflict
between the negativity of government and the constant resistance of the
people against the absence of projects of renewal. Angelopoulos exposed

the nature of the Greek state as predominantly a set of mechanisms for
social control, surveillance, and oppression, and not as a form of social
organization establishing conditions for the “pursuit of happiness” or the
enhancement of freedom for its citizens.
Dinos Dimopoulos reappeared in 1978 with an accomplished adaptation
of the novel The Sun of Death (O Ilios tou Thanatou) by Pandelis Prevelakis,
which redeemed him from the sins he had committed with Vouyouklaki’s
melodramas. According to him, the film expressed the quintessential “colors
of Greekness” and explored the “authentic Greek tradition” as encoun-
tered in the remote villages and the pre-modern way of living. It received
ample funding from the Greek Film Center; yet despite its great photog-
raphy, luminous colors, and suggestive atmosphere, it theatricalizes cultural
identity, transforming it into an ostentatious visual performance without
vestiges of historicity. The idea that Greekness was an archetype transcending
history, self-consciousness, and change remained one of the central beliefs of
all conservative film-makers.
On the other side in the same year, Nicos Panayiotopoulos’ The Lazy
People of the Fertile Valley (Oi tempelides tis Euforis Koiladas) was another
symbolic anti-political statement, a parable about the life and days of
the Greek bourgeoisie, who governed an absent community, deprived of
agency, initiative, and creative force. The script was based on the 1948 novel
Les fainéants dans la vallée fertile by the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery
which proclaimed the anarchist right to be lazy. But Panayiotopoulos
brought the story upside down and constructed an apt parable about the
absence of creative capacity among the ruling elite of the country. The film
approached Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Buffe (1973) and Liliana Cavani’s
The Cannibals (1969), and expressed the anarchist aesthetics of exposure
and denouncement through overstatements and satire. Certainly there was
a lot of optimism in the belief that the ruling establishment of the country
suffered from suicidal tendencies. At the same time, as with his first movie,
Panayiotopoulos’ film recorded “the first cracks in the unofficial group called
New Greek Cinema.”31
In 1978, Nikos Koundouros produced his monumental film 1922,
addressing the ur-trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe without evasions,
phobias, or pretexts. It was the first time that the magnitude of the disaster
received visual representation as an imaginative event, seen through the eyes
of a lost youth. The reality of being violently and mercilessly uprooted, the
inability of the common people to react to and comprehend what happened
or who is to blame, and ultimately the destiny of ordinary people within
epochal changes in history were expressed through cold colors and powerful
images, in an attempt to objectify the pain and horror of the depicted
reality. The depiction of the confrontation between the defeated Greeks
Nikos Koundouros, 1922 (1978). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
and the triumphant Turks was not as nationalistic or defensive as some

critics argued. Koundouros empathizes with the Greeks not because they
are Greeks but because they are defeated: the destiny of the victims at the
hands of a victorious army interested him just as much as the trauma of the
Catastrophe itself.
The dramatic structure of the film, which started with a kitsch theat-
rical performance about the glory of Greece and ended with the inarticulate
scream of the traumatized refugees, must be one of the most effective ever
made in Greek cinema. The farcical and ridiculous official understanding
of the “nation” was gradually dismantled by the nightmare of history. The
politicians were gone, the official state vanished, and the only ones left were
the ordinary people, the believers, struggling to survive. More than any other
target, the film castigated, condemned, and caricatured the Greek state,
always absent when monumental events took place and always incompetent
at protecting its own citizens. It must be mentioned that the film was effec-
tively banned by the conservative government (as the Film Center would
not distribute it), allegedly to be sacrificed on the altar of the friendship
with Turkey. In reality of course it was because it was the most passionate,
angry, and violent plea against those responsible for the Catastrophe—the
local political establishment, which in order to avoid been accused, blamed
everything on the Turks, even the banning of the film!
Overall, despite criticism by both sides of the political spectrum, the
film stands out as a unique attempt to deal with the recent past without
melodrama, idealization or self-victimization. One could even say that it was
Proustian, like Time Regained, an attempt to make sense of loss and absence
by re-collecting the memories of the past and giving them artistic unity.
Two documentaries of the same year also explored recent Greek
history: Dionysios Gregoratos’ Performance for a Role (Parastase gia ena
Rolo) and Takis Papagiannidis’ The Age of the Sea (I ilikia tis Thalassas)
which put together a considerable amount of original footage of historical
events between 1917 and 1977. Despite their honesty, both works explore
history from the narrow point of view of the Left, presenting historical life
as the result of external conspiracies and internal cabals, an approach which
characterized most documentaries of the period, and presenting Greek
people as lacking in agency and judgement.
Kostas Ferris made Two Moons in August (Dio feggaria ton Augousto),
a strange love story between a music teacher and a girl. Dimitris Makris’
Iron Door (Kangeloporta) was a successful adaptation of a dark Kafkaesque
novel. Tonis Lykouresis’ The Golden Haired Girl (Hrisomalousa) must also
be included for its suggestive reconstruction of village life in a state of
transition and for the great performance by Vera Krouska. The exploration
of provincial life with its amoral conservatism, xenophobia, and ossified
traditionalism makes this film a unique text of New Greek Cinema, a visual
complement to Angelopoulos’ Reconstruction. The ultimate defeat of the
teacher who wanted to perform a traditional theatrical play, the departure of
his lover for Germany, and the triumph of the established authorities offered
a completely new representation of the “authenticity” of Greek village life.
In the same year, Jules Dassin released A Dream of Passion, which
represented the country at Cannes and was nominated for a Golden Globe
for Best Foreign Film. It was a modern rendering of the story of Medea,
as a cinema star—performed passionately by Melina Mercouri—tries to
empathize with the ancient heroine, by contacting a mother, hauntingly
played by Ellen Burstyn, who had murdered her children to take revenge
on her husband. The film explored emotional complexities and mental
borderline states in a magnificent and powerful style that both shocks and
attracts. An interesting subtext was the psychology of the artist and how she
related to her own role as she discovered its objective realization. The acting
styles of Mercouri and Burstyn are so different that the whole film hangs on a
precarious balance, occasionally upset by Mercouri’s overacting or Burstyn’s
internalized subtlety. Unfortunately the film was under-appreciated by
critics who expected a more antiquarian rendering of the ancient tragedy.
Yorgos Panousopoulos’ Honey Moon (To Taxidi tou Melitos) was one of
the most stylish movies of the following year. Panousopoulos explored with
affection, sensitivity, and compassion the world of aging people in one of
the best films of the period for narrative pace, photography, and characteri-
zation. In the same vein, Andreas Thomopoulos’ A Laughing Afternoon (Ena
Gelasto Apoyevma) explored the common memories of a divorced couple, as
on their last day together they face a terrorist action, with touching sensi-
tivity and ingenious subtlety. Hristophoros Hristofis Wandering (Periplanisi)
was one of the most poignant reflections on the destiny of the Greek
Diaspora. Rafailidis noted that the film was “the result of a serious reflection
on the grave Greek past and its uncertain historical destiny . . . Wandering is
the first and to this moment the only ‘national’ Greek movie.”32
Other notable movies of 1979 were Vassilis Vafeas’ Eastern Province

(Anatoliki Perifereia), an honest film about the transition from a rural
mentality to the contemporary capitalist multinational work ethic expressed
with stark and cold realism. Dimitris Mavrikios’ Lamore was also a visually
remarkable film, with poetic feeling and violent passion, which won inter-
national recognition and made known the great actress Katerina Helmi (b.
1939). Kostas Ferris’ Exile on Central Avenue (Exoristos stin Kentriki Leoforo)
also addressed the new kinds of trauma that the post-civil war generation
experienced; unable to conform and be accepted by either right or left
ideologies.
The most consummate film of the year was Nikos Nikolaidis’ The
Wretches are Still Signing (Ta Kourelia Tragoudan Akomi). It presented a
marginal, apolitical group of four friends from the 1950s as it clashed with
the growing paranoia of a society filled with vacuous grandiloquent state-
ments and the collectivist oblivion of the individual. Instead of political
declarations and visionary pronouncements, the movie revolved around the
wonderfully meaningless statement: “Evil began in 1957 after that moron,
Perry Como, sang ‘Glendora’!” The movie was full of sparkling wit and
subtle humor; a dark comedy, parodying, and yet celebrating, the cinematic
memories of a generation that avoided political commitment and developed
its own subcultural codes of communication through American movies,
underground morality, and rock and roll music.
The storyline was driven by its own vibrant and basic colors, as nostalgia
for the innocence and the purity of youth was gradually transformed into
madness and self-destruction. Its dialogue also constituted another parody
of the dominant discourse of belonging, identity, and power—a subversive
language full of irony, sarcasm, and vulnerability. Nikolaidis introduced a
new language of visual representation to Greek cinema using bright colors,
American “decadent” music, filmic references, and intricate plot devices
Nikos Nikolaidis, The Wretches are Still Singing (1979).

Courtesy, Nikos Nikolaidis. Credit: DVD
that make this film a primary cinematic text foregrounding the “hidden
histories” of forgotten generations.
Within the atmosphere of marginal groups reclaiming visibility, one
must include Dimitris Stavrakas’ short film Betty, a documentary on the
life of a transsexual. Without cheap voyeurism, the film confronted Greek
audiences with an uncomfortable view about male sexuality and with an
exceptional individual enjoying every moment of her life with passion
and responsibility. Finally, two important experimental films should be
mentioned; Maria Gavala’s Narrative/Adventure/Language/Silence (Afigisi/
Peripeteia/Glossa/Siopi), a strange and haunting investigation into the
meaning of cinematic language itself. Thanassis Rentzis’ Corpus was a visual
illustration of how the human body has been depicted in seven historical
periods through narration and double exposures of corporeal representa-
tions by various artists.
The arrival of the new decade gave rise to new hopes that cinema could
fight back against television and bring audiences back to the movies. A
number of lavish productions were made, together with the production of
slapstick comedies based on the continuing appeal of popular actors and
directors. Aliki Vouyouklaki returned to the studios, seven years after her
last movie, with the boulevard comedy Cunning Female . . . Rascal Woman
(Poniro Thiliko . . . Katergara Ginaika), but the film enjoyed a very moderate
success. A number of mildly successful comedies by Thanassis Vengos and
Costas Voutsas lampooned the forthcoming participation of Greece in the
European Union. Also, there was a remarkable decrease in porn films, as the
free import of hard-core porn from other countries was finally allowed.
Within the context of local production, a number of films stand out.
Voulgaris’ Eleftherios Venizelos (1980) was an ambitious attempt to recon-
struct the life of the most prominent Greek statesman, depicting him as
an agent of historical change and as the politician who took risks with
the nation’s life. With this film, Voulgaris made his first move away from
the styles of New Greek Cinema through attempts at characterization and
psycholigization structured around a linear narrative.
Thodoros Marangos also worked with Thanassis Vengos in the comedy
Thanassi, tighten your belt (Thanassi sfixe ki allo to zonari sou, 1980); despite
its commercial success, the film failed to renew interest in comedies (which
had started reappearing in various forms) and bring audiences back to
cinemas. Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ Melodrama? (1980) introduced the theme
of existential angst which was to become dominant in the following decade,
as Greek film-makers became more and more self-conscious. A number of
very good existential dramas were made during this period.
A realistic exploration of a subculture was given with Paulos Tasios’,
Request (Paragellia), which represented the psychodynamics of the macho
subculture with shocking realism through an unembellished narrative. The
story was based on true events that took place in the early 70s, when two
brothers requested a song at a night club—an indication in these circles of
social status and more importantly, respect. At the same time, Tasios trans-
formed the true story into a tense re-enactment of the lives of disturbed
individuals as they unfold within a complex universe beyond their under-
standing and control.
The film was one of the very few attempts at gritty realism and austere
visual pragmatism, exposing the glamorized vulgarity of the ruling middle
class. The commentary throughout the film by the anarchist poet Katerina
Gogou is probably one of the most unforgettable sound tracks in Greek
cinema; and her verse, “There will come a time when children will choose their
parents . . .” amplified profoundly the crisis of family and familial authority
that Tasios depicted, a theme which would be explored by a number of new
directors later in the decade.
Yorgos Stampoulopoulos’ And It Goes to Glory Again (Kai xana pros
tin Doxa Trava, 1980) was a hilarious parody of popular culture in its trivi-
ality and truth focused on the life and career of the popular singer Yannis
Floriniotis. The highest grossing film of the decade was Nikos Tzimas’
The Man with the Carnation (O Anthropos me to garifallo). It was a brave
and unambiguous attempt at the visual biography of the famous left-wing
politician and intellectual Nikos Belogiannis who was executed by the
state in 1954. It was also a gripping and fascinating political melodrama
made with all-Hollywood narrative techniques, emotional conflicts, and fast
transitions—and, as such, it sealed the end of the political films as under-
stood and promoted by the New Greek Cinema.
However, the greatest movie of the year was again made by Angelopoulos.
His historical epic Megalexandros (Alexander the Great) was a grand narrative
farewelling all grand narratives, a magnificent recapitulation of his cinematic
scripture in a way that both puzzled and inspired. The film received the
Golden Lion of experimental cinema at the Venice Film Festival (while the
Golden Lion went to Louis Malle and John Cassavetes). It is almost four
hours long and could be seen as Angelopoulos’ reply to Eisenstein’s Ivan
the Terrible (1944 and 1945). It explored power and its corrupting influence
on charismatic personalities, which in certain historical moments linked
past and present by focusing social energy and political activism. As Dan
Georgakas remarked:
With Alexander the Great, Angelopoulos upped the cinematic and political
stakes by shifting from specific historical events to take on national
mythology with techniques that were even more demanding than in his
previous films.33
The story was based on the infamous Dilesi Massacre of 1872, when brigands
abducted a number of British tourists and demanded ransom. As the ransom
was not given, the bandits killed the tourists. Angelopoulos relocated this
incident at the beginning of the twentieth century as a folk hero, calling
himself Alexander the Great, establishes a counter-community of rebels
and outcasts. Power makes him cruel, inconsiderate, and tyrannical. At the
end of the film, a ritual of theophagia (god-eating) takes place as the leader
is devoured by the community. The final scene shows the only child of the
community escaping, and a voiceover announces almost didactically, “This
is how Alexander entered the cities . . .”
The film remains one of the most underrated by Angelopoulos because
of its dense symbolism, opaque and sometimes impenetrable references,
and its archaic anthropology. For those who don’t know much about Greek
history and folk culture it can be seen as an exercise in pure style with the
dominance of neo-platonic optics of representation and their cosmological
correspondences. But the references to contemporary realities can be seen
as it depicts the tense atmosphere of the political messianism of a deranged
individual who sees himself as having been given a special mission by history
or God, like the personality cult of Jim Jones in Jonestown, which had come
to its tragic end the previous year. The strong Freudian background, with the
subplot of incest, adds a complex layer of references to the character. At the
same time, the submerged homoeroticism within the closed community of
soldiers living with imposed abstinence, obedience, and self-control around
the leader opens another dimension towards the libidinal undercurrents that
energize the story.
Visually, Angelopoulos explored the multiple perspectives of folk
painting, especially of the naive painter Theophilos, and the spatial arrange-
ments of Byzantine iconography, with the slow movement of camera,
offstage action, and the use of deep earthy colors to explore the psychopa-
thology of authochthonicity that dominates such blood-and-soil movements.
Theo Angelopoulos, Alexander the Great (1980). Courtesy,

Theo Angelopoulos. Credit: DVD
Hristodoulos Halaris’ music with its rural sounds from windpipe instru-
ments, added an animistic depth that was both seductive and terrifying. The
descent into self-delusion of a political leader was to become an extremely
relevant issue in the new decade, as the up-and-coming socialist leader
Andreas Papandreou presented himself as the savior of the country, in
messianic terms, full of the dynamism that was to liberate the country from
the demonic oppression of the right-wing conservative autocracy.
With its new themes, Megalexandros both farewelled the period of
extrovert optimism and greeted the dawning period of grand illusions,
which, just as in the film, was to end in an immense disenchantment from
all projects of social renewal. The tendency towards psycholigization shows
that by then the New Greek Cinema had begun to morph into something
different, gradually abandoning the overtly political orientation of the recent
past while continuing its formal legacy: long takes, slow narrative pace,
suggestive lighting, and the discreet rejection of montage by privileging a
realistic representation in plot, location, and character.
Most films in this transitional period were moving between realism and
magic realism in an attempt to find new ways of visually articulating the
changing reality and, most importantly, the changed intellectual and political
atmosphere. It was obvious that the explosion of the creative imaginary
that had taken place after the Restoration was anything but dormant. The
institutionalization of all cultural activity through state apparatuses stifled
collective projects of social renewal and relocated the creative impetus into
the private sphere.
The early 1980s were a period when the auteur tradition became densely
introspective. At the same time, television serials and productions for video
led to a certain revival of commercial cinema which had by now lost its
communal appeal and had instead become a private entertainment at home.
Most cinema venues were closing down, while only slapstick comedies and
soft porn films were screened at the few remaining theaters. Great actors
took part in them for financial reasons and many talents were destroyed
by overexposure in vulgar and cheap productions, with rudimentary plots,
inane dialogue, and pornographic voyeurism.
But the promise of a new era was on the political horizon as the
conservatives had run out of steam after seven years in power, and the
Socialist Party, full of rhetorical ebullience, ideological fanaticism, and infec-
tious enthusiasm was likely to win the upcoming elections in October 1981.
C h a p t e r F iv e
❦❦
The 1980s: Hope and

Disenchantment
The Socialist Government and the Promise of Change

In 1979 / 80 , under the conservative government of Constantine
Karamanlis, an institutional change took place with immense consequences
for Greek cinema. Film production was transferred from the Ministry of
Industry to the Ministry for Culture. A new legal framework was estab-
lished, securing sufficient funding and relative freedom as censorship was
relaxed but not abolished. Furthermore, a new prominence was given to
the Greek Film Center, which was to play a pivotal role in film production,
with generous funding and extensive subsidies for various cinematic genres,
including feature films, documentaries, television series, and experimental
films.
In early 1981, Greece joined the European Union; a membership which
would allow film-makers to participate in co-productions with European
organizations, especially television channels. However, with the noticeable
exception of Theo Angelopoulos, it took several decades to make use of
the new possibilities opened by the new political and cultural project of
a unified Europe. Initially, participation in the EU, instead of opening up
Greece to transnational trends and opportunities, seems to have led to forms
of parochial ethnocentrism, cultural exclusivism, and demoralizing intro-
spection. This was enhanced by the election of PASOK, an ultra-socialist
party, to government in October 1981. It propagated the isolationist slogan
“Greece belongs to the Greeks, and not to the West.” As historian Richard
Clogg points out, the “heavy mix of nationalism, populist demagogy, and
socialist rhetoric” used by Andreas Papandreou to win the 1981 elections
became the hallmarks of his rule until 1989.1
193
Certainly, the “change”towards the Left was inevitable. Karamanlis’

government had already proceeded with the nationalization of important
sectors of the economy, (banks, transport, heavy industry, for example), in
a trend aptly called “social-mania,” thus preparing the way for a complete
takeover of economic activity by the state. “Change” had already taken
place in France with Francois Mitterrand, and Spain was to follow. The new
superstar politician-cum-playboy, an annoying mixture of privilege and
populism, Andreas Papandreou, had promised with his grandiose slogans
radical changes in political structure, economic development, social welfare,
foreign policy, administrative ethos, public life, censorship, new roles for
the police and army, meritocracy, a new function of the government, and
inexhaustible financial support and institutional renewal for cinema. He
had promised this extensive list of changes, through “Allagi,” in his much
celebrated “Contract with the People” and his irrevocable “Appointment with
History.” The list of promised changes was long, seductive and, depending on
his audience, multiplying ad infinitum.
After 50 years of right-wing rule, the election of the youthful Socialist
Party gave rise to many hopes for a renewed Greek political life, free of the
endemic corruption or oppression of previous decades. It also generated
many hopes for a renaissance in Greek cinema. Given also the fact that the
star of Stella, Melina Mercouri (1920–1994), became the lifelong minister for
culture, most film-makers expected that more funding and support by the
state was at hand.
One of the first things that the Socialist government did was to abolish
the 1942 law which had imposed strict censorship on the film industry—and
which, generally speaking, showed an overprotective approach to the artistic
aspect of film production. Art films became privileged by the state ideology
while commercial cinema was considered mere entertainment without
artistic merit. Yet, the committees established by the new government
were made up of staunch “party” members with anti-right credentials and
with the paradoxical understanding of history as an endless persecution
of socialists. Their entrenched ideology forced the government to prolong
negotiations with industry unions over working rights, special privileges,
technician quotas per movie, holidays, and special welfare benefits—to
such a degree that the proposed new legislation took over six years to reach
parliament.
Within this atmosphere, the psychological syndrome of the “underdog
cult” became the dominant mythology of the new elite, who fancied
themselves as persecuted at the moment when they had unrestricted power,
authority, and inexhaustible resources at their disposal.
However, with protection and funding came complacency and
conformism. It was as if the lifting of the last censorship restrictions and
the unlimited financial support institutionalized a “culture of complaint”
The 1980s: Hope and Disenchantment 195
without inaugurating a creative dialogue with the audience, indeed not

even a dialogue with the cinematic past. In a strange reversal of the estab-
lished practices of either indifference or control, after 1982 the state would
fund almost every proposal for film submitted to the Greek Film Center,
providing, of course, it conformed to its ideological agenda. The idea was
that by producing more films, it was more likely that more people would go
to see them; consequently, some would be commercially successful and so
repay their expenses.
This practice was not unlike Papandreou’s pseudo-Keynesian economic
policies, which were based on the concept that by increasing salaries and
government spending, more cash will flow into the market and as a conse-
quence more money will be generated. The rationale behind the policy was
an American interpretation of Keynes’ theory that government could use
“the budget to manipulate consumption levels.”2 The implementation in
Greece, however, took place without a corresponding increase in produc-
tivity, thus leading to rapid inflation and soon to huge deficits that needed
heavy external borrowing in order to balance the annual budget. Papandreou
thought of Greece as “. . . a country that is European while partaking of the
characteristics of the Third World . . .” and which needed a “special kind of
intervention.”3 Consequently, when he was elected he used the country “as
an experimental field for democratic decentralization and self-government
that was to place economic planning under social control and free the
‘people’ from capitalist exploitation.”4
Papandreou’s simplistic formula of managerial economics from above
led to the destruction of just about everything that had been achieved in
the country during the postwar years. In the end, the socialist government
had to disguise everything under the heavy ideological mantle of belligerent
rhetoric and heroic theatrics against the “privileged” in a continuous class
war, oblivious to the fact that, after 1982, they belonged to the privileged
class. As John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis observed, “What PASOK
did was to develop a populist mode of rallying the masses of the disen-
chanted around a suitably vague project of ‘change.’”5 Furthermore, in its
failure to deliver the promised socialist “eutopia,” PASOK evolved into a
harrowing and authentically third-worldish cult of the leader, propagated by
state apparatuses with an almost religious fervor and fanaticism.
The grand disenchantment with the socialists’ failure to establish a true
civil society can be detected in the cinematic codes of the period, especially
after 1985, with the radical rejection of all projects of social renewal and the
growing withdrawal from public engagement. However, the whole process
was deeply political: Papandreou started as a modernizer and ended up a
parochial mixture of Benito Mussolini and Juan Peron. The body politic,
and film-makers, reacted by rejecting all grand discourses about the past and
embracing micro-narratives of individual fall and redemption.
With so much money invested, however, there was an explosion of all

kinds of films in different genres addressing what now became the dominant
ideological stratagem of the government, the abeyant traumas of the past,
and only peripherally current issues. The central concern remained the fatal
decade of the 1940s, as understood and imagined by the governing party and
its followers. The middle class that gained power with the socialists had its
origins in the persecuted communist Left of the Civil War and the 1950s. Its
rise to power was not just a kind of historical justice and retribution; soon it
became obvious that it had escalated into a one-sided and ruthless revenge,
without any attempt at genuine reconciliation and critical assessment of
historical experience.
Many films, and television series, were made to recreate the history
of political persecutions of dissidents and the common people. Some were
melodramatic, others idealistic, others simply kitsch, but in one way or
another, they tried to heal the painful vestiges of a suppressed collective
memory. Some extraordinary movies were made during the 1980s; most,
however, were mediocre, self-content, and smug, recreating an atmosphere
either of populist superficiality or of existential claustrophobia. The explosion
of creative work addressing the traumas of the past was something long
overdue, but by 1985 it had already lapsed into parochialism and was simply
out of touch with the new generation which hadn’t experienced the Civil
War and which didn’t know much about the dictatorship either—except as a
school holiday. Furthermore, the representatives of the resistance generation
proved to be more opportunistic than their conservative counterparts, and
soon discredited through their cynicism, careerism, and self-indulgence all
projects of political renewal and reform.
Furthermore, it was quite paradoxical to talk about state oppression
while being fully supported and funded by the state or even seeing those who
took part in the resistance against the dictatorship being transformed in less
than a year into professional politicians and highly paid television stars. The
Socialists, until their last day in power (in 1989), talked constantly as though
they were in opposition or a persecuted political fringe, whereas they were
in government, took decisions, and actually persecuted many fringe groups.
Their incredible denial of their actual position for an imaginary location
outside history discredited everything that people had believed until then.
The self-perception of Greek society with its new orientation towards
the European Union became another dominant issue. The slogans of the
Conservatives and the Socialists about belonging indicated a crisis of national
identity and of political orientation that was to throw creative activity into a
state of confusion, melancholia, and introspection. The question of cultural
belonging and of cultural identity, called “Greekness,” became one of the
most self-indulgent pastimes in cultural debates of the period. It neutralized
creativity in its attempt to singularize and homogenize Greek identity, which
throughout its history was polymorphous, transformative, and polycentric.

The Socialists’ slogan “Greece belongs to the Greeks,” created a culture
without points of reference and without external testimonies about its
semantic codes—therefore it created a culture in self-imposed isolation.
In 1985, such isolation became almost an ideological obsession, after the
new president, the famous judge of the Lambrakis affair, gloriously immor-
talized in Costa-Gavras’ Z, Hristos Sartzetakis, declared, with his bizarre,
soporific prose, that Greeks were a “brotherless” nation (anadelfon ethnos)!
After the issue of cultural identity was “solved” by the socialists, religious
affiliation became a dominant issue. The Orthodox Church had enveloped
Greek popular culture so completely that it was transformed into a folk
religion, structured around liturgical rituals and archaic ceremonies: this
form of nationalized Christianity, which “helped the nation survive,” became
an important defense mechanism, especially during periods of crisis.
Such self-referentiality was doomed to become an instrument of
ideological manipulation in the hands of the government, and a discourse of
cultural exclusivism among the state-sponsored intellectuals. Unfortunately,
almost ten years of rapid global change were wasted in debating imaginary
issues in what Freud termed “the narcissism of minor differences.” Through
such narcissism, the Socialists constructed the image of a culture “under
siege,” stressing its uniqueness, peculiar position, and specificity. Greece
willingly accepted the idea that, within the wider context of European
countries, it was determined to remain an “exception,” expressing its excep-
tional status of a unique historical destiny in near religious terms, reminiscent
of the cheap and facile populism of fascism.6
Finally, the social question seemed to have somehow receded as a
theme and representation. Indeed, a multiplicity of visual languages was
developed which in itself showed that it was impossible to construct in
the 1980s a collective narrative that would mean common things to the
audiences of an affluent, optimistic, and highly politicized society. The
popular directors of the previous decade continued to work and produce
some remarkable movies. Yet new realities became visible, beyond the stories
of political persecution, party politics, and ideological martyrdom. Many
hidden histories of Greek society started to find their visual transcription;
histories which, although they looked decadent and reactionary to the
ideological orthodoxy of the Left, or decadent and morally sick to the Right,
brought to the fore the existence of minority sub-groups and shed light on
hidden micro-communities unknown to mainstream society.
Overall, as Mihalis Adamomoulos observed in 1981:
The greatest disadvantage of Greek cinema in all genres [was] that it
didn’t know, or it could not tell a story, or develop a complex narrative. It
showed a preference towards formalistic quest, stylization, empty narrative
sequences, the framing of space and of objects instead of producing

characters, individuals or of developing a grand narrative . . . As a conse-
quence, the only thing that matters is the composition of the frame, the
atmosphere, the form, but never the story, or the narrative.”7
During the incoming decade, this formalist tendency would transform itself
into another manneristic device meaning anti-commercial, intellectual, and
introspective cinema—which ultimately meant boring and self-indulgent
stylistic exercises that drove audiences away from the cinemas.
New Films for the New Regime and the Death of New
Greek Cinema
Together with the election of the Socialist Party, in October, another
significant event took place in 1981—the last film made by the superstar
of the sixties Aliki Vouyouklaki. A Spy Called Nelly (Kataskopos Nelly) was
released and withdrawn after three weeks. Very few tickets were sold and
Vouyouklaki abandoned cinema altogether after this humiliating failure. It
proved that the old cinema, its values and stars had become irrelevant and
that the New Greek Cinema of the 70s had finally triumphed; the only name
that survived the demise was the comic genius Thanassis Vengos, who over
the next two decades would reveal the sublimity of an authentic tragic self
under the popular comic mask.
At the same time, a new way of distributing films through video started
becoming so popular that it soon developed its own mode of production
and dissemination. Many films were made exclusively for the video market.
Most were low-budget slapstick comedies, or soft porn, which became
really popular as VHS technology was spreading and cinema ticket sales
were falling. Many movie theaters closed during this period, despite the
new government’s attempt to fund and promote film clubs throughout the
country. Film production started dwindling dramatically, and by the end of
1985 it looked as if it had almost vanished, with fewer than 20 artistic feature
films being produced each year. There were some interesting contributions
to film production, however, produced against the background of countless
populist comedies, porn films, and silly melodramas about drugs in schools,
prison life, and sexual perversions in the judiciary.
Nikos Veryitsis’ Stories of a Honey Bee (Istories mias Kerithras, 1981)
brought a new sensitivity to film-making as well as an insight into artistic
sensibility with the visual exploration of the life of actors beyond the
walls of the studio. Thodoros Maraggos’ Study My Son Study (Mathe paidi
mou grammata, 1981) was a stinging satire on the value of education in a
materialistic, affluent, and oppressive society, as a provincial teacher forces
his children to study. Things become complex when politics intervene,
showing both the liberating and the destructive aspects of education. The
film expressed the looming anger of ordinary citizens, as educated people
remained politically suspect and mostly unemployed: “Six year in primary
school and 6 years in high school, makes 12. Plus 6 years at the Polytechnic
school—18 in all. Another 6 years abroad, 24 . . . Where did my life go?” It
was the most successful film of the year and became extremely popular as
a satire of the contradictory policies of an oppressive state which promoted
education as a mechanism of obedience and conformism.
Tasos Psaras’ The Factory (To Ergostasio, 1981) was a realistic depiction
of the growing changes in economic production and their consequences.
Yorgos Panousopoulos’ A Foolish Love (Oi Apenanti, 1981) was an accom-
plished depiction of the desire for communication and connection between
people living in modern apartments, as presented in the illicit love affair
between a middle-aged woman and an adolescent. Betty Livanou’s perfor-
mance was majestic while the emotional realism that Panousopoulos
employed to unfold his story was engaging without becoming melodramatic.
Frida Liappa’s The Ways of Love are Nocturnal (Oi Dromoi tis Agapis einai
Nihterinoi, 1981) was probably one of the best and most interesting attempts
to reclaim the primacy of the individual adventure against the grand
collective narratives that dominated the populist aesthetic of the period.
Liappa’s female gaze searched for what constituted emotional truth in the
desperate existential quest for fulfillment and reciprocity.
Lakis Papastathis’ In the Time of the Hellenes (Ton Kairo ton Ellinon,
1981) was a strange and somehow “revisionist” film which inaugurated a
new understanding of “national identity” as the distorted perception of the
ruling class regarding the “authentic Greek tradition.” Set at the beginning
of the twentieth century and dealing with a topic similar to Angelopoulos’
Megalexandros, it is interesting to notice the differences in approach,
style, and storyline between them. Papastathis (b. 1943) showed a distinct
sensitivity for the details in the reconstruction of the period, in language,
costume, and settings. However, the suggestion that “authentic” Greece was
to be found in the behavior of the brigands, as if there was somewhere an
“inauthentic Greek tradition,” made this film ideologically spurious. On
the other hand, Thanasis Rentzis’ Electric Angel (Ilektrikos Angelos, 1981)
was a significant non-narrative experimental film, exploring the mystery
of eroticism as manifested throughout the twentieth century in dreamlike
sequences full of sensuality and hypnotic music.
The first full year of socialist government saw a number of good films
produced. Hristophoros Hristofis’ Rose (1982), with the Polish actors Andrej
Severin and Daniel Obrinsky, was a nostalgic meditation on the predicament
of displaced political refugees, through poetic realism and fragmented
narrative. The story is about these refugees as they meet at a famous hotel in
Trieste during the Greek dictatorship, the same hotel where Rosa Luxemburg
had stayed during her exile. Dinos Mavroidis’ The Happy Face of Leonora (To
Eutihismeno Prosopo tis Leonoras, 1982) was an opaque attempt to explore
the rise to power of the new middle class, after years of persecution: closed
in an isolated house, the successful members of society narrate the ghosts of
their past and reveal the betrayal of their idealistic youth.
Vassilis Vafeas’ Break (Repo, 1982) was another interesting satire about
the lower-middle-class mentality that dominated Greek society. Dimitris
Makris’ The Dam (To Fragma, 1982) presented a dense allegorical film with
a Kafkaesque atmosphere and allusions, based on a famous Greek novel.
On the other hand, Tony Likouressis’ The Blood of Statues (To Aima ton
Agalmaton, 1982) was a poetic reflection on the meaning of symbols, as a
group of youths escaping from a provincial reform school find refuge in
a new archaeological museum. The depiction of a society that privileges
antiquarianism at the expense of the living was probably one of the most
interesting sub-themes emerging in this period.
Tasios released his Stigma in 1982; the first film to explore with
honesty, sincerity, and empathy families with children suffering from Down’s
syndrome. It was an unexpected social drama that tackled a controversial
issue that was to become current decades later. The story revolves around
the decision of a young couple to perform euthanasia on their child and
how this decision leads to their separation. It was a tale of moral empow-
erment with serious ethical issues raised on voluntary death, abortion, and
medical principles. Tasios structured the various reactions of the married
couple towards their child as well as those of the social environment with
emotional austerity and starkness; he never became sentimental or evasive.
The protagonists Olia Lazaridou and Antonis Kafetzopoulos, performed
with reserve and passion. The film was a good example of the new “themes”
which had begun to emerge in the 80s, referring to issues of personal respon-
sibility. Furthermore, Tasios was one of the very few directors who managed
to create characters with distinct individual psychology.
In the same vein one must see Kostas Zois’ documentary The Rejected
(Oi Azititoi, 1982), about the mental hospital on the island of Leros and
the treatment of people with mental disabilities. The film explored social
realities associated with “madness” and exposed collective prejudices and
personal tragedies.
Yorgos Karypidis’ Confrontation (Anametrisi, 1982) was an incredibly
dense film noir full of literary references and a story that blurred the
boundaries between illusion and reality. A lonely man— played superbly
by Aris Retsos—falls in love with a mysterious movie star who is then
found dead. His reading of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Dashiel
Hammett inspire him to search for her killer. In his mind, literary refer-
ences become confused with real clues until he finds out that she died in
an accident. The film was an apt exploration of solitude and introspection
in a world of illusions and shadows confronted by the brutal indifference of

everyday life.
Nikos Perakis’ Mish-Mash (Arpa Kolla, 1982) was a hilarious parody of
the way in which the new government wanted history to be depicted. It was
also a wonderful critique of the bureaucratic party insiders who were taking
over Greek cinema at the time and the new mythology about the past of the
Left that they wanted to fund, as long as you were a member of the Socialist
Party. In 1984, Perakis would release a sequel. Loafing and Camouflage
(Loufa kai Paralaggi) was another successful parody of the myth of the
resistance against the dictatorship, which under the socialists had become
almost fetishized ideology.
But the most “political film” of 1982 had a completely different agenda.
The 80s were a period of intense diversification in Greek cinema. The
abolition of censorship presented new thematic challenges for screen-
writers and directors who had begun to sense the audience’s fatigue with
the political dramas that had dominated since 1974. Political cinema finally
started receding after 1980 and ultimately vanished before the end of 1985.
However, a new understanding of the political began to replace the estab-
lished view promoted by the state as political history. Now the political was
gradually converging with the social, and both were problematized and
finally interrogated about their most central values and constructs.
The questioning of historical memory was gradually extended to the
core values of its dominant tradition, as determined by the structures of
patriarchy and masculinity. It is very interesting to note that left-wing
critiques only infrequently touched upon the “core values” of the political
establishment; for instance, on gender roles and their position within the
power system of society. And while femininity was to a certain but not
sufficient degree reassessed, masculinity, with its implied codes of behavior,
forms of representation, and patterns of self perception, was never interro-
gated seriously in any form of intellectual discussion.
Indeed, after the 80s, a marked crisis of masculinity was often found
in Greek films. Most questioned the ideological domination of an andro-
centric discourse and presented masculinity as an unstable social role with
an anarchic, ambivalent, and ambiguous sexual desire—expressed on many
occasions through self-destructive or psychopathological behavior. Tasios
and Marketaki had alluded to male sexual impotence not as a physical
problem but as a failure to fulfill societal expectations; however, they left
psychology out and explored male aggression as a socially constructed
reaction to the feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. But the crisis of mascu-
linity had as its consequence that homosexual and transgender identities
found for the first time their narrative elaboration in an honest and creative
way, which the middle-class conservative crowds had to confront and
accommodate into their political, ideological, and aesthetic horizon.
Most left-wing ideologues had never thought of gender as a political

issue; even feminist ideas were treated with hostility by Marxist intellectuals.
Given also the fact that because of the dictatorship, Greek society never
experienced the sexual liberation movement that shook the establishment
elsewhere in the 60s. The Left was always reluctant if not suspicious towards
ideas that questioned the heroes’ and social realists’ masculinist and phallo-
centric discourses of mainstream Soviet-inspired Marxism. In the 80s, such
ideas were challenged through new representations and new stories that
were real and, beyond all expectation, were happening for decades at a grass-
roots level.
The film that inaugurated a new “gaze” for understanding and repre-
senting masculinity was Yorgos Katakouzinos’ Angel (Angelos). It explored
the fate and public perception of homosexuals in Greek society—a reality
that until then had remained taboo, represented only as a caricature in
slapstick comedies, commonly a campy hairdresser, tailor, sinister petty
criminal, or sexual predator. With the exception of Koundouros’ Vortex,
there was no other “positive” representation in Greek cinema of homosexual
characters and homosexuality. Angel introduced the new theme of sexual
violence in Greek society, and presented a society within a society—that of
the underground sexual outlaw who had nothing to do with expressions of
ideological dissent or political activism but with the struggle, both internal
and external, for the free expression of one’s individual sexual identity.
Angel was based on real events and actual personalities and confronted
the inability of Greek society to deal with the sight of masculinity deprived of
power. A shy and terrified young man—underplayed by Mihalis Maniatis—
fell in love with a macho domineering crook—overacted by Dionisis Xanthos.
Soon he is forced to dress up and prostitute himself in order to bring him
money. After years of exploitation, the explosion happens and in a frenzy of
despair and passion, the transvestite slits his lover’s throat and is condemned
Yorgos Katakouzinos, Angel (1982). Courtesy, Yorgos

Katakouzinos. Greek Film Center Collection.
to life imprisonment. The reaction of the public was ambiguous: sympathy

mixed with repulsion, since the film exposed masculinity as a “constructed”
social role, with its use of the phallus for domination, sexual pleasure for
extortion, and the overt exploitation of sex for control.
In the film, Angelos, the main character, is seen in the morning
exercising with other soldiers, learning to swear and use weapons in order
to become tough and defend the motherland; and on the same night he is
transformed into a voluptuous transvestite prostituting himself to repressed
married men who pick him up in order to experience some “real” moments
of sexual bliss. The homosexual as a human being was a rather confronting
spectacle for a homophobic society that understood such sexual behavior
either as perversion or as the whim of great men—to such “charismatic”
men, homosexuality was forgiven, but not so when seen in the common
man. Suddenly seeing the homosexual as an ordinary person, the son of
your neighbor, indeed your own son, was a little too much to bear. The
film was ruthlessly criticized from both sides of the political spectrum; but
it revealed the nagging suspicion that macho mentality was at its core an
insecure masculinity, full of phallic phobias and a self-hating desire for the
male body. With this movie, identity and gender politics became prevalent
themes in Greek cinema; and sexuality, exposing a masculinity in a deep and
irredeemable crisis, found its first ambivalent representation.
Simultaneously, urban melodramas became popular again. Nikos
Vergitsis’ Revenge (Revanch) and Yorgos Tsemperopoulos’ Sudden Love
(Xafnikos Erotas) were two of the commercial successes of 1983 for the
simple reason that both were good films: they had an effective script and
presented their characters with direct realism, unpretentious simplicity,
and healthy self-irony. Yorgos Stampoulopoulos’ Look Out Danger (Prosohi
Kindinos) explored the heterosexual side of sexual aggression through incest
and murder. The film was a grim and brutal depiction of paternal mascu-
linity as violence and coercion. Apostolos Doxiadis’ Underground Trajectory
(Ipogeia Diadromi) was also a prescient exploration of the machinations
within a socialist government through factional conflicts. In this film the
“legends” of the generation of the Polytechnic Uprising in 1973 started being
debunked and indeed ridiculed—something that was already occurring
beyond the screen as presumed members of the “resistance” squabbled about
who had resisted more than the other.
With his Sweet Bunch (Glikia Symmoria), Nikos Nikolaidis went even
further: he constructed a counter-grand narrative, a deliberate anti-Angelo-
poulos aesthetic, which challenged dominant perceptions of history, identity,
and normativity. His movies were, as he stated, “dedicated to a generation
that didn’t believe in politics but in friendship, love, and independent
thinking.” Sweet Bunch depicted the great fatigue that creative film-makers
started to feel towards the paternalistic role of the state, and almost predicted
Nikos Nikolaidis, Sweet Bunch (1983). Courtesy, Nikos Nikolaidis;

Credit: DVD
the death of a generation which supposedly took on the “historical respon-

sibility” of changing society and its foundations.
The film sang an elegy and farewell to the innocence of a
forgotten generation through poetic realism and colorful expressionism.
A conscious response to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), the
film explored the other side of violence by depicting its victims. As the
socialists were consolidating their power base within the state appara-
tuses, it was becoming increasingly apparent that there was no intention
of reconstructing Greek society in their applied politics—and the
disenchantment with political ‘engagement’ started to become obvious.
Furthermore, Nikolaidis indicated that the film “was about the rise of
modern world fascism” and this could also refer to the new role of the
state in his own country with its inflated populism and the paternalistic
embrace of cultural activity.
Also released in 1983, Nikos Zervos’ The Dracula of Exarheia (O
Drakolas ton Exarheion) was a marvelous example of trashy, non-sensical,
outrageous, raw, and freakish cinema, in the manner of Ed Wood, celebrating
the anarchist culture of an Athenian suburb through parody, satire, and overt
ridiculing of national symbols. The movie was exceptionally bad, the script
was horrible, and the performances abysmal, but precisely because of these
“shortcomings,” the film was the sanest commentary on the erratic and
ultimately disappointing way in which the socialists governed the country.
By contrast, Yannis Smaragdis’ The Journey of Return (To Taxidi tis Epistrofis)
was an accomplished exploration of the repatriation of a migrant from
Sweden and the changes that he encounters. Despite its voguish theme,
Smaragdis avoided sensationalism through poetic realism and dream-like
sequences.
But the year belonged unquestionably to two of the most important
films made in the country. The first was the film adaptation of a Greek novel
written at the beginning of the twentieth century by Konstantine Theotokis;
the second another kind of epic, a counter-epic, monumentalizing the life,

culture, and music of the rebetika underground. Tonia Marketaki’s The Price
of Love (I Timi tis Agapis) is probably one of the most accomplished achieve-
ments of Greek cinema, viewing history from the perspective of women, and
acting as a therapeutic to the dominant stereotypes of feminine passivity and
fatalism. One can discern Marketaki’s persistent attempt to define what consti-
tuted Greek experience, especially for women, and how it could be represented
visually. The film received a number of international awards and it stands out
as one of the greatest formal achievements of Greek cinema. Through bright
glaring colors, Marketaki recreated funeral masks to render a lost era and the
humans that shaped it. With this film, she became the Gustave Courbet of
Greek cinema with her lack of sentimentality, her savage honesty and formal
realism. For the first time, the past was neither idealized nor beautified; it was
reconstructed as class reality, as the brutal conflict between social forces and
the alienated individuals that fall into the cracks of the social divide.
Women here lost their archetypal eternity as mothers or lovers and
became real people with needs, desires, and dreams. Men were depicted as
being trapped in the role of the dominant oppressor, reacting only through
drinking and frolicking, like spoiled children. The central female character
insists, “Whom do we need? We have our hands to work and that’s enough!
Let’s go away . . . we will win.” Women were shown as having agency and class
consciousness. They appear in control of themselves and of their lives, unlike
men who are lost to the allure of power and domination.
Marketaki’s realism was distinct for its attempt to reconstruct cinemati-
cally the actuality of the visible. It also indicated a profound understanding
of historical experience as the rational outcome of human activity and
the result of deliberate action by ordinary people, as they defined their
everyday lives against the oppressive presence of a hostile, negative, and
alienating power. Her film stands close to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre
Tonia Marketaki, The Price of Love (1983). Greek Film Center

Collection.
Padrone (1977) and Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1979) for its
reinvention of neorealism as a radical exposure of the oppression of ordinary
people, in an era when even human misery tended to look cosy and chic.
The quest for identity—gender or social—inevitably led to the search for
origins. As we have seen, Nikolaidis turned to the study of marginal groups
whose presence in Greek history was strong, but whose voice was sanitized
and domesticated. One of these groups was the rebetes, the songwriters
and singers, who lived and created in complete illegality until they became
“national” and “political” symbols of resistance and opposition during the
1960s, through sanitized and mainstreamed translations of their work.
Kostas Ferris produced his epic narrative Rebetiko (1983) which
presented in a semi-fictional and semi-documentary form the predicament
of the rebetes and their tormented personal and collective history. The movie
unfolded as a “spasmodic” narrative with many gaps in the script, but was
kept together by the powerful music of Stavros Xarhakos which, reviving the
tradition going back to Stella, wove a non-visual thread through action and
dialogue, enhancing their emotional impact.
Its main axis was the life of the singer, presumably the legendary Marika
Ninou, who escaped as a refugee from Smyrna to Piraeus and who sang
some of the most popular rebetika songs, before her death from cancer at
a very young age. Her life, career, and death became the pretexts through
which Greek history was represented from below, from the perspective of
the ordinary people who suffered the disastrous upheavals of political life.
The movie was uneven, as Ferris entered a world which, despite its uncon-
ventional and “abnormal” behavior, wanted to be accepted and become
“normal;” unlike the “outcast” heroes of his movies up to then, who were
unable to belong and be accepted.
The incongruity was striking: the narrative idealized and abstracted
situations that could only be deemed tragic and horrific. Despite the inclusion
of original footage from major historical events, the film has something
artificial and contrived. It is almost as if Ferris was trying hard to find a
redeeming element in the life of the rebetes; but in doing so, he aesthetisized
their adventure and humanity and made them look like schematized forms
instead of real human beings. A comparison between Ferris’ Rebetiko and
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club of the same year would be extremely
enlightening. Coppola was not afraid to touch upon the violent and illegal
character of the very same people who were the creative geniuses behind
jazz music. Ferris on the contrary prettified everything by not showing the
very obvious and sometimes horrible shadows in the consciousness of the
rebetika singers. Yet the movie revealed an incredible adventure of loss,
death, and exploitation which marginalized groups suffered for a long time
and which resonated with audiences still remembering the persecutions that
followed major historical upheavals.
Costas Ferris, Rebetiko (1983). Greek Film Center Collection.
One can only see such “grand narrative” as a farewell to an era, mentality,
and understanding of social experience and cultural memory; indeed a visual
eulogy on the life of a subculture which by then had become an industrial
commodity to be celebrated as a tourist attraction and to be disseminated
as “authentic” Greek culture. The deviance, rebelliousness, and death-
wish that dominated such subcultural groups—the drugs and prostitution,
the violence and exploitation—were barely touched upon. Instead, Ferris
depicted their “personal authenticity” as their main redeeming feature, thus
transforming them into cultural icons. Such incommensurability though
belonged to the wider social realities of the period.
By 1984, it had become apparent that the government, despite its
revolutionary rhetoric, was simply “modernizing” the functions of the state
without making the necessary structural and institutional changes, so that
all social forces could realize their potential. In the same year, the collapse of
the last political legacies of the New Greek Cinema also started to become
obvious. It was generally considered as the year when Greek cinema entered
into a prolonged creative coma, when most Greek films were screened in
empty theaters—with the most successful selling fewer than 20,000 tickets.
The most popular films were hastily made for the video market (and
included slapstick comedies or porn films by the mysterious Berto), and
there are no reliable statistics to account for their commercial success. State-
controlled television was gaining more viewers with lavish productions of
failed socialist sagas such as The Lavrion Strikes or imported soaps such as
Dallas, The Love Boat and Fame.
Meanwhile a strange idea emerged in the new patrician establishment
of the Socialist Party: all commercially successful films were bad and
“reactionary.” A new elitism of incomprehensible abstractions about the
people, revolution, and socialism became the dominant mantras of Prime
Minister Papandreou, who decided that it was better to govern through

slogans than through policies. Such vacuous and populist rhetoric was trans-
lated by the party apparatchiks into peculiar cultural projects that deeply
influenced the production and distribution of the few films produced. The
official ideology was about a people (laos in Greek) who fought heroically
for its freedom against the Italians, Germans, and their collaborators; the
British; and finally the Americans and their cronies, the dictators. It was
another “idealized” version of historical experience, with the representation
of a laos in a state of perpetual resistance against all foreign intruders.
Indeed, it stood as the state-sponsored representation of a totally “fantasized
community” of resistance fighters without historical conscience, individu-
ality, and interiority.
Even the Communist Party and the Left played a strange role in
this. According to the official ideology, Communist Party members were
“good” patriots, but their leadership, was one of “historical errors.” The
de-historization of both the people and the left ideology through secular
hagiographies, political legends, and quasi-religious rhetoric created not
simply a genre and an aesthetic for the cultural production of the period,
but also imposed the cultural hegemony of the ruling Socialist Party on
the official understanding of history: what had previously been hidden and
repressed by the conservative ideology, was now venerated and idolized.
From being present but not represented, it became represented but not present.
It was transformed into an ideological construct full of nostalgia,
innocence, and idealism without any reference to the actual realities of the
day or discussion about the methods with which historical memory was
manipulated by the government. Unfortunately, the conservatives lacked
a counter-discourse and were unable to construct their own narratives,
insisting on nationalistic clichés, religious platitudes, and parochial family
values. Consequently, the monopolization of culture by the Left, as appro-
priated by the Socialist Government, imposed its rules on the cultural and
political debates of the decade, creating an imaginary past and an ideological
theater of history without historical events and acting individuals.
In 1984, Nicholas Gage (b. 1939), the Greek-American writer, journalist,
and executive producer of The Godfather III, requested permission to film
his book Heleni (1982) where it actually took place, on the mountains of
Epirus. The story was about his mother, who was executed by the commu-
nists during the Civil War. The government refused permission for purely
political reasons and Peter Yates filmed it in Spain. The movie, starring John
Malkovich and Linda Hunt, was not very good, but its rejection showed the
lack of any political dialogue or debate, especially in the art world. Another
rejection took place the same year. When Elias Kazan asked to film in Greece
parts of his autobiography Beyond the Aegean, Minister Melina Mercouri,
who was married to Jules Dassin—blacklisted by McCarthy after Kazan’s
testimony—rejected the request. This would have been Kazan’s last film, but
he never made it.8
In the season of 1984/85 a number of interesting films were released.
Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ Varieté was about the existential impasse of a
director while his own constructed characters experience genuine emotions.
It was a highly personal film, which struggled, somewhat unsuccessfully, to
transcend narrative cinema. In Vassilis Vafeas’ Ulysses’ Love (O Erotas tou
Odyssea), Costas Voutsas, a comedian of the old commercial cinema, was
transformed into an emblem of urban solitude and psychological isolation.
After he is sacked from his job, Ulysses walks aimlessly through the streets
of Athens following an unknown woman whom he is only able to approach
at the end to whisper to her, “I love you.” He then returns home to family
happiness and safety.
Hristos Siopahas’ The Descent of the Nine (I Kathodos ton Ennea), based
on a novel by Thanasis Valtinos, was a popular film on the desperate heroism
and idealized martyrdom that the Left and the government promoted. The
strange story about nine communist insurgents escaping invisible enemies
was proof that Greek cinema of the period was all but dedicated to lost causes,
expressing the self-indulgent nostalgia for excitement and adventure of a
well-fed bourgeoisie. Panos Papakyriakopoulos’ Final Countdown (Antistrofi
metrisi) presented another nostalgic take on the heroism of the Left’s fighters
as reconstructed by a political exile returning from France. By watching the
film, you cannot really tell if this is about lost youth or the failure of ideology.
Andreas Thomopoulos’ Ostria expressed another perspective on the
intellectual and emotional hibernation of the period. Three couples camping
on a remote beach meet a beautiful woman who destroys their psychological
balance and personal relations. Andreas Tsilifonis’ The City Never Sleeps (I
Poli pote den Koimatai) explored generational change as a man returns after
20 years’ exile to investigate the death of his younger brother. Instead of
ideology and war, young people died of drug addiction and shady dealings
with the underworld. Social injustice and exploitation assumed new forms
and were being implemented through different methods.
Most of these films, wavering between realism and magic realism,
in one way or another were nostos stories—homecoming tales about
displacement and dislocation. The film that monumentalized such
homecoming to a remembered paradise lost, the ultimate Greek Heimat
story, was Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Cythera)—
one of the best films of the decade and one that put an end to the epic
cinema that Angelopoulos had produced until then. The film received the
Firesci Award at the Cannes Festival in 1984. Its story was very topical, as,
the year before, the government had allowed the unconditional repatri-
ation of all political refugees of the Civil War from Eastern Europe. In
the film, the political refugee returns home from the Soviet Union after
Theo Angelopoulos, Voyage to Cythera (1984). Courtesy,

25 years to find everything and everyone changed. His home is in ruins,

his wife only vaguely recognizes him, and his children want to get rid of
him in any way possible. Finally the state intervenes, but since no country
recognizes him as its citizen, he wis left in the middle of international
waters with his wife.
The film was a wonderful parable about what constitutes belonging, identity,
and memory. It investigated imaginative methods used by displaced individuals
to deal with the upheavals of history and their sense of being uprooted. They
could not stop history from changing nor that by then they represented uncom-
fortable reminders of a forgotten past. Manos Katrakis played with biblical
grandeur the out-of-place-and-time repatriate. The same can be said of the
comedian Dionysis Papayannopoulos, who until then had appeared only in
slapstick films. The music by Eleni Karaindrou elevated the story into a strange
landscape between dream and reality. The anthropocentric morality of the film
showed the new direction that Angelopoulos took during the 1980s, exploring
individual psychology and the dilemmas of human interiority.
The next year must be seen as a turning point in the history of New
Greek Cinema, indicating its ultimate demise. The most successful film
of 1985, and indeed one of the most commercially successful of the last
30 years, was made by one of the architects of the New Cinema. In Stone
Years (Petrina Hronia), Pandelis Voulgaris incorporates a personal story
into the grand narrative of collective history, and avoids (only just) senti-
mentality and pathos, despite the fact that Stamatis Kraounakis’ music
sentimentalizes even the most political moments. Voulgaris succeeded in
producing an enduring story of dedication and commitment, somehow
close to the dramas of the American cinema, through a renewed Hollywood
aesthetic that in reality was in direct contrast to his earlier films like Anna’s
Engagement and Happy Day. As such, this film gave the final coup de grâce
to the New Greek Cinema.
Pandelis Voulgaris, Stone Years (1985). Greek Film Center Collection.
The story was about the life of a political exile starting after the Civil
War and ending with his liberation in 1974. At the same time, it depicted
the dedication and love of his wife—superbly performed by Themis Bazaka.
The film was a political melodrama, with a linear narrative which explored
the indefatigable spirit of left-wing fighters. Stylistically, it seemed to deny
everything that the New Greek Cinema stood for: understatements, ambigu-
ities, and openness. Voulgaris achieved a precarious balance between the
emotional restraint that he had shown until then and an overflowing roman-
ticized nostalgia. Yet as Dan Georgakas stressed, despite its shortcomings,
the film “wanted to bring the old conflicts to some kind of closure.”9
Conversely, the surrealist extravaganza Bordello by Nikos Koundouros
explored a world of irrational impulses and repressed desires. In the
labyrinth of history, there is no redemption except the one that comes
through the explosive liberation of desires—only through perversion and
Nikos Koundouros, Bordello (1985). Courtesy, Nikos

Koundouros. Greek Film Center Collection.
excess can human history and nature be understood. This film, set during
the Cretan Revolution of 1897, showed Koundouros as an angry romantic
reducing history to its elemental beginnings: desire and death.
Yorgos Panousopoulos’ Mania was another sensual bacchanal celebrating
the liberation of the senses in a symbolic garden dominated by animalistic
deities. The human body, the corporeal conscience, remains the only
certainty that contemporary humans can possess in an era without visions
of renewal or reform—the era of ossification and stagnation.
Takis Spetsiotis’ Meteor and Shadow (Meteoro kai Skia) was a biography
of the homosexual poet Napoleon Lapathiotis through a poetic realism
that both fascinated and confused. Yorgos Korras’ The Children of Saturn
(Ta Paidia tou Kronou) explored psychological and sexual triangulation,
especially bisexuality, as a way of rethinking human relations and, more
specifically, family values. The dynamics of family as a repressive and
coercive institution leading to madness were chillingly explored in Stavros
Tsiolis’ Such a Distant Absence (Mia Toso makrini Apousia) who, after 15
years, made his first movie in a completely new genre. Dinos Mavroidis’
Scenario must also be mentioned as a parody of old Greek cinema and its
clichés; yet the film revisited the forgotten Greek cinema with affection and
admiration, preparing the revival of the 1990s.
Two more films from 1985 must also be included: Stavros Konstantarakos’
Floating (En Plo), an earnest attempt to explore the remains of the Civil War;
and Maria Gavala’s Violet’s Fragrance (To Aroma tis Violetas), a low-budget
film presenting human relations through the feminine gaze, something that
is both upsetting and inspiring. Also, Antouanetta Angelidi’s Topos explored
the interiority of the female existence as it unfolds before a dying woman as
her life parades in front of her eyes like a spectacular kaleidoscope. The film
borrowed its iconography from paintings by Giorgio De Quirico and the
masters of the Renaissance to create a visual explosion of colors, forms, and
abstract geometries. It was an impressive and haunting visual meditation on
human mortality, gender, and destiny, with magnificent visual juxtapositions
and music.
With the exception of Voulgaris’ Stone Years, which enjoyed moderate
commercial success, box office sales were dominated by slapstick comedies
and facile remakes. By 1985, the mythology of the Civil War seemed to
belong to remote and somewhat fairy tale days long gone. By being adopted
by power, the rhetoric about the traumas of the past made these stories
lose their subversive function. They had become aesthetisized landscapes
and mythological images proving the spirit of resistance and rebellion that
every “true” Greek felt. Soon, such rhetoric had developed into a particular
self-conscious style, full of religious fervor and the desire for martyrdom.
Consequently, it lost its historical and political edge; it became an alibi and
an excuse for the state and its ideologues to impose their undisputed control
over cinematic and cultural production. Meanwhile, cinema’s main theme

was by now developing in a more fatalistic direction.
The characteristic of almost all films about Civil War heroism was
the depiction of the left-wing fighter as the perpetual victim of incompre-
hensible historical forces, through conspiracies, secret cabals, and hidden
centers (mostly organized by America). Indeed, modern Greek identity
could be defined only through victimhood, which seemed to have become
the main element in recent historical experience. Such representation was
not referring to any specific individual: these films (we can even add many
historical documentaries) depicted a collective victimhood as the result of a
collective failure and defeat. Postwar identity, therefore, was defined as lack
and privation, loss and shrinkage—an identity totally different from the one
constructed by the great narrative directors of the 50s and 60s.
Indeed, Papandreou’s overcompensating and histrionic rhetoric
indicated a profound inferiority complex which ultimately led to a denial
of existing realities and the numbing of creative imagination. The general
atmosphere in most films was of melancholia and mourning, in the purest
Freudian sense. The gradual disenchantment with the socialist project of
“change” established mourning as a continuous “work” defining the social
imaginary and its representations and further consolidating itself to the end
of the decade. The content of movies like Stone Years, The Descent of the 9,
Voyage to Cythera, Rebetiko, Rosa, and many others, was that of a profound
grief for something lost, and might be articulated in the terms of Jacques
Derrida as “a work working at its own unproductivity.”10 In fact, most films,
especially after 1985, simply abandoned all communicable networks and
reverted to introspective “closed” forms that deprived them of all social
function and ultimately of the audiences themselves.
A Poet’s Interlude: Stavros Tornes

1985 also marked the most important cinematic work by one of the most
unexpected and most paradoxical film-makers of the country, Stavros
Tornes. In his short life (1932–1988), Tornes produced some of the most
challenging movies of Greek cinema. He started by depicting a minority
group, the Romas, in Balamos (1982) and used their own language without
translation in order to question the singular aesthetics of a “national cinema.”
In the Roma language “Balamos” is the eternal wanderer, and in this film,
a dreamer searches for a horse through the realms of vision, hallucination,
and fantasy.
Tornes made only three more movies. The first, Karkalou (1984), is a
stunning visual extravaganza of surrealist cinema. Danillo Trelles (1985) is
a suggestively nonsensical drama. With the pun in its title (trelles means
“insanities”), it is a deranged comedy about the missing codes for common
meaning. “Where is Danillo Trelles?” asks Tornes, trying to “localize” the

mysterium tremendum. “Why are they looking for him in the mountains of
Epirus? Why do Roberto and Pupo use a rooster to entrap the Fox-Man? What
is the relationship between the African Shaman Deedee and the Eleusinian
Mysteries? What hope does the English blues player Bee have of finding the
Andalusian music of Danilo Trelles? . . . Where can Danillo Trelles be found?”
The comedy was a string of unrelated snapshots, so it would be totally wrong
to attempt an explanation of their associations and possible symbolism.
Finally, he released his extraordinary parable A Heron from Germany (Enas
Erodios apo tin Germania, 1987) in which he made concessions to narrative
while maintaining a hypnotic and almost transcendental visual iconography,
in one of the most haunting masterpieces of experimental cinema.
In all his movies, Tornes explores the secret histories of Greek society,
the groups without voice and representation, and which are lost in a homoge-
neous social ideology. His visual idiom is subversive, based on minimal
script while the main protagonist before his camera is the human body
as an archetypal cipher, an ideogram, inscribed within an imaginary yet
sensual landscape. His films celebrate embodied time in all its uncontrollable
euphoria and existential sadness. He declared:
Cinema is the eternal apology of Being. Cinema is a Society reproduced
under one condition: by letting the Cosmic Being emerge under the
forms of reason . . . Cinema is the Promise-Threat: the return of the
Inconceivable, the Audacity of the Unpredictable.11
He never cared at all for commercial success, although his films were moder-
ately successful.
Tornes explored a pagan spirituality expressed through warm colors,
the worship of community and sensual choreography—creating a cinematic
Stavros Tornes, Balamos (1982). Courtesy, Stavros Tornes.

Credit: DVD
mix that cannot be easily described or classified. Tornes’ movies, despite

their flaws and excesses, constitute a complete oeuvre, similar to that by the
other lonely auteur, Takis Kanellopoulos, and which can placed next to Maya
Deren’s and even the musical iconographies of Gregory J. Markopoulos and
the insane humor of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Towards the Bankruptcy of an Era: 1986–1991

It was increasingly obvious by the mid-1980s that one of the emerging
realities was a profound distrust of the Socialist Government and its ideology.
As we have seen, the failure of the Socialist Party to fulfill its promises and
reform society by responding to the challenges of modernization, led to a
period of intense disillusionment and disenchantment with politics and all
visions of collective renewal. This soon led to a generalized crisis which was
manifested on all levels of petit-bourgeois life: family values, masculinity,
religious authority, and, of course, the legitimacy of the state.
Greek cinema seemed to enter then its postcolonial phase as it began
to cater for the needs of specific social groups, avoiding the commodified
images of “Greece” as a singular unity that had dominated international
and national representations after Zorba the Greek. National stereotypes
seemed to have imploded and new iconographic possibilities emerged which
were explored in all directions and genres. One could claim that in the 80s,
generic lines simply vanished and allowed hybrid forms of representation to
emerge. Together with this, the movement of New Greek Cinema became
obsolete, since the images, representations, and patterns of power criticized
by its advocates became relics of the past. (Or indeed because most of its
representatives had become members of the ruling bureaucracy distrib-
uting funding and positions.) After 1985, a period of limbo was entered,
which ended almost ten years later with the emergence of a new cinematic
movement with new heroes and stories and with the emergence of new
technologies that were to democratize production and distribution.
However something unexpected happened between 1985 and 1995
which accelerated the repudiation of the past. On New Years’ Eve 1983,
with his usual narcissistic rhetoric of “healing the wounds of the Civil War,”
Prime Minister Papandreou announced the unconditional repatriation of
all political refugees living in Eastern European countries. Thousands of
people from remote Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, Abkhazia, Georgia,
and Armenia, and from Central European countries, such as Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, were given permission to return if
they wished to.
Their numbers were completely unpredicted: 200,000 people were
estimated to have been living behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, over a period
of four years, their numbers swelled and a serious change took place in
the social structure of the country. The “repatriated” Greeks were given tax
deductions and hefty financial assistance mostly in the form of cash. They
were also given incentives to build houses in designated areas as satellite
villages around cities like Athens and Thessalonica, or other areas in Thrace
and Macedonia. But the infrastructure was not prepared to receive such an
influx of people at once. The lack of effective infrastructure combined with
the endemic corruption of Greek bureaucracy transformed good intentions
into a logistical and social nightmare. Soon, the inadequacy created a new
underclass of outsiders, some of whom could not speak the language, and
many of whom didn’t know how capitalism worked and didn’t understand
the modus operandi of the Greek state.
Unexpectedly, it also created another problem which became a
nightmare for the state and its ideologues. According to the laws of 1983
and 1985, the political refugees had to be given back their lost property and
assets; but who could be easily be classified as “Greek” among them? As it
was claimed in 1989, if the law was to be applied to all there was the danger
of “allowing into the country non-native minorities (allogenon meiotiton)”
meaning Slav-Macedonians who had escaped from Yugoslavia. This caused
considerable identity-anxiety, a psychological condition to which the Greek
state has always reacted badly and wrongly (as is always the case when “evil”
foreigners question the continuity between ancient and modern Greeks!).
Soon the designated areas became ghettos that sheltered crime, smuggling,
and prostitution, as the newcomers showed a marked resistance to all attempts
at assimilation. At the same time, mainstream society, feeling stressed and
threatened, started to react to such “foreigners” and the oriental presence
among them, which inevitably stressed the eastern and non-occidental
elements in popular culture (in music in particular). Within ten years, repat-
riates became so well established that they found voice and representation in
the mainstream of Greek society. As Ferdinand Braudel concluded, “demog-
raphy is destiny,” and this sudden change in demography was understood by
many people as indicating a deep transformation in the self-perception and
the self-representation of contemporary Greek experience.
Furthermore, during 1986 and 1987, an attempt at rapprochement
with Turkey took place, and the Greek government, sensitive to issues
relating to Greek minorities in other countries, discovered that there were
certain invisible minorities within its own territory. First, there was the
Turkish, or Muslim, minority in Thrace. Second, were the Macedonians, or
Slav-Macedonians, a group which was going to cause considerable anxiety
to the Greek public by claiming ownership of none other than Alexander
the Great, a popular Greek hero for centuries. For the first time, the idea of
a homogeneous national territory was questioned, and Greek society—so
conditioned by official education into identifying nation and state territory—
began to experience a cultural and political panic which was magnified by
the generation of reporters who became journalists on the basis of their high
school certificates.
The panic was expressed not simply in the rise of isolationist nation-
alism—masterfully manipulated by the socialists who were leading the
economy to bankruptcy—but also in the rise of the Orthodox Church as
a major cultural and political presence. On most occasions, Orthodoxy
was transformed into Orthodoxism, a peculiar melange of nationalized
religious ideology, which saw the Eastern Church as under relentless attack
from underground conspiracies, perfidious allies, and sinister cabals—
organized by evil Catholics, colonialist Protestants, and the ubiquitous Jews.
Secular forces were never very strong in Greece. The state and the church
remained in close alliance in their struggles to defend the nation against the
communist threat and other numberless enemies.
Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church never developed an intellectual
discourse capable of holding a dialogue on the questions of modernity (in
the way that the Catholic Church was forced to with the Second Vatican
Council). Isolated into a Byzantine self-declared “liturgical spirituality,” it
ignored history and the historical adventures of the community, supporting
the prevailing political ideology of the Greek state, of anti-communism, but
in more general terms, of anti-modernism. The failure of politics in the 1980s
gave rise to religious belief as the inalienable “minimal self ” who remained
untouched by the challenges of modernity and the disenchantment of social
engagement—especially when “moral” enemies appeared like the rise of
sexual liberation in the mid-80s, linked with the AIDS epidemic.
Between 1985 and 1989, around 35 films on saints and martyrs of
faith were made by Elpis Films. One of them, by Yorgos Hondrokostas,
Family as the Protector Against AIDS (I Oikogeneia Frouros kata tou AIDS,
1986), shows the political agenda of its producers. Another, by Kostas
Hatzikostas, Universal Government (Pagosmia Kivernisi, 1985), was about
the global conspiracy to convert Greek Orthodoxy to other faiths, in this
case Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the irreparable damage this caused to the
family, the individual, and, of course, to the motherland. These films were
never successful commercially but their sheer number within a few years
indicates a wider cultural problem also reflected in mainstream art films.
1986–1994: The Limbo Years

Many films of this period are situated within the context of cultural and
identity wars that created a tense atmosphere of crisis in Greek society. The
crisis had begun to dismantle all accepted genres and styles. Moreover, films
were screened in virtually empty theaters. In 1986, more Greeks watched
Top Gun, Platoon, and Crocodile Dundee than any Greek films. Theo
Angelopoulos called 1986 “the zero-year of cinematography in Greece!”
After 1986, Greek cinema seemed to have totally collapsed. All films
were produced by the Greek Film Center, bound by the clientelistic policies
of the Socialist Party. The official ideology declared that “democratic forces”
had to win the war against the reactionary ideas of the conservatives,
the “accursed right-wing party” (eparatos dexia), as the prime minister
announced through the state-controlled media. After four years of wrangling
between unions and various ministries, Melina Mercouri brought the new
legislation to parliament.
After the legislation was passed in 1986 (revised in 1988), the problem
of establishing “genuine” criteria for funding became one of the main reasons
for factional rivalry, personal squabbling, and generalized conformism. Very
few independent productions were made, and most of those were either
experimental or short films. But even with funding, the Greek Film Center
did not have the appropriate mechanisms for promotion and distribution
of its own films. Even after establishing its own international distribution
agency, Hellas Films, in 1984, the response was minimal. Many local films
were sent to international or local festivals, but very few could find their way
to ordinary venues. Max T. Roman observed:
The Greek Film Center was hurt by a distrust of private initiative and help,
so that those in charge of GFC, trying to carry out Mercouri’s brilliant
ideas for a strong Greek cinema, pointedly snubbed all private investment
or co-production proposals (some did not even want to see the films sold
to the United States), and withdrew into a cocoon, eventually isolating the
films that were made from the larger public.12
With very few exceptions, the years between 1986 and 1994 were the most
insular in the history of Greek cinema. Good films were made, and some
superb experiments with the medium appeared, but the audience was lost,
and the communal socializing experience of going to the cinema became a
memory. People went to the movies only when there was nothing “good”
(reality shows, games or soaps) on television. By the end of the decade,
private television channels were established which challenged the state’s
monopoly of the airwaves. The proliferation of these channels took more and
more people away from cinemas and essentially isolated the industry from
the wider community.
Although the testimony of the box office is not the only sufficient
argument for the appeal of a movie, many movies produced by previously
successful film-makers were commercial failures. In 1985 and 1986, the great
legend of the old commercial cinema Alekos Sakellarios released his last
movie, with the star of the 60s, Rena Vlahopoulou, but the film failed even to
be noticed. Dalianidis also produced his charming comedy for home video,
Come In, Give Us a Kiss, You are Done (Peraste, Filiste, Teleiosate)—another
colossal failure. Both represented the return of “zombie” cinema, totally
disconnected from the new audience. It seemed as if the audience was lost
for Old and New Greek Cinema alike.
A significant experiment with the medium must be mentioned. Kostas
Sfikas’ Allegory (1986) was a visual extravaganza in a highly stylized,
one-dimensional yet cubist, Byzantine-like landscape. The film explored
the ways in which power creates its own mystique and imposes it on its
subjects. The story emerged on two levels of articulation: through a moving
eye and over a world spinning like a wheel. Both classical and biblical refer-
ences make this polychromatic frenzy a strange and alluring commentary
on the desire for freedom and individuality. Sfikas made three more films:
The Prophetic Bird of Paul Klee’s Sorrows (1995), The Enigmatic Mr Jules
Verne-Nemo-Allegory II (2002), and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2007),
constructing an anti-representational space for cinematic language, taking
film-making back to the wildest experiments of Eisenstein. Together with
Stavros Tornes and Dimos Theos he constituted a challenging counter-
cinema tradition which deserves more attention and study.
Pavlos Tasios released his psychological comedy of manners Knock Out
in 1986. It added nothing to his previous works—the theme of friendship
which could have been explored from a moral perspective was totally lost. Yet
the film did include a strange new element: a sense of humor and self-irony
that greatly enriched Tasios’ visual style. Also in 1986, Frida Liappa’s It was
a Quiet Death (Itan Enas Isihos Thanatos) depicted existential impasse and
personal loss in an opaque and rather impenetrable style. Dimitris Makris’
Shaven Heads (Oi Kekarmenoi) was an emotional and sensitive exploration
of how army service influenced the lives of four friends from different social
classes. Dimitris Panayotatos’ first feature film, Night with Silena (Nihta me
tin Silena), was another existential quest along the blurred borders between
illusion and reality, and an attempt to Hellenise cinéma du look.
An interesting take on loneliness and isolation when fantasy and reality
collide was presented in Stavros Tsiolis’ Regarding Vassilis (Shetika me ton
Vassili). The film was an urban road-movie, with amateur actors and only a
provisional script, which created an atmosphere of experimental strangeness
and impermanence.
Two films of the year seemed to belong to another era: Good Homeland,
Comrade (Kali patrida, Sintrofe) by Lefteris Xanthopoulos about Greek
refugees in Hungary, and Caravan Serai by Tasos Psarras, a period film about
refugees during the Civil War. Despite their good intentions, and decent
scripts, both films seemed to tell stories that no one was interested in any
more, except the professional ideologues of the party establishment.
It would be an oversight not to mention the entrancing visual exper-
iment by Dimos Avdeliodis, especially in The Tree We Wounded (To Dentro
Pou Pligoname), which established a cinematic form of folk opera, with
music and image working together to represent the elemental beauty of
Kostas Sfikas, Allegory (1986). Greek Film Archive

Collection.
Dimos Avdeliodis, The Tree We Wounded (1986). Greek Film

Center Collection.
ordinary pre-modern life—in some ways reminiscent of Markopoulos’

Serenity (1958) with its analogous use of classical music, while making
intellectual gestures to Stavros Tornes’ visual language. It was based on a
succession of visual episodes, mostly without dialogue, which recreated the
innocent gaze of a lost childhood—a primordial innocence that seems to
have become the main quest of Abdeliodis’ camera over the years.
In the same year, Theo Angelopoulos released his strangest and perhaps
weakest film, The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos), with Marcello Mastroianni,
Serge Regiani, and the young Nadia Mourouzi. This film too is about
existential loneliness, ideological disenchantment, and psychological loss.
Spyros, a teacher, takes his honey bees around Greece “following the
pathways of Spring.” On his travels, he meets a young girl who rekindles
in him his older self and the lost dreams of his youth. In despair, he will let
himself be killed by the stings of his bees while tapping on the ground the
old coded messages from his imprisonment after the Civil War.
It was a strange film, a somewhat awkward attempt to explore psycho-

logical trauma and loss that leaves everything in abeyance. The script was
rather weak, and Marcello Mastrogianni was not really there. On the other
hand, it inaugurated a mesmerizing dialogue between the camera and
the landscape, between photography and the natural elements. The long,
slow takes seem to capture natural phenomena as monumental events
in a succession of still photographs, as though the camera wants to stop
the flow of time. Great cinematography by Yorgos Arvanitis and ecstatic
music by Eleni Karaindrou enhance the feeling of emptiness and absence
that permeates the story. Angelopoulos himself saw this film as a direct
reference to the missed “appointment with history” that Greek society was
experiencing at the time: it was a missed opportunity that led to what he
considered “the silence of history.” Because of this silence, he claimed:
. . . we are all trying to find answers by digging into ourselves, for it is
terribly difficult to live in silence. When there is no historical development,
one is tempted to focus on oneself, in the context of this crisis that has
interrupted historical continuity. For our generation, having taken an
active part in keeping this continuity alive, this is very sad, the kind of
disappointment that is very difficult to express.”13
The film falters in construction and characterization as its auteur oscillates

between an existentialist cinema and one of collective destiny. It is a transi-
tional film, linking his previous work to the next—Landscape in the Mist
(1989)—and creating the iconography of the new stories that were to occupy
him after such disenchantment with politics.
The film of the year—indeed one of the very best films of the post-
dictatorship period—was made by the expatriate Nico Papatakis, who
returned for the second time to make his greatest cinematic achievement,
The Photograph (I Fotografia). After making his controversial Gloria Mundi
(1975) in France, Papatakis directed with visual starkness and stylistic
simplicity one of the most ambiguous and tragic Greek films. The storyline
was simple. During the dictatorship, a young man—performed with infec-
tious asthmatic angst by Aris Retsos—escapes to Paris where he finds
protection with a distant relative trading in furs—played with incredible
calm and elusiveness by Hristos Tsangas. He carries with him the photo-
graph of a popular singer which he presents as a picture of his sister. His
protector falls in love with the girl in the photograph and a vicious circle
of deception and lies begins. When they decide to go back to Greece so the
man can marry the sister, the young man kills him before they reach the
remote village.
This psychological thriller was structured around the uncontrollable
escalation of an initially innocent lie. As things get out of control, both men
sink into their own fantasy worlds, depending more and more on each other
for reinforcement. The film has been read as a visual translation of the Hegelian
Master-Slave dialectic, since the young man depends on the older and thus
has to satisfy his desires in order to maintain his position while making the
master dependent on him. Despite the heterosexual story, there is a strong
undercurrent of homoeroticism, expressed superbly by Papatakis in the routine
of common meals and the deflected verbal expression in letters supposedly
written by the sister. Even behind that, the men’s inability to communicate is
fatal. As Chrysanthi Sotiropoulou observes, “Both heroes pay the price for the
absence of human contact. Imprisoned within their dreams, they are unable to
experience their own friendship. A friendship which is real and significant.”14
The colors are bland and icy, the dialogue ambiguous and evasive, the
settings, especially in Paris, claustrophobic and alienating. The last scene as the
two men drive through mountainous roads towards the village is something
between Hitchcock and Melville. At the very end, the young man turns to the
camera, and, like the moral conclusion of a tragedy, tells his viewers:
“I killed him because I loved him . . . Yerasimos Tzivas is gone, expecting
everything from happiness; and before realizing it through a horrible
death. May my action inspire people to think of all those who around the
world abandon their country searching for destinies that do not belong
to them, looking for them persistently, and without ever succeeding in
achieving them.”
This was a profound philosophical meditation on the destiny of the diasporic

people who cling onto elusive memories from the past while experiencing
reality through reflections and substitutes, unable to deal with the challenges
of the present.
At the same time, the film delved with brutal honesty into the character
of the Greek “common man” as he finds himself unable to deal with historical
Nikos Papatakis, The Photograph (1986). Courtesy, Nikos Papatakis. Greek

Film Center Collection.
pressures, reverting to a fantasy world full of displaced emotions and

repressed feelings. Patatakis’ film avoided idealization, auterism and folklore,
and depicted with disarming psychological depth the silent tragedies in a
society devoid of freedom and therefore moral resistances.
1987 also showed a meagre production of about 30 films (features and
shorts). Most of them were again produced by the Greek Film Center which
seemed simply to have displaced other producers. A number of interesting
films were made in various genres with some good directors from the past
exploring new directions, although most had minimal commercial success.
Nikos Nikolaidis released his science-fiction post-apocalyptic thriller
Morning Patrol (Proini Peripolos) which introduced a new iconography to his
work. The film had an elaborate yet simple script, superb cinematography by
Dinos Katsouridis and an odd score by Yorgos Hatzinasios. It was a film of
strongly contrasting moods, as a lonely woman wanders through the ruins
of a destroyed city where she will meet a lonely man in despair, eventually
finding with him the ultimate link between love and death, a theme that
Nikolaidis would explore in his later films.
Dimos Theos produced a historical biography of a resistance hero from
the Ottoman period in his epic Captain Meidanos, the Image of a Mythical
Fighter (Kapetan Meidanos, I Eikona enos Mithikou Oplarhigou). His film
seemed to rekindle attempts to revisit the past and reassessed the historical
experience of Greek people through effective storytelling with fast narrative
rhythms and suggestive photography.
Fotos Lambrinos’ Doxobus went even further back in history. Byzantium,
the period in which Greeks formed their contemporary identity, seems
otherwise absent from the cinematic tradition (with the exception of Yorgos
Skalenakis’ underrated Byzantine Rhapsody from 1968). Lambrinos’ film was
an unexpected experiment in the reconstruction of the heretical history of
late Byzantium during the Civil War of 1341. Lambrinos, an accomplished
theorist of cinema history, constructed one of the most interesting visual
hypotheses about the interpretation of the past. Through this low-budget
movie, he demonstrated that recreating the past was not simply a matter
of funding or special effects. As represented in its strange otherness, the
Byzantine period appeared as a totally alien space, a peculiar thrown into a
strange temporality, and was an apt parable for the disintegrating pseudo-
socialism of the country and of Eastern Europe. Lambrinos explored how
religion transformed people into irrational fanatics and hunted animals,
destroying in them all the forms of ethical considerations behind responsible
action.
On the other side of politics, Lakis Papastathis with his Theophilos
attempted a (somewhat uneven) depiction of “demotic temporality” in
Greek cinema based on the life of the most important naive painter of the
country. However, his project remained incomplete, as the film exuded a
sense of agrarian folkishness, melodramatic sentimentalism, and humorless

pre-modern nostalgia, which audiences found parochial and conceited. The
film looked little more than a succession of moving cartoons, without depth
or perspective, and with the actor Dimitris Katalifos performing almost
absent-mindedly.
In the same atmosphere belongs Terirem by Apostolos Doxiadis which
explored the predicament of a shadow theater player whose wife is mute
and suffering from cancer. Yet the attempt to visualize Christian Orthodox
religiosity, or spirituality, seemed somehow contrived and affected.
Unfortunately, there are no successful “religious films” in Greek cinema.
Christian religion has always been seen as a cultural tradition, as folklore
and ritualized customs and not in any way as the mysterium fascinans or
the mysterium tremendum in their epiphany through the mundane, trivial,
and ordinary.
Kostas Koutsomitis’ The Noose (O Kloios) dealt with the first airplane
hijacking in Greek history, when a group of communist youths took over
an airplane during the Civil War and escaped to Yugoslavia. The film,
based on actual events, was made as a good Hollywood thriller and was
successful at the box office. Kostas Vrettakos’ The Children of Helidonas (Ta
Paidia tis Helidonas) was another investigation into the impact of the Civil
War on the lives of ordinary people over many decades, achieved mostly
by great performances, especially from the star of old Greek cinema, Mairi
Hronopoulou.
Yorgos Kantacouzinos’ Absences (Apousies) was a period piece about
the lives of three daughters after the 1922 Catastrophe, each one following
a different path, as their class lost its social prestige and became their own
prison. Together with the story of the three girls, so consummately photo-
graphed by Aristeidis Karydis-Fuchs, Kantacouzinos explored the changing
realities in family dynamics with the image of a prodigal father squandering
all prestige through a meticulous reconstruction of the past. Nikos Veryitsis’
The Archangel of Passion (O Arhangelos tou Pathous) explored the need
for a transforming passion in a world of lost ideals and frustrated desires.
Finally, Vassilis Vafeas’ 120 Decibels (120 Desimpel) also delved into the lost
connections within the organic unity offered by common ideals and shared
experiences, as friends and relatives gathered around a wounded man in a
hospital. This simple story expressed a game of memories and lost ties that
offered a sense of common direction and destiny.
In the next year, 1988, even fewer films were made—a total of 20—as
television channels started multiplying, some of them screening popular
comedies and Mexican, Brazilian, and American soaps. Pandelis Voulgaris’
depiction of a football player, The Shirt With No 9 (I Fanella me to Ennia),
was one of his least successful works. Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ The Woman
Who Saw Dreams (I Ginaika pou Evlepe ta Oneira) was an imaginative
attempt to explore the dreamworld of a married couple in crisis. Stavros

Tsiolis’ Invincible Lovers (Akatanikitoi Erastes) was a deeply humanistic and
compassionate film about a young boy who escaped his village and met with
a girl who later disappeared. The scene of his return to the village, defeated
and confused, is probably one of the most poignant moments in Greek
cinema.
Yorgos Karipidis’ In the Shadow of Fear (Stin Skia tou Fovou) was a
gripping film noir, full of psychological complexities and dramatic conflicts,
and great cinematography and music. Dionysis Grigoratos’ The Polk Case
(O Fakellos Polk ston Aera) revisited the investigation into the murder of
American journalist George Polk during the Civil War—it was the most
commercially successful film of the year.
Yorgos Korras and Hristos Voupouras released their underrated The
Deserter (O Lipotaktis) which explored the sexual dynamics of the Greek
countryside, as the protagonist (played with reserve by Hristos Mainas), a
homosexual and an outsider, escapes Athens to find refuge in a remote village.
There he is attracted to a virile and vulgar macho man who had deserted the
army and lives by exploiting men and women through his sexual favors. The
film explored the undercurrents of convention, hypocrisy, drug addiction,
and violence hidden in relations in which people are unable to communicate
feelings and live in the despair of existential self-imprisonment. The linear
narrative and the genuine simplicity in representing the realities of the Greek
countryside were enhanced by Eleni Karaindrou’s discreet music. Within an
era of inane comedies and self-indulgent auteurism, this was a gem of a film
which deserves a closer look.
Special mention must be made of Dimitris Kollatos’ Life with Alkis (I
Zoi me ton Alki), a touching and cathartic autobiographical “essay-film”
about the life of a father with an autistic child. The film reveals the semiotic
confusion in the communication between autistic children and their parents,
while mapping out the strange codes and unexpected signs that a father who
loves his child invents in order to communicate with him in the loneliness
of autism.
However, the film of the year came again from Theo Angelopoulos.
Landscape in the Mist (Topio stin Omihli) was one of the most visually
hypnotic, stylistically challenging, and philosophically dense films ever
made in Greece; a metaphysical road movie, as two children leave their
shadowy mother and get a train to Germany with the hope that there they
will find their absent father. However there is no father, no destination, no
way out of the shadowy land of an invisible mother. The children escape to
nowhere. In the final scene, a lonely tree appears surrounded by mist, and
nothing else. It is one of the most ambiguous endings in Greek cinema: is
this the tree in the garden of Eden or the luminous tree at the end of Andrey
Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice?
Theo Angelopoulos, Landscape in the Mist (1988). Courtesy,

The story can have many interpretations, as the film is punctuated by

religious symbols and Christian and classical references. It can be seen as
a fairy tale or a parable, about the quest for origins, or the journey to the
ultimate home of humanity.
Angelopoulos filmed his personal book of miracles and wonders with a
slow but steady narrative, a tense psychological atmosphere, and unexpected
“epiphanies”: a white horse running loose in an empty city, snow falling in
absence of clouds, staircases going upwards without end, a huge marble
hand pointing at the children, and a seductive young man who takes them
into the underworld of dark discos, brightly lit national highways, and easy
pleasures. Yorgos Arvanitis’ cinematography created incredible contrasts of
light and darkness, sensitively exploring the human face and the deep world
of human eyes with curiosity and compassion. Eleni Karaindrou’s music
almost de-realizes the action, offering a sublimating depth to the script.
From the 20 movies produced in 1989, only a few are still of interest.
Hristos Vakalopoulos’ Olga Robarts was a strange film about a female serial
killer and the efforts of a curious burglar to expose her identity. The film was
a fascinating thriller with great touches of humor and wit. Patris Vivankos’
Xenia was about the escape, connection, and destiny of a woman from
Greece and a man from France who both find refuge in Andalusia. The
anxiety for communication and yet the fear of personal exposure makes this
first feature by Vivankos an interesting example of existentialist cinema.
Vassilis Vafeas’ The Red Daisy (I Kokkini Margarita) was the story of
a middle-aged man being seduced to his demise by a young woman. It is
a modern version of von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), but without
any risks with the medium or the story. Finally, Costas Ferris’ Oh Babylon
was a surrealist rewriting of Euripides’ Bacchae, as the sacrificial victim
celebrates his birthday by inviting the most improbable and unlikely
people. The film showed the best and worst in Ferris’ cinematic art: the
rampant imagination that remakes reality into a spectacular extravaganza
around the timelessness of the unconscious, and, at the same time, the
aesthetics of excess that overwhelm and overpower the viewer with an
oblique personal mythology.
Next year, only 16 feature films were released due to immense political
unrest, fiscal problems, and the continuing bickering within the main
production company, the Greek Film Center. Soon, the change in government
would also mean a change in the director of the Center—something that led
to major confrontations with unions and directors alike.
New and old themes seemed to dominate the very meagre and uneven
production in 1990. Yorgos Tsemperopoulos’ So Long (Ante Geia) was a
decent melodrama with subtle music by Manos Hatzidakis and great perfor-
mances by the veteran comedian Kaiti Pananika and the handsome youth
Alkis Kourkoulos, in a love story between a middle-aged married woman
and a younger man. Dimitris Panayiotatos’ Lovers in the Machine of Time
(Erastes stin Mihani tou Hronou) was an interesting fantasy about different
timelines and confusion of parallel moments in the personal history of
a couple. The film received a special prize at the Avoriaz International
Fantastic Film Festival and its technical effects show the rise of new technol-
ogies in the film production.
Stavros Tsiolis’ Love Under the Date Tree (Erotas stin Hourmadia) was
a funny film about two friends who try to find a date tree in the middle of
Greece as proof of the fidelity or infidelity of their lovers. Vassiliki Iliopoulou’s
first feature film The Passage (Perasma) was an impressive thriller about two
friends who return from the army. One of them is killed in a brawl with a
policeman, and the other kills his friend’s murderer. His attempt to escape
from the country, with the help of a female truck driver, makes this chase
movie a fascinating thriller with lots of wit and humor. Another first feature
film, by Tasos Boulmetis, Dream Factory (Biotehnia Oneiron), explored a
futuristic city in which people have lost the gift of dreams and where they
have to buy their own dreams through invisible and omnipotent agencies.
The film was atmospheric and tense and used a fast, gripping narrative.
Dimos Avdeliodis continued with The Victory of Samothrace (I Niki tis
Samothrakis), a film in which his poetic imagination made many conces-
sions to narrative realism. The film was rather uneven but showcased
Avdeliodis’ ability to create a film without protagonists and characters. It
was also distinct for its peculiar humor, based on movement and expression
more than conversation, and thus reminiscent of silent films, such as those
of Charlie Chaplin and even Commedia dell’arte. Elements of the showdown
puppet theatre of Karagiozis can also be detected, emphasizing the surreal
character of the story. Classical music transforms the Athenian landscape
into a peculiar topos of anachronistic juxtapositions.
However, the strangest and most controversial film of the year, and
probably of the whole of the 90s, was Nikos Nikolaidis’ Singapore Sling: the
Man Who Loved a Corpse (Singapore Sling: o Anthropos pou Agapise ena
Ptoma). The film signaled a new direction in Nikolaidis’ film-making, as
now sex, fetishism, sado-masochistic orgies, and madness were converging
in a rather precarious way which sometimes veers off to the explicitly
pornographic. A lonely private detective is looking for a woman who had
disappeared four years earlier. In the dark, he sees two women, an insane
mother and her nymphomaniac daughter, try to bury a man alive. The
women take him prisoner and inflict on him sexual torture, rape, and
endless humiliation without any hope of escape. The film would have
imploded within its own imagery but is saved by its quirky black humor,
magnificent cinematography by Aris Stavros and the hilariously “insane”
acting of the female leads, Meredith Harold and Michelle Valley.
Nikolaidis created a palimpsest of cinematic references, from Gene
Tierny to Sylvia Kristel, from Otto Preminger to Marco Ferreri, from
Nagisa Oshima to Louis Buñuel, with underlying philosophical discourses
on eroticism, necrophilia, perversion, and the “the divine filth” by Georges
Bataille, and with the sublime immorality of the Marquis de Sade. It was a
shocking film that indicated an existential and probably cinematic impasse,
a visual “liminal experience” exposing sexual violence and corporeal humili-
ation in an ambiguous way, as though Nikolaidis was deeply fascinated and
attracted to the dark, asocial, and animalistic tendencies of the unconscious.
Towards a Transnational Greek Cinema: 1991–1995

The impasse was not just a personal affair for one of the most euphoric repre-
sentatives of the defunct New Greek Cinema. The inability of the socialists
to govern, the extensive corruption of the state apparatuses, and the general
political instability led to two elections, in June and November 1989, which
resulted in hung parliaments. An atmosphere of real or rumored scandals
was corroding civil and political order.
The new decade opened with this profound crisis in Greek society,
as finally a new conservative government, under the leadership of the
1965 “apostate,” Constantine Mitsotakis, won the April 1990 election with
a one-seat majority. In its agenda of political reform based on economic
rationalism, it struggled hard to curb the influence of unions, privatize
crucial industries, and bring the culprits of past financial scandals to justice
through the so-called “catharsis.” Unfortunately, the reforms started from
the last point, which immediately gave the impression of a political witch-
hunt. Of course, since some conservatives were themselves involved in such
shady activities, the prosecution was limited to the former prime minister
Andreas Papandreou and some key ministers, with tragic results: one died
of a heart attack in front of the television cameras; while Papandreou, with

his usual respect for legality and democratic institutions, ignored the court
summons—he was finally acquitted by one vote.
Meanwhile, seeing the demoralizing impasse in production, the Greek
Film Center introduced a new program of funding called the “New Gaze”
(Nea Matia), which was available to new directors with fresh ideas for exper-
imental projects. Through this scheme, some of the most important new
directors would make their debuts after 1993. At the same time, multiplex
cinemas made their first appearance in the country. Local municipalities,
in their fight against the dominance of television, started to fund their own
cinema theaters, screening mostly art house films, organizing retrospectives,
and convening public discussions on the future of local cinema.
A total of 14 movies were made in 1991. Nikos Kornelios’ Equinox
(Isimeria), Takis Spetsiotis’ Ravens (Korakia), and Dimitris Giatzouzakis’ St
Fanourios’ Cake (Fanouropita) expressed with humor and levity the emerging
tendencies, as the final farewell to political cinema and the mythologized
past. Special mention must be made of a short film by Alexis Bistikas, The
Necktie (I Gravata) about a romance between two men from Greece and
Britain, with the tie being the symbol of their union and separation. Tassos
Psarras made the first serious film about AIDS with The Other Aspect (I Alli
Opsi), which unfortunately, despite its honesty and sincerity, ended with
a moralistic didacticism about family values and monogamy, ignoring the
complexities of the disease as a social phenomenon.
The strangely impressionist movie Two Suns in the Sky (Dio Ilioi
ston Ourano) by Yorgos Stampoulopoulos must be mentioned too for its
ambivalent depiction of the Orthodox Church in its struggle to destroy the
last remnants of pagan theater in early Byzantium. The film was also an
exercise in historical reconstruction, depicting a collision of mentalities and
world views. Stampoulopoulos recreated a period of historical transition
by employing a visual language of expressionistic qualities and theatrical
settings that brought to life the era and its tense atmosphere. Pandelis
Voulgaris’ The Quiet Days of August (Isihes Meres tou Augoustou) was a
beautiful, introspective, and sensitive meditation on loneliness, old age, and
friendship. It was structured around three stories, a style which seems to
suit best his directorial command. Frida Liappa’s The Year of the Heatwave
(I Hronia tis Megalis Zestis) was a thoughtful and gentle exploration of
existential solitude, as an actual heatwave becomes the external symbol for
internal silence and emotional numbness. Liappa died shortly after the film’s
release, abruptly ending a career with several reflective films from an existen-
tialist tradition, which also deserve more attention.
Unfortunately, the same fate awaited another important female director,
Tonia Marketaki (1945–1994), who, although among the early representa-
tives of the New Greek Cinema in the 70s, became more interested in complex
and ambitious films. The culmination of her work before her untimely death
was her dreamlike Crystal Nights (Kristallinies Nihtes). The film was a bold,
Borgesian attempt to recapture time lost, through mystical ceremonies,
arcane reincarnations, and resurrected souls. Set in Thessaloniki’s populous
Jewish community before the Shoah, it opened with a love affair between
a gentile woman and a young Jewish man. The death of the man leads the
woman to bring back his soul, but now only as a lifeless and selfish zombie.
The narrative is extended in time to explore what happened after the war and
ends with a suggestive reflection on the nature of love and life. Despite the
improbabilities of the script and the impenetrable esoteric character of its
symbols, Marketaki’s final film was a visually mesmerizing experience, full
of sensitivity and fragility, and touching on the most inhuman incidents of
recent history, with empathy, affection, and a sense of guilt for the victims,
their lost lives, and happiness. It was a film about lost innocence, and the
continual traumas of history, which can never be healed or atoned for.
Two further films from 1991 must also be included. Lefteris
Xanthopoulos’ The Fugitive (or, Master of the Shadows) (O Drapetis) was a
touching depiction of the life of a shadow theater player (Karagiozis) and
the fate of his art as it became obsolete by the rise of modernity in the form
of cinema. Thanassis Skroubelos’ Johnny Keln, My Lady (Tzonys Keln, Kiria
Mou) revisited the stories about brothels, pimps, and prostitutes from the old
Greek cinema of the 60s, exploring the communal bonds between under-
ground people.
In the same year, Angelopoulos released the most “prophetic” of his
movies, The Suspended Step of the Stork (To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou),
the first part of a trilogy exploring borders and divided people. As the
communist world collapsed and the borders that divided Greece from its
Balkan neighbors became irrelevant, Angelopoulos visited the concept of the
border and what it meant in the contemporary world. Marcello Mastroianni
and Jeanne Moreau find themselves again in a “sequel” to Antonioni’s La
Notte (1961) as they struggle to reconnect with each other as well as with the
history around them. Bridges, dividing lines, and interrupted roads express
the highly symbolic climate of the film, culminating in a silent wedding on
opposite sides of the border—one of the most startling and unsettling scenes
in the film.
The film was about the new forms of communication and interaction
between people who leave behind the divisions and conflicts of the old
world. It explored the new frontier of human development, by depicting the
interstitial realities in what Manuel Castells called “the space of flows.” In
the last scene of the film, technicians install wires like the notations of an
inaudible music score, transcending borders and divides, and ending the
dangerous realities of the collapsing nation state. Electronic networks of
communication demolish barriers against human interaction and mutual
Tonia Marketaki, Crystal Nights (1992) From the Greek Film Centre
Collection
Theo Angelopoulos, The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991).

understanding: new invisible grammars of communication emerge. This

optimistic ending was in stark contrast to the looming Balkan wars of the
early 90s.
Angelopoulos ended the movie with an ominous statement, however:
“If I stay still I am here. If I lift my foot I will be elsewhere,” as the main
character stands at the line that divides three countries.
The film was a magnificent meditation on the end of exclusivist self-
perception and self-justifying mythologies, and expressed the transition
from an introverted national culture to the new condition of transculturality
as the central mode of self-articulation and self-understanding.
Only 11 movies were released in 1992, a number indicating the looming
crisis of legitimate authority in the country together with intense squabbling
among film-makers as the new government started to implement a program
of economic rationalism. Among these films, Angeliki Antoniou’s Donousa
stands out as an honest effort to depict the mores of a closed traditional society
on a remote island, by exposing incest and sexual violence. With a good
script, the film depicts with austere realism the law of silence that undermines
communal bonds and human relations—and beyond that, it explores the

crisis within the nuclear family and its patriarchal structure. Stavros Tsiolis
and Hristos Vakalopoulos’ Please Women, Do Not Cry (Parakalo Ginaikes
Min Klaite) was a hilarious comedy of manners and mores as two fake
hagiographers, employed to renovate a church in a remote village, use the
opportunity to spy lustfully on naked women with their telescope. It was a
really funny film with very serious subtexts, and a biting social critique.
A powerful film of historical revisionism, Byron, the Ballad for a Demon
(Byron, i Mpalanta enos Daimonismenou), was made by Nikos Koundouros.
Irrespective of the negative reviews and its box office failure, this was a
superbly atmospheric film which encapsulated some of the recurring themes
of his work: the lonely individual, the hostile society, and the inability to find
common ground for communication. But nobody liked seeing the darling of
Romantic Philhellenism, the idealist who sacrificed his life so that “Greece
might be free again,” being depicted as a cynical beast, a lustful desperado,
and a raving sodomite. Koundouros’ Byron is angry, resentful, possessed by
animalistic lewdness and moral despair; all caused by his own inability to
find meaning in anything that he does: sex, revolution, poetry, or even in life
itself. The film was superbly photographed, in dark, ominous, and menacing
colors by Nikos Kavoukidis, while Manos Vakousis, an actor of comic roles
until then, presented a poet in a collapsing state of mind with empathy and
subtlety. During this period, Koundouros was indeed the only director who
resisted conformism and complacency; the only director who continued the
oppositional aesthetics of good Greek cinema, criticizing, subverting, and
debunking established myths, ideologies, and implied “truths.”
At the same time, Koundouros’ fellow traveller Michael Cacoyannis,
after years of silence, released his smug and pompous comedy Up, Down
and Sideways (Pano, Kato kai Plagios) with a good cast, headed by a
Nikos Koundouros, Byron, the Ballad for a Demon

(1992). Courtesy, Nikos Koundouros. Greek Film Center
Collection.
screaming Irene Papas. Nobody could believe that such an atrocious crime
against taste was committed by the great director of Stella. However, the
film was solid proof of the end of an era—and of a specific way of making
movies.
In 1993, 25 films were made, most of them funded by the Greek Film
Center. There are some interesting explorations of the emerging crisis in Greek
society. Nikos Grammatikos’ The Time of Assassins (I Epohi ton Dolofonon)
was a fascinating psychological thriller about contract killers, with a great
script, exciting music, and superb costumes. Kostas Aristopoulos’ Starry
Dome (Enastros Tholos) was an allegorical modern retelling of the story of
Antigone. The cinematography by Stamatis Yannoulis and the costumes
by Anastasia Arseni create a symbolic atmosphere of archetypal references
magnificently enhanced by the music of Berlioz, Mozart, and Cherubini.
Dimitris Kollatos’ independent production I Plucked a Red Rose for You
(Kokkino Trantafillo sou ekopsa) was a touching autobiographical meditation
on the suicide of the director’s wife and how he lived with his autistic son,
trying to regain lost time by watching the old films they had made together.
Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ I Dream of My Friends (Oneireuomai tous Filous
Mou) was an emotional exploration of the past life of a man, starting in
Berlin in 1965 and unfolding through time. Although the script was rather
too introspective, the outstanding performance in the lead role gave Lefteris
Vogiatzis firt prize at the International San Remo Festival.
Dinos Dimopoulos’ last film, The Little Dolphins of Amvrakikos (Ta
Delfinakia tou Amvrakikou) was a touching and optimistic take on human
relations, focused around the emotional rite of passage for three children,
photographed with gentle subtlety and warm intimacy by Walter Lassally’s
eye for Greek luminescence. It is one of the best films ever made about
children, and won major awards in Cairo, Vienna, Italy, and that of Best Film
in New England’s Children Film Festival in 1995.
Yannis Papadakis’ White Red (Aspro Kokkino) depicted the violent
dynamics of subcultural characters with passion and directness. Markos
Holevas’ Eyewitness (Autoptis Martis) explored with psychological sugges-
tiveness and narrative strength a strange series of murders that lead the
main character to a lethal confrontation with a homeless man. Patric
Vivankos’ Happy Life (Zoi Harisameni) was a fascinating exploration of the
relations between six middle-aged friends as they go searching for money
in Colombia. There, differences come to the surface and a “game” of mutual
extermination begins. Only one of them makes it back home.
From the overall production of 1993, however, three films stand out.
Alexis Bistikas’ The Dawn (To Harama) was a touching “popular” melodrama
about the career and personal life of two singers in a traditional singing
club. Their hopes, ambitions, and conflicts are superbly depicted in a film
which could have been made by Douglas Sirk, with catchy popular music
by Hristos Nikolopoulos and great performances by Stavros Zalmas and

Katerina Kouka.
Unfortunately, Bistikas (1964–1995) died of AIDS after this film, ending
a promising way of working in which the realism of setting and the styli-
zation of acting indicated a sophisticated aesthetic, yet still in embryonic
form.
Bistikas made a number of short films, one of them with Derek Jarman,
in which one can admire his cosmopolitan vision and radical realism against
the current aesthetics. His homosexual gaze, focusing on nuances, subtexts,
and hidden details, subverted accepted practices by infusing the main
story with sensual energy and explosive tension. He was one of the most
promising film-makers of the post-New Greek Cinema period, one who,
from within the aesthetics of British experimental underground cinema,
made films about low-class singers, barflies and ordinary commoners.
The film that received most awards in the year’s Thessaloniki Festival was
Pericles Hoursoglou’s Lefteris Dimakopoulos. It was the simple story of the
homecoming from Germany of a successful engineer. Back in the motherland,
he is reconnected with his old friends, and they relive their youth and recollect
their love affairs under the dictatorship. The film was an uncomplicated
narrative about loss and love, but it lacked the magic touch of imagination. It
indicated the strong cultural tendencies for an escapist return to a youth full
of promise and hope before all went wrong. Yet its simplicity is also its central
problem: the characters are lacking in depth and the story in scope.
The film that can be seen today as the forerunner and herald of a new
representational style in Greek cinema was Sotiris Goritsas’ From the Snow
(Apo to Hioni). It won a number of prestigious international awards (Pestoia
and Amien, as well as the award for best film by Fipresci, the International
Federation of Film Critics). The story concerned three Albanians who enter
Greece illegally and, after a cruel journey, reach Athens and struggle to
survive in the strange and inhospitable city. In their ultimate misery one falls
to his death from a building and the others return to Albania. Around this
story, Goritsas (b. 1955) explored the alienating invisible forms of capitalist
society, the bewilderment of the local middle class before such unexpected
strangers, and police brutality against defenseless and desperate people. As
Goritsas said to Petro Alexiou:
The subject of forced exile, the subject of the “foreigner” is, I think, closely
tied to modern Greek history. Only this time we’ve found ourselves on the
other side, not with the “foreigner,” but as the host to the “foreigner.” And
it appears that we’ve quickly forgotten our previous life, our past suffering,
our identity.15
The film becomes a hybrid between documentary and fiction, its actual
realities and imagined situations framed by stark and austere photography
by Stamatis Yannoulis. The only characters moved by the strangers are the
persecuted and the marginalized—Goritsas presented the stranger as a
domestic category: there were so many strangers in Greek society that the
newcomers only made exclusion policies obvious and visible.
The film explored the unknown back alleys of the Greek capital,
giving for the first time a clear image of the squalor and misery of many
homeless people, local or immigrant—and, at the same time, it opened
up the self-sufficient and self-referential forms that had dominated Greek
cinema since the early 1980s. A new “work of mourning” emerged then;
not for lost ideological certainties but for what was being perpetrated at
that very moment, with the indifference and collusion of normal citizens,
against hopeless, miserable and terrified people living in their midst. The
“opening-up” of form that Goritsas achieved inaugurated the process of a
cinematic renaissance full of dynamism and violence within the five years
that followed.
Seventeen feature films were made in 1994. The most successful, and
one of the most interesting films made after 1974, was the first feature film
by Antonis Kokkinos, End of an Era (Telos Epohis). Set in dictatorship-1969
at a school where students want to perform Ionesco, the main story revolves
around a new student who comes from the countryside to the big city. Here,
he confronts oppression, falls in love, and experiences rejection as rites of
passage to adulthood. The film, in black and white, was funny, subtle, and
sensitive. It resonated with the emotional memories of a whole generation
as it recreated with nostalgia and empathy the paradoxical era of the dicta-
torship, the confused era of their adolescence.
Three women directors released films that continued the traditions of
Liappa and Marketaki. Lagia Giourgiou’s House in the Countryside (Spiti
stin Exohi) was a riveting detective story about a writer who tries to write
Sotiris Goritsas, From the Snow (1993). Courtesy, Sotiris Goritsas. Greek
Film Center Collection.
his book as a couple is accused of killing his neighbor. He is fascinated by

their story, but as he unravels its mystery he helps the police in their search.
Katerina Vassilakou’s Jaguar (Iagouaros) was an enthralling psychological
exploration of the relations between two women—one having married
the other’s brother, who was executed by the Germans in 1944, and then
moving to Boston with her American lover. In their relationship, the secrets
of the past become painful reminders of an imagined happiness and unity.
Finally, Lukia Rikaki’s Quartet in Four Movements (Kouarteto se Tesseris
Kiniseis) was a powerful exploration of family dynamics as the ordered life
of a middle-class couple is destroyed by the entrance of a handsome and
ambitious musician.
Among other films Thodoros Marangos’ The Lunar Fugitive (O Drapetis
tou Feggariou) was a magical fairy tale based on folk stories and legends.
Dimitris Athanitis’ Goodbye Berlin (Antio Verolino) was a strange thriller
about the anxiety of a young director as he struggles to make his first film
but gets involved with the underworld and is assassinated. Special mention
is deserved by Takis Spyridakis’ The Garden of God (O Kipos tou Theou),
which depicted life in prison and the ways in which four youngsters struggle
to survive it. The brutal and monotonous life in prison was explored with
sincerity and empathy—the four inmates escape to the sea only to find a
tragic death. The film was both witty and bleak, a very atmospheric contem-
porary film noir with redeeming touches of humor.
Panos Karkanevatos’ Borderline (Metaihmio) was a big production with
international funding about two brothers, one of whom is considered lost
until the other starts searching for him. The film follows twists and turns by
showing the changes on his life and psychology, until the ultimate moment
of recognition. A similar story of a quest for true identity was explored in
Nikos Typaldos’ Terra Incognita, a film with haunting cinematography and a
fast narrative pace.
Yannis Smaragdis’ Cavafy was a remarkable yet uneven attempt to
depict the biography of the great poet—a film that tried to reconstruct
visually the temporality of his poems through an introspection which, in a
strange way, resisted the challenge of Cavafy’s homosexuality. Through its
over-aestheticization, the film undervalues the male body as the ultimate
hypertext in Cavafy’s poems. Sensuality without sexuality makes the film
somehow a middle-class exercise in mainstreaming Cavafy’s eroticism.
Actor Dimitris Katalifos gave a compelling performance full of sensitivity
and reserve, although occasionally he looks lost and bewildered, showing
that something greater was happening in the mind of the poet at the very
moment when he was enjoying his sexuality.
Alexis Damianos also released his third and final movie Charioteer
(Iniohos) in 1994, which was something of a swan song to the vitality and
mythopoetic strength of the New Greek Cinema. Unfortunately, the film was
so densely textured that it imploded and became inaccessible to contem-

porary audiences who left wondering what the whole thing was about. As
it was made over a period of many years, narrative gaps are obvious and
off-putting. With so many major crises having taken place in Greek society
after the 80s and, more importantly, with the social changes that followed the
demographic alteration, contemporary audiences questioned the relevance
of the film about the Civil War and the 40s when a new (undeclared) social
and political war was raging in the country. Nevertheless, despite its opaque
form, Damianos’ movie was an epic achievement, both artistically and
visually, which could be admired if not enjoyed.
Meanwhile, the 90s seemed to have fulfilled Angelopoulos’ prediction
regarding the end of all borders in the most alarming way. By the end of
1991, communist regimes had collapsed across Europe and a mass wave of
migrants, mostly illegal, entered Greece. In a few years, the social landscape
of the country changed dramatically, with new problems emerging in the
relations between the established Greek population and the newcomers.
Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Ukranian, and Polish immigrants radically
reformed the country’s structure and culture. After 1991, many new people
entered Greece, legally or illegally, who never professed to have had any
affinity with its national history, as had the repatriated Greek refugees
from the Civil War several years earlier. The great transformation from a
homogenous nation-state to a heterogeneous multicultural society was both
a challenge and a shock to the political and ideological conditioning of the
Greek population.
By 1995, Greek society had undergone an unpredictable and unprec-
edented transformation which stressed its multiple traditions, social
diversity, and cultural in-betweenness. Angelopoulos’ great epic from this
year, Ulysses’ Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odyssea) is the cinematic landmark that
separates periods and mentalities, identities and allegiances, illusions and
realities—and it addresses the newly found conditions of self-articulation
and self-representation that Greek society found itself in after the change in
its demography.
Trying to modernize the institutional framework for cinema, changes
were introduced to the Greek Film Center and the Thessaloniki Film Festival
by the conservative government. In 1992, an important reform took place
in organizing the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Instead of solely Greek, the
Festival became international again in an attempt to attract films from other
European countries, especially the Balkans, and from world cinema. The
change was needed because of the increase of international exchanges, the
rise of global cinemas, and a need to attract funds from various sources.
Presidents of the Festival’s international committee became prominent
directors, like Wim Wenders, Otar Ioseliani, Miklós Jancsó, and John
Boorman. The change gave new life and prestige to a local festival which,
in its splendid isolation, had been a plaything of various governments

and was used by coteries to give prizes mostly to mediocre films made by
their friends. With a new impetus now given to the supposedly renewed
government, it seemed a new era of great promises was emerging. And after
Melina Mercouri’s death in 1994, new policies started being discussed in
order to break down the effective monopoly of the Greek Film Center over
film production and to attract new funds from the European Union. So far,
only Angelopoulos had managed to attract sponsors from other countries
(Italy, Germany, France, and Spain) together with internationally known
actors. It seemed that after 1995, assisted by the New Gaze, a new generation
of film-makers was emerging with new forms of representation, and, more
importantly, with entirely new stories to tell.
Chapter Six
❦❦
The Polyphony of the Decentered

Gaze: The Other as Cultural
Hero (1995–2010)
General Themes and Trends

If the 1980 s wa s the period of search for identity and cohesion, the
1990s was almost exclusively dedicated to the exploration of difference and
diversity. In the 80s, attempts were made to heal the traumas of the past by
consolidating a unified self-perception, a society with homogeneity and
unity; and, in the socialist rhetoric of the times, by creating a society with a
“common destiny”. However, as the demography changed, difference emerged
as the new cultural reality dominating debates of the post-socialist period.
Difference raised the prospect of diverse identities within mainstream Greek
society, particularly of identities based on gender, self-definition, and class. At
the same time, new and different identities emerged as immigrants and locals
intermingled and a new generation started to crystallize during the late 90s.
Consequently, the cinematic gaze lost its singular centre, mainly that
of Greek historical memory, and opened up to a diversity of histories that
made their presence felt after the collapse of communism in a heterogeneous
society searching for new points of reference and equilibrium. Cinematically,
such a search seems to have inaugurated a new kind of gritty and grim
realism, which became dominant after 1995 when a new generation of
directors appeared. As Hallam and Marshment observed on a European
scale, such realism pushed “hitherto neglected groups onto the screen [and]
the speaking of previously unheard truths and unexpressed attitudes.”1
While famous directors like Theo Angelopoulos continued producing
films in their own distinct styles, albeit with different storylines and points
239
of departure, new approaches gradually emerged from young people who

grew up in a society which struggled to “modernize” itself. The visual and
aural landscape of the country had changed dramatically within five years.
Monolingualism and monoculturalism were replaced by a diversity of
languages and cultures coexisting with tension and unease in an unstable
state shaken by repeated political scandals, financial problems, and adminis-
trative corruption which on many occasions led to direct confrontation with
the people.
Furthermore, the film industry itself was experiencing a transformation.
The Greek Film Center, which by then had become almost the single film
producer in the country, had been badly influenced by the financial crisis
of the late 80s. New policies were introduced which favored multiple
sponsorship from many sources—private, state, and international—and
which were to become dominant in the new millennium. Meanwhile,
the film market was dominated by American blockbusters which totally
eliminated local films. Very few people watched Greek films, which were
gradually becoming art-house films screened only during festivals, expos, or
retrospectives.
Moreover, disillusionment with politics and political films was one of
the most permeating characteristics of the new film-making. Young directors
matured after the ultimate loss of moral authority and civil legitimacy of the
Greek state. They also experienced the loss of the greatest legacy that the
history of Greek cinema had inherited: its oppositional aesthetics. After its
lethal and patronizing embrace by the state in the 80s, all kinds of political
ideologies in films were indications of an ugly and amoral conformism,
expressed through complacency and collusion with organized power and the
vested interests of the media moguls supporting it.
Professionally however, most of the new directors worked for private
television channels and directed either short series or video clips. In many
respects, the logic of television dominates most of the movies produced over
the last 20 years. Indeed, the televisual mode was and still is the dominant
way of visualizing action. Consequently, the dividing line between the
camera making images for the big screen and for television, the cinematic
and the televisual, became rather blurred or even totally vanished.
Since the late 1980s, after television channels multiplied all over the
country at an uncontrolled pace, the need for more directors who could put
together low-budget but commercially popular programs became increas-
ingly pressing. The introduction of the handheld camera and then of digital
technology changed the landscape of film production with the creation of
a wide variety of mainly short films, in different genres, which explored a
society in a deep existential, political, and civil crisis, while at the same time
examining the potential of these new technologies.
But the lack of a rejuvenating political vision was obvious in the mood
The Polyphony of the Decentered Gaze: The Other as Cultural Hero 241
of most filmic representations. From the early 90s to this day, political and
historical issues have been replaced by personal anxieties, private fantasies,
and individual phobias. Despite several films being made about the critical
representation of the past, new directors seem to be more interested in
depicting contemporary social realities through the lens of cynicism, emotive
humanism, or indifference, revealing a profound ambivalence towards their
own society. In other films, community tensions are mostly represented
through a gloom-and-doom, morose, and depressive perspective that create
a constant juxtaposition to the jocular atmosphere of films from the golden
age of Greek cinema, which, shown on television, have started becoming
symbols of a lost communal unity (which of course may have never existed).
Overall, different films started being made for different communities
from the body politic: mainstream, diasporic, queer, transgender, and so
on. The ideological construct of a single nation, of the Nation, was decon-
structed into its constitutive micro-communities which, in their turn, sought
representation, voice, and visibility. The persistent attempt to “compile” a
post-national imaginary can be found in most works of cultural production
of the latest period.
Consequently, new micro-histories are now being represented,
especially of the new migrant minorities and their predicament in a society
which doesn’t know how to deal with its own citizens. The invisible people
at the margins gained their visibility at the moment when all projects that
inspired previous generations collapsed, especially projects that privileged
the political and existential adventure of Greek citizens in search of meaning
and self-definition.
“All Greek movies today are about Albanian immigrants,” is said melan-
cholically in Vangelis Seitanidis’ Under Your Makeup (Kato apo to Makigiaz
sou, 2009). It is almost as though the Greek experience has lost its right to be
represented; or even as though contemporary Greek directors refuse to deal
with the Greek experience and use the mirror of the immigrant in order to
depict the crisis of meaning, authority, and purpose that seems to dominate
social life, without ever admitting that they themselves are the immigrants
we see on screen, strangers in their own land. Indeed, the “stranger” is the
new cultural hero in these films—the stranger from outside and the stranger
from within, represented now as the “human” uncanny that fascinates and
unsettles. For these new cultural heroes, new forms of realism are gradually
being constructed—a process that is still under way today and which is
constantly reconfigured in a society in rapid and unpredictable fluidity.
The dominant form of representation might be called episodic realism,
as a reaction to the symbolic grand narratives of reconstructed past of the
previous decades—although Pandelis Voulgaris’ Deep Soul (2009) and Theo
Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow (2004) seem to insist on such recon-
struction. Now the camera usually focuses, with anxiety, anger, and horror,
on episodes of everyday life full of the banality and triviality found in the
ordinary, the pedestrian, and the habitual. Most movies magnify the prosaic
and the common in an attempt to unearth the implied subtexts of a society
that has lost all vision of renewal and change. Indeed, the absence of political
or social vision is painfully obvious; nevertheless no criticism of the function
of Greek democracy is attempted, or of the official ideologies about history
and the past. It is as if the prolonged social crisis has created an emotional
numbness and intellectual confusion that have established a visual discourse
of discontent devoid of moral considerations.
Most of the films after 2005 shed fresh light on the common experience
but absence of communal bond by foregrounding individual alienation and
the loss of shared values. Indeed, they depict a society dominated by the
pseudo-events promoted by the media, without moral dilemmas and ethical
concerns, privatized and insular, almost consumed by doubt, disbelief, and
self-loathing. The actions of specific individuals in a society without bonds,
collective memories, or a sense of destiny now become the axis of most
films; but such individual praxis is neither an exercise in individualism
nor in secluded privatization, as the ideologues of the past would have
accused it of.
On the contrary, it is the constant reminder of a missing societal bond,
of a lost togetherness, which has thrown the individual into a whirlwind of
ambiguities and uncertainties which cannot be resolved. The central theme
of the most important films after 1995 is the helplessness of human beings
within a political system of depersonalizing structures; a system divested
of its moral legitimacy and which imposes a perpetual state of existential
anomie on lonely and homeless people, especially those who try to survive
as strangers in a society without bonds.
It is a new cinema that emerged, the cinema of the narrow path, being
pressured from all sides and struggling to construct a way out of the crisis
by looking outside accepted mainstream centers. Some call it the New Greek
Current, and see a great challenge to the “boring and repetitive cinema of
the 80s” as well as the cinema of the 70s. As Orestis Andreadakis stated in a
recent research of 77 new directors:
We use the word “Current” because this movement does not have the
inflexible characteristics of an entrenched school and does not function
on ideological or aesthetical manifestos like “Dogme 95.” The creators
who constitute this current let themselves free within its own dynamic
with a peculiar jocular predisposition and deny all parochial groupings.
However, they clearly manifest some common elements. They are united
by audacious boldness, for example, they are interested in reality and have
substituted symbolism with the subversions generated by the conflict
between pop and realism.2
After the early 1990s, the cinematic gaze lost its center: instead of looking back
on its history with the conscious attempt to heal the traumatic memories left
by instability and division, it looked around and discovered something only
occasionally and unexpectedly observed in its development. Greek society
had ceased being a society that sent migrants outside its borders. Domestic
and international migration created an immense nostalgia for a paradise lost
in the archetypal organic serenity of the village, of the topos of origin. After
the 90s, however, the national space itself was inhabited by “aliens,” genuine
refugees, escaped criminals, Muslims, women and men from other cultures
who, after the collapse of communism and during continued unrest in the
Middle East, flooded Greece, either passing through to western Europe or
staying and making the country their new home.
So the gaze that looked with nostalgia towards the past discovered the
Other in the immediate present and in the adventure of the newcomers for
whom Greece was a place of both hope and exile, of promise and despair,
of stability and anxiety. Culturally, as the borders fell after 1991, not only
Balkan neighbors entered Greece, but Greece itself was reconnected with its
immediate environment. Immigrants, especially Albanian, helped Greeks
to rediscover their common Balkan heritage and their long historical bonds
with the other nations of the region which had been severed by the Iron
Curtain and the Cold War. Even the common bonds with Turkey became
frequent cinematic material, as Turkish cinema, especially that by Yilmaz
Güney, was respected and admired by Greek cinephiliacs.
Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze contains a scene on the mountains between
Albania and Greece where hundreds of faceless people try to escape through
the snow and freezing cold for a better life in the south. The landscape full
only of snow resonated with the whispers and sounds of an entrance into
history together with all of its consequences: the trauma of birth and the
endless primal scream that cannot be appeased, since there is no maternal
presence to alleviate it. For the film-makers, the immigrant appeared at a
very paradoxical moment; when politics had been discredited and grand
statements had become suspect. Together with them, the aesthetics of
populism dominant during the 80s was also discredited as parochial and
dangerous. New senses of filmic time emerged through the creative osmosis
between old films screened on television and the actual timing of television
programs.
After 1988, the airwaves were deregulated. This led to the proliferation
of independent channels with their own programs which competed with
state-owned channels. At first, new channels introduced quality programs
and independent news, plus more working positions for technical staff,
actors, and directors. But the spring of good television and independent
information lasted for very few years. Soon, trash television took over and
the promise of renewal died within the amoral populist aesthetics of the
decade. Indeed, the aesthetics of cheap melodrama and sexual titillation

took over and dominated television production through its sensationalism
and the cult of the lowest common denominator in information, criticism,
and programming. A whole generation of young film-makers didn’t just
grow up in this environment, but also enjoyed cinema classics on television;
and they watched them in 15-minute slots between commercial breaks.
The decline of art cinemas and cinema clubs was dramatic, and the
associations and municipalities which were funding them closed them one
after the other, suffering the arrival of the DVD player. The destruction of old
cinemas, which had for decades been symbols of common experiences and
communal bonds, also undermined the culture surrounding film itself. The
loss of communal connection transformed such social rituals into individual
experiences, or indeed into private worlds. Soon the sense of community
had all but vanished, and the production of new movies turned its attention
to the alienated and lonely heroes within an antisocial urban crowd.
Homelessness, withdrawal, and isolation became the dominant moods in the
scripts of the new period—with the new cultural hero being the immigrant
and the stranger.
However, most films do not simply depict their hero out of context, they
depict the image of the immigrant who wants to belong to a society that the
Greeks themselves do not really like. Such paradoxical ambivalence can be
felt in all movies produced since 1995. The cinematic gaze frames not only
the difficulties of the migrant in being incorporated into Greek society, but
the inability of the society to accept difference and divergence. Greek films
are sites of deep structural conflicts: they depict the unwelcome stranger
against the backdrop of an undesired reality.
Stylistically, most directors employ television techniques and, more
importantly, the filmic time befitting television series in order to unfold their
stories. Indeed, most of these movies resemble television news bulletins,
either as self-conscious parodies or as genuine stratagems used to achieve
harsher realism. The self-reflexive style of the New Greek Cinema with
its slow pace, long takes, distantiation techniques, and elliptic editing has
been replaced by fast, linear narrative full of jump cuts, moving camer-
awork, and heavy editing—in direct opposition to the monumental style
of Angelopoulos’ films. Stylized acting is abandoned in favor of highly
emotive and challenging performances. (Only in the recent Dogtooth, 2009
by Dimitris Indares do we find certain reflections of the old elaborate mise-
en-scène.) On many occasions, especially in the comedies which resurfaced
with immense success during the late 90s, viewers feel that narrative is struc-
tured around television programs, music videos or commercials. Episodes
in the story are short and punchy, jokes sound like advertising slogans, and
whole films are made of a series of loosely connected episodes.
Most of these comedies can be enjoyed at home on DVD or computer
because they are made specifically for the small screen. Probably the main
challenge of contemporary cinematic poetics is to find a solution to this
urgent question: how can the experience of the big screen be transferred to
the small screen of home television or to the even smaller computer screen?
Most film-makers really do try to find a solution to this in an attempt to
make movies relevant to the generation which goes to the movie theater only
infrequently and only to watch American special-effects blockbusters—as
the only movies that perpetuate the magic and allure of the big screen.
Most of the new directors are still trying to find their way with the
medium and within the market forces that determine its development,
nationally and internationally. The most important goal is to bring audiences
back to the cinemas—something that is looking more and more utopian.
Good movies sell very few tickets, whereas a comedy like Mihalis Reppas
and Papathanasiou’s Safe Sex (1999), co-produced by a television channel,
sold over 1,400,000 tickets, superseding Aliki Vouyouklaki’s old record for
Lieutenant Natasha (1970). The comedy itself is technically accomplished,
with good dialogue, and hilarious episodes. On television, each story could
have been expanded to a full episode of about 30 to 45 minutes; in the
cinema, the episodes look sketchy and brief. Yet it revived the tradition of
good comedies and brought the audience back to the cinema in a spectacular
fashion, thereby proving that cinema is still possible!
It seems that this is the only way to rekindle film culture and to revive
the industry; the production of good popular cinema, using the most
advanced technology, and based on the hybrid aesthetics of the small and the
big screen. The challenge, therefore, is not simply the production of quality
films, but the very survival of cinema film as a distinct art in a society that has
lost interest in stylistic experimentation. The challenge is for the production
of “good” films in all genres, covering a wide range from “commercial”
cinema to what has been considered self-reflexive and formalist.
Entering the New Millennium: the Context

In the October 1993 election, the Socialist Party won again after four years of
failed and turbulent conservative rule. In 1996, the Socialist leader Andreas
Papandreou finally succumbed to his many ailments thus liberating his
party from his dynastic, and by then farcical, presence. Quite symbolically,
Papandreou died the same year as the superstar Aliki Vouyouklaki and the
seemingly ever-rejuvenating composer Manos Hatzidakis, all of them having
influenced Greek cinema in different ways.
New political leaders emerged with more technocratic credentials,
like Costas Simitis who promised to modernize politics in the country. His
slogan for “modernization” (eksinhronismos) meant the introduction of
mild economic reforms, distancing himself from the populist extravaganza
of the previous decade, in order to “rationalize” economic activity, reform

public administration, and rekindle political participation. The Socialists
won again in 1996 and 2000, promising austere fiscal policies, a fight against
corruption, and transparency in administration. It was a period of prolonged
and deep optimism. Thanks to the austerity measures, the country balanced
its books, cut down public spending, and reduced its deficit—necessary
prerequisites for membership of the European Monetary Union and the
introduction of the Euro as official currency. This meant that geographic
and political isolation would in effect be over and Greece’s economic destiny
would be linked with that of major European countries. The political slogan
of the day which expressed such optimism and self-confidence was: “Greece
is not any more a Balkan country in Europe, but a European country in the
Balkans!”
However, the problems created by the attempts to solve the structural
deficiencies of the economy were greater than expected—and the modern-
izers had to revert to spurious and clandestine dealings with international
corporations or even ally themselves with the old party establishment.
Major scandals of mismanagement, such as that of the Stock Exchange
bubble in 1999 (when thousands of people lost their money in search
of nonexistent profitable investments), began to cast their shadow on a
period of conspicuous consumption, grandiose construction works, and
reckless spending. Yet in 2002, Greece became one of the core members of
the European Monetary Union, joining its economy to those of the more
advanced European countries, for better or worse. In order to achieve such
a goal the Socialist Government basically deceived the European Union by
presenting false statements about its actual debt—a mortal sin that was to
be paid heavily by the people seven years later. And participation in the
monetary union made the country vulnerable to international speculators
and other profiteering organizations, as it exposed its structural problems
and created new challenges which, as a peripheral and weak economy, it
didn’t know how to confront.
After achieving his goal, Costas Simitis made an unprecedented and
spectacular move in 2003: he was the first prime minister to resign while
in office and allow the party to elect a new leader. Not surprisingly, the
preferred candidate was the son of the previous prime minister, Yorgos
Papandreou Jr., who, with his knowledge of international politics, perfect
English, and experience of computer technologies, was convinced that he
could create a new Greece ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first
century. However, most Greeks were certain that their democracy was
evolving into a hereditary rule of two family dynasties, Karamanlis and
Papandreou.
The feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with the
democratic model introduced after 1974 permeated the atmosphere of
many films in the first decade of the new century. The caricaturing of politi-
cians, the representation of state apparatuses as hostile mechanisms, and the
critique of the official version of history that we see in these films reflect this
atmosphere of decline and corruption, of radical distrust and faithlessness
towards the Greek state.
Despite the message of perpetual modernization and the considerable
successes of the previous nine years, the Socialists lost the 2004 election to
a supposedly dynamic Conservative leader, yet another Costas Karamanlis,
nephew to the previous prime minister and president, who promised the
“re-establishment of the state” (epanidrisi tou kratous), but to whom soon
was to be attributed the honorary title of most incompetent politician in
recent memory. Creative accounting, public sector increases, and dodgy
deals about construction works laid the foundations for the ultimate collapse
that was to follow. Meanwhile, the young prime minister kept himself busy
by globetrotting and allowing party factions to destroy the state machine. As
Koliopoulos and Veremis state, “By the end of the twenty-first-century’s first
decade, the Greeks appear to have lost their sense of direction.”3
The period between 2000 and 2005 was a period of affluence and
excess—two grave errors that were to cost the ordinary people dearly
several years later. The eudaemonistic atmosphere was mainly created by
the presumably endless European Union “funding packages” which were
mostly wasted on shady agreements and clientelistic policies. The boom
of economic activity was also due to the cheap labour that countless illegal
immigrants provided and the air of psychological confidence that such
affluence created—for all the wrong reasons as it came out later.
Another reason for optimism was the selection of the country to host
the 2004 Olympic Games—a major event which, according to many hopeful
predictions, could completely reinvigorate the Greek economy through
international investments. (Unfortunately, it simply contributed further to
the loss of money and the corruption of the bureaucracy which, in 2008,
through the conscious inertia of a completely impotent government, brought
Greece to near bankruptcy once again.)
New Iconographies and Stylistic Challenges

During this period of political epigones, in which the anaemic and opportun-
istic successors seemed simply to vie to repeat the mistakes and excesses of
their paternal figures, a new generation of film directors emerged, struggling
to consolidate its voice and articulate its principles. Most of the new directors
turned to independent producers, international investors, and the existing
programs of the European Union in order to make mostly low-budget but
technically impeccable films. The absence of good scriptwriting continued to
be noticeable. Meanwhile, contemporary Greek cinematographers seem to
have abandoned the studios altogether and have their cameras (sometimes
handheld digital cameras) out in the streets filming works of intense imagi-
nation as if they were actual documentaries.
On the streets they find incredible new stories and people: the
immigrants, junkies, social outcasts, and, more importantly, they witness
the cruelty, indifference, and apathy of the mainstream petit bourgeoisie
towards those unlucky people. Certainly, they were already in front of them
for quite some time, but they now gained a new visibility and a new gravity.
They turned the attention of the camera away from the political theater, or
the representation of the past as ideological theater, towards the exploration
of actual spaces of interaction. As Pierre Sorlin had already detected after the
early 1990s:
Unlike documentaries, feature films did not describe the condition of the
immigrants, but played with the uncanny, the unexpected, thus stressing
the new features, the new “visibility” introduced by the strangers. For
it is in this field, in the realm of images, that cinema tells us something
regarding the common vision of the world around us.4
On the other side, the “strangers” are depicted almost as wild and unruly
intruders, bewildered and confused, experiencing “a labyrinth in which they
have lost all sense of their bearings.”5
The fusion of documentary and fiction gave rise to many films
belonging to the hybrid genre of docudrama, establishing new representa-
tional codes for the newcomers. As we have seen, the beginning was made
by Sotiris Goritsas with From the Snow in 1993. Most directors explore
the Balkan dimension in Greek society and cross the borders to discover
a cultural continuum that both shocks and amuses. At the same time, as
they followed their erratic odysseys, they unexpectedly discovered the
Greek countryside and the ways of life that dominate the heartland of
Hellenism. In many films made after 1995, the main characters abandon
the big city and find or at least try to find refuge in the village. After
the immigrant, the escape from the city is the second dominant theme
of the New Greek Current. Most films, like From The Snow, The Edge
of the City, Hades, The King, The Guardian’s Son, articulate a negative
discourse about the capital city, which until recently was the only center of
political authority and cultural legitimacy. Anthropologist James Faubion
has called this new discourse “the Athenian negative” and defined it as
follows:
The Athenian negative is at once a recirculation of commonplaces and an
ever-new pronouncement of insight and discovery; it is at once formulaic
and filled with the freshest of pathos. It is a paradox, but a paradox that
has the precise form of ritual, which in its effective expression is always a
union of the formulaic and the deeply felt.6
In the past, the persecuted and the outcasts had found refuge and protection
in the grand anonymity of the big metropolis, hiding their presence under
the ruins of the past or in the human hyperactivity of the present. By the
end of the 80s, however, Athens was transformed into a “negative” place of
“civic alienation,” according to Faubion. This new reality was thematized by
many films—dramas and comedies—with the added tragedy of the alien
immigrant, who couldn’t be concealed any more. The Athenian negative as
a cultural discourse dominates the mythography of the new film-makers
who frame urban reality as a space of dramatic re-enactment of the ongoing
conflicts without redemption or catharsis.
After Goritsas, the director who tries intensively to fuse these two modes
of representation is Constantine Giannaris (b. 1959). He is not the only
one. A number of new and imaginative directors, like Panos H. Koutras,
Dimitris Indares, Yannis Oikonomidis, Stratos Tzitzis, Angelos Frantzis,
Yorgos Nousias, Yorgos Lanthinos, Vardis Marinakis, Syllas Tzoumerkas, and
Athena Tsangari, replace identity politics with psychodynamics of difference
in an attempt to capture the fluidity of personal identity, social belonging,
and cultural memory, through a transcultural cinematic eye and ultimately a
European, if not a global, cinematic gaze. As cultural critic Ilias Kanellis stated:
The independence and the extrovert attitude of certain older cinematogra-
phers is the tradition of the living stage against which the most competent
younger directors, create thanks to the new technologies and the interna-
tionalization of the cinematic market, by now totally free from the state.”7
All new directors have a new “take” on cinematic representation, forming a

loose movement of individuals who are eclectic, independent, and heteroge-
neous. Each has a distinct visual style that is still evolving and exploring its
potential. Women directors play an important role. Antouanetta Angelidi (b.
1950) remains the most distinguished representative of experimental cinema
who, after her mesmeric Topos (1985) produced two of the most interesting
and least classifiable experiments in visual language, Hours (Ores, 1995) and
The Thief of Reality (O Kleftis tis Pragmatikotitas, 2001). Stella Theodoraki—
an accomplished theorist of cinematic experience, after a number of short
films, released two features, Close . . . So Close . . . (Para ligo, Para Ponto, Para
Triha, 2002) and Ricordi Mi (2009), in an innovative fusion of illusion and
reality. Peny Panayotopoulou, Angeliki Antoniou, Lagia Giourgou, Aliki
Danezi-Knutsen, and Margarita Manta have in different ways renewed
narrative cinema with an impressive number of stylistic and thematic
innovations based on a trans-generic fusion of various visual approaches and
representational codes.
Meanwhile, the great names of the past continued to make their own
contributions to Greek cinema. After 1995, the attempt to reconnect with the
geopolitics of the Balkans and Eastern Europe became one of the dominant
concerns of Greek cinema. The Yugoslav wars had already started in 1991,
and were rekindled in 1993 and in 1995. The destruction of the historic
Old Bridge in Mostar by Bosnian-Croat forces in November 1993 was an
incident symbolic of the escalating violence and brutality. In July 1995, the
Srebrenica massacre took place in which Serbian paramilitaries extermi-
nated 8,000 Muslims. It seemed that history had gone back to the wars of the
nineteenth century and the internationalist union was not a utopian dream
but a horrible illusion.
Angelopoulos’ 1995 epic Ulysses’ Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odyssea) was
a landmark that inaugurated a new era in Greek cinema, by constructing
a monumental funeral for the past. Angelopoulos finally took the first step
to look outside Greece: Ulysses’ Gaze is a visual testimony of what he saw.
The film depicts the journey of a Greek-American director (played with
intense awkwardness by Harvey Keitel) through the Balkans until he reaches
Sarajevo at the moment of its brutal siege by Serbian paramilitaries. Once
there, he finally discovers the original reels taken by the Maniaki brothers
in the early twentieth century. The journey becomes a symbolical descent to
the originary gaze and to the source of cinematic transcription of history,
a regaining of the “authentic gaze.” At the moment, however, when the
reels are produced by the Jewish memory keeper, the director’s friends are
murdered. With tears in his eyes, he cannot see anything: having lost his
innocence, there is nothing to be seen of the innocent world that the original
gaze recorded.
All other films of that year pale into insignificance vis-à-vis the scope,
breadth, and story of Angelopoulos’ movie. Unquestionably one of the best
films of the decade in Europe, it is a trans-historical road movie under which
we can see the archetypal journey of Ulysses towards a new hearth—that of
the collective memory encapsulated in cinematic images. The film received
the Critic’s Award at the Cannes Festival and its iconography, music, and
story have permeated many films ever since.
Ulysses’ Gaze can be seen as a mythical journey, a personal quest, or as
a cultural exploration. It can also be interpreted as an attempt to reconnect
Greek cinema with its past and the original innocence of the Manaki
brothers before borders separated communities and people. There are so
many aspects to this film: it is a journey—the archetypal odyssey—to the
origins of Balkan cinema, to the original gaze of unity and authenticity so
savagely lost after the collapse of the last “internationalist” project—the
grand utopia of communist brotherhood and unity. The broken gigantic
statue of Lenin, offered to the real god of Europe, the bloodline of all its
civilizations, the river Danube, is a funeral of all ideologies that go back
Theo Angelopoulos, Ulysses’ Gaze (1995). Courtesy, Theo Angelopoulos.

Credit: DVD
to the beginning of cinema, coinciding with the beginnings of social

questioning and unrest.
In other films of 1995, Pandelis Voulgaris’ Acropol attempted a musical
commentary on political life of the 50s and 60s. Yorgos Panousopoulos’ Free
Fall (Eleftheri Katadisi) explored the return to the native village of a young
man who flirts with two women, one of whom is his half sister. Stavros
Tsiolis’ The Lost Treasure of Hursit Pasha (O Hamenos Thisauros tou Hoursit
Pasha) was a delightful comedy about 11 fugitives from prison who try to
find the legendary treasure as they travel through the Peloponnese. Stelios
Haralambopoulos’ Hades (Adis) was an evocative descent into the underworld
of the Greek countryside as an Athenian lawyer leaves the city to find a missing
person in a northern Greek province. The katabasis into the unknown world of
the “other” is finally attempted by his wife who, as another Alcestis, “descends”
to the countryside to retrieve him. The film uses a slow pace full of long takes,
deep spatial compositions, suggestive lighting, and symbolic dialogue, in an
attempt to represent a modern tragedy of loss, redemption, and restoration.
Yorgos Kantakouzinos’ Life (a beautiful butterfly) (Zoi, mia oraia
petaloyda) was a gruesome depiction of a passionate love affair which ends
with the murder of the woman by her husband; while Thanassis Skroubelos’
Hawaii dived into the world of a famous male brothel of the 1960s as two
transvestites fight for the attention of their debauched pimp. Dimitris
Indares’ Like the Prairie Cock of Wyoming (O Tsalapeteinos tou Wyoming)
which bears the subtitle “An Adventure of Emotions,” explored three inter-
twining stories about love, growing up, and confusion. A 20 year old
struggles to become an adult while he is disoriented by the late pregnancy of
his mother to an unknown man, and his boss’s hopeless love affair at 55. His
confusion is made worse by his own two love affairs and his story becomes
more convoluted as he attempts the big leap from adolescence to adulthood.
Nikos Triantafillidis’ Radio Moscow brought new, fresh air to comedy

using an international cast and an old legend: Kostas Gousgounis. The film
explored the many faces of love as an old stripper from Russia and an officer
of the Red Army Choir strive for their reunion in the hostile territory of
Greece, where the woman is harassed by sexual assaults and love proposals
by lustful men. Dimos Theos’ Eleatic Stranger (Eleatis Xenos) must be
mentioned for its tense atmosphere of ambiguity and mystery. Theos based
his film on a dangerous and hopeless quest, as a German woman goes to
Greece on the pretext of archaeological excavations, to find her lost and
unknown father. In Greece she finds out that her presumed father was assas-
sinated and as she delves into his life she is killed herself by those who killed
him for his large fortune. The juxtaposition between the archaeological past
and the sinister present, between what is present in its absence and of what
is unreal in its existence, transforms this film into a strange exploration of
the confused Greek social imaginary. Eleni Alexandraki tackled a similar
topic in her subtle, sensitive, and poignant Drop in the Ocean (Stagona
ston Okeano). A simple love affair between an actress and a fugitive gives
Alexandraki the thread for the exploration of the contradictory feelings
generated by love. The failed affair is only a drop in the ocean, an episode
that is and will be re-enacted everywhere forever.
In 1996,in the same vein of a critique of emotions, Nikos Grammatikos’
The Absentees (Oi Apontes) was a touching film about the changes in
Greek society between 1986 and 1994 and their impact on the emotional
connections between a group of friends. It was also one of the first films to
deal with the wasted decade of the 1980s, exploring the anxieties and the
dedication of a group of people who sacrificed their youth on the altar of the
socialist delusions which returned to undermine their love and destroy their
friendship. Olga Mallea’s The Cow’s Orgasm (O Orgasmos tis Ageladas) was
a feminist and comic take on sexuality; while Maria Iliou’s Three Ages (Treis
Epohes) was an existential reflection on time and gender.
Vassilis Boudouris’ Business in the Balkans (Biznes sta Valkania) and
Yorgos Kyrras and Hristos Voupouras’ See You (Mirupafsim) were honest and
interesting investigations of the immediate cultural and social surroundings
of Greece. The first is a hilarious take on the new opportunities for making
money in such a strange place as the Balkans, which came suddenly under
the domination of aggressive capitalism. The latter offers a rare glimpse into
the reality of post-communist Albania, with documentary frankness and
without any pretensions of cultural superiority or the colonialist aesthetic
of an “advanced” society. Voupouras’ gaze is fascinated but puzzled by such
an incredible society and depicts the bizarre juxtaposition of parochialism
and modernity that constitutes the social and natural landscape of contem-
porary Albania. Finally, Andreas Pantzis’ The Rooster’s Slaughter (I Sfagi tou
Kokora) explored the emotional cruelty within a homosexual couple, as, after
their separation, one of them blackmails the other. Despite its conventional
ending, the film expresses a confronting view of hidden sexual behavior.
Within experimental cinema in 1996, Vassilis Mazomenos’ The Triumph
of Time (O Thriamvos tou Hronou) should be mentioned for its ingenious use
of computer animation to explore the intellectual trajectory of Don Quixote
through the eyes of Charlie Chaplin in what the critic Babis Aktsoglou
called “a filmic opera.”8 Mazomenos (b. 1964) had appeared with his first
experimental film in 1995 with Days of Wrath—A Requiem for Europe (Meres
Orgis—Ena Rekviem gia tin Evropi), an eschatological visual exploration of
the last days of Europe, based on the classical myth of Deadalus and the
science-fiction idea of establishing a utopian society through coercion and
torture.
In 1997, Goritsas’ Valkanizater presented a comic fantasy that delved
into the new realities that emerged after the collapse of the Balkan borders.
Vangelis Serdaris’ Vassiliki was also an interesting film by a veteran director,
with a gripping story from the Civil War. Despite its rather parochial story,
the critical look on the past and the exploration of human emotions between
ideological enemies was probably the characteristic that differentiated this
film from the heroic martyrology of the 80s. Renos Haralambidis’ No Budget
Story was a strange tragicomedy in black and white of a young director who
joins forces with a porn producer who promises funding for his first movie
as long he smuggles drugs in videotapes. Antonis Kokkinos’ My Brother and
I (Adelfos mou ki Ego) fell short of his previous achievement with End of an
Era; while Panayiotopoulos’ The Bachelor (O Ergenis) was a film that showed
the continuing shortage of good scripts and how it could lead to easy sensa-
tionalism using sex and more sex as its alibi!
Hoursoglou’s The Gentleman in Grey (O Kirios me ta Gri) was a sensitive
depiction of a love affair between two elderly people. Special mention is
deserved by Sophia Papahristou’s The Golden Apples of Hesperides (Ta Hrisa
mila ton Esperidon), Nikos Kornelios’ The Innocent Body (To Athoo Soma),
and Symeon Varsamidis’ The Fragrance of Time (To Aroma tou Hronou)—all
were atmospheric and surreal dramas with great performances and brilliant
scores and showed the increased interest of the new directors in enhancing
filmic experience by emphasizing sound and visual effects.
But 1997 belonged again to the highly personal, almost autobio-
graphical film made by Angelopoulos, Eternity and a Day (I Aioniotita kai
mia Mera) which received First Prize at Cannes the following year. One can
see this film as an elegy to a lost sensitivity and as a nostalgic recreation of
a humanistic tradition which had tried to visualize a cinematic response to
the great questions of human mortality. (Angelopoulos made the film after
the death of his mother.)
Long takes make for a poignant psychological device to explore the
mind of a dying poet: his life is ending but life still goes on. An Albanian boy
comes his way and for a while he feels again the impulse for living. Around
this simple encounter, Angelopoulos builds a complex narrative about the
life of illegal immigrants, their dreams and predicament in a hostile land,
their exploitation by Greeks and Albanians alike, in a slow and introspective
narrative, which must be seen as a poetic incantation for the appeasement of
death. The ghost of the Greek poet Dionysios Solomos, who spent most of
his life “searching and buying unknown words,” appears and vanishes in the
film, showing the only immortality people can aspire too: the deathlessness
given by language and art, the ultimate justification of life as an aesthetic
phenomenon, created by tragedy, sacrifice and loss.
The scene where the Albanian children burn the meagre possessions of
their dead friend is an authentic anthropological ritual. Another scene with
people hanging over the wired fences of the borders is parallel to Dante’s
infernal descent. Finally, the long take about the poet’s birth, growing
up, falling in love, having children, maturing, aging, and finally dying,
entangled throughout his whole life in the waves of language and the sea, is
a magnificent contemplation of the meaning of life, in a way that was lost
after Ingmar Bergman and Andrey Tarkovsky.
The next year, 1998, can be seen as the year of minor achievements.
Stavros Tsiolis’ Let Women Wait (As Perimenoun oi Ginaikes), Olga Malea’s
The Discreet Charm of Males (I Diakritiki Goiteia ton Arsenikon) and Yannis
Soldatos’ The Enigma (To Ainigma) were brilliant works with a new sense of
social realism and comic relief. Menelaos Karamagiolis’ Black Out was an
absorbing drama of jealousy and perverse religiosity.
Something totally new broke out with Constantine Giannaris’ From the
Edge of the City (Ap’ tin Akri tis Polis), the film that created a whole new
genre of urban drama, with its fast editing, electrifying music, and relentless
action. This is the most accomplished formal attempt to incorporate two
technologies and styles: the televisual and the cinematic. Giannaris has
fused the two modes of representation in a functional way: bringing
together the fast pace of television news bulletins and the long takes of
cinema drama.
Giannaris started his career with the production of three interesting
gay short films which questioned masculinity and femininity as normative
models. His early movies are about transgression and subversion—they deny
the legitimacy of normative practices by imbuing their “deviant” heroes with
inner moral struggle and internal life. His heroes do not simply have sex,
since sexuality is the battleground where most social tensions are negotiated.
Sex becomes a painful reminder of a missing unity. It is neither vulgar nor
obscene: it is the living proof of a mechanical and depersonalized existence,
without perspective and hope. The migrant is his cultural hero in a series of
half-documentary half-fiction movies that explores the predicament of the
new “ethnics” at the margins of society, at the edge of the cities.
Constantine Giannaris, From the Edge of the City (1998). Courtesy,

Constantine Giannaris. Credit: DVD
Occasionally reminiscent of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), the

film depicts the misery and squalor, violence and frustration, desire and
disgust that immigrants feel in a hostile country. Yet the dream sequences
in Kazakhstan are shots of sublime magical realism, and of transporting
emotional strength. Giannaris’ empathy is the redeeming feature of this film:
it captures—with an eye of deep understanding and affection—the anguish,
horror, and panic of the immigrants as they confront a huge impenetrable
social machine of exclusion and stigmatization.
Giannaris constructs a new visual language for contemporary cinema:
a fast narrative pace, structured around strong chromatic contrasts, with an
intrusive boldness in his camera that explores an underworld of unwilling
criminals. The narrative flow is also interrupted by the main character
talking directly into the camera and indirectly to us. The film is a dialogue
between the characters, their director, and us, the invisible protagonists in
the context around the film. As Dimitris Papanikolaou has argued:
From the Edge associates itself with a “new queer” aesthetic instead of
conforming to a poetics of national culture. Decidedly post-nationalist,
framed by desire and the fluidity of identities, the films adopts an aesthetic
code that allows it to expose and critique the dominant narratives of
repatriation, migrant return, and homogeneous modernization.9
The Russian families living on the outskirts of the city, suspended between
the nostalgia for their childhood and the negative realities of their actual
life, give Giannaris the ultimate metaphor for contemporary life. They all
experience interstitial realities, hovering between the real and the imaginary,
constructing identities that perform a social role while experiencing another
identity in the mental world of their true existence. Sex, drugs, and illegality
are the only means by which they can make their true existence emerge, and
be touched by something that transcends their misery and their muzzled
ability to communicate. In such lawlessness they express the anomie of their

existence and thereby realize their humanity: their anomic existence is their
life. Such subversion of social expectations and patterns of normality makes
Giannaris’ film a seminal text in the New Greek Current and one of the best
films produced in post-1991 Europe.
Another movie that excelled in 1998, in a traditional storytelling
manner, was the unexpected It is a Long Road (Ola Einai dromos) by Pandelis
Voulgaris. In this movie (dedicated to the memory of Takis Kanelopoulos),
Voulgaris avoided his usual temptation of powerful melodramatization.
Instead, he made an exceptional film that revolves around three stories, each
with their own particular style and characteristics, by understating emotions
through an expressive ellipsis which is discreet, tempered, and precise.
Furthermore, it explored the hidden physiognomy, landscape, and mentality
of the country with stark candidness and conscientious sincerity, without
embellishments and without losing control of camera filters.
The first story about a soldier who commits suicide as his archaeologist
father (superbly performed by Dimitris Kataleifos) discovers an ancient
tomb, is shot through tamed colors that vibrate with earthiness and tangi-
bility. The emotional energy in the scene as the father visits the place where
his son killed himself explodes from the screen with almost religious pity
and fear. The second story, about the last duck of a very rare variety in the
wetlands of a big river, shows the comedian Thanassis Vengos in the most
sublime performance of his career with reserved passion and disciplined
emotion as he silently shoots in despair the man who killed the last duck.
The final story, “Vietnam,” is probably one of the most repulsive explo-
rations of the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches in the Greek countryside—a
story of despair and angst, it is expressed with reserve and composure by
Yorgos Armenis. The story depicts the self-destructive nihilism that takes
Pandelis Voulgaris, It is a Long Road (1998). Greek Film

Center Collection.
over a society devoid of ethical values, or indeed devoid of any values

whatsoever, and the human tragedies that this nurtures. The empathy of
Voulgaris’ gaze is fused in every scene, take, and color of the film. The
discreet music by Stamatis Kraounakis and the suggestive photography by
Yorgos Frentzos are magisterial in bringing out the compressed emotional
energy. The silences that dominate the film reach out to the ineffability of the
sublime.
Vassilis Mazomenos released his mesmerizing and terrifying apocalyptic
phantasmagoria Money—A mythology of Darkness (Hrima, mia mythologia
tou skotous) in 1998. A visual essay on the impact of money on humanity, it
is a film that deserves more attention and which proves the potential of new
technologies in the creation of a new kind of cinematic language. With this
film, Mazomenos created a trilogy of philosophical essays by means of visual
experimentations. His later films Remembrance (2002) and Guilt (2010)
received many positive reviews and international recognition; especially the
last in which Mazomenos explored narrative cinema through a nightmarish
and confronting story.
In 1999, Dimos Avdeliodis released The Four Seasons of the Law (I Earini
Sinaxis ton Agrofilakon) which some critics consider as one of the finest
Greek movies. Avdeliodis’ depiction of the rural, pro-modern community
of the island of Chios was both magical and touching, generating a sense
of nostalgia and longing for a homeland lost in another time. However, the
strange contrapuntual depiction of a pre-modern rustic atmosphere with
the highly sophisticated music of Vivaldi leave the movie in semantic limbo
about the intentions of its director and its overall atmosphere. The film
is structured around the four seasons, each filmed by a different director
of photography and accompanied by Vivaldi’s music. It unfolds like a
cinematic dream, in an associative way, with the small rituals and the great
dreams of everyday life in a small village in 1960. Every shot is ambiguous,
every episode inconclusive; every form in an interstitial existence between
pre-modernity and modernity, surrounded by invisible elemental spirits
emerging through an extravaganza of colors that help the narrative unfold,
with the music animating every object and natural phenomenon. Vassiliki
Tsitsopoulou interprets the film “as a parable on the origins of Greek author-
itarianism.”10 However one might also see it as expressing the inability of
authority to understand or to “attune” itself with autochthonous existence
thus establishing a constant and confusing dissonance between people and
their social realities.
The film is more accessible than Avdeliodis’ earlier ones, through many
concessions to narrative by nostalgically reconstructing a world of childhood
dominated by innocence and awe. It can be seen as a suggestive serenade to a
world of signs and wonders doomed to be lost under the corrupting influence
of history and politics. In a sense this is a cinema of religiosity, of eco-psychism
and folk piety, of animistic terrestrial magic, through the childlike eyes of a
camera experiencing a state of sinlessness, and pre-lapsarian beauty, while
occasionally veering off to the picturesque and the pretty.
Costas Kapakas’ Peppermint looked back at an idyllic childhood in the
early 1960s with affection and humor; while Panayiotopoulos’ This Night
Remains (Afti i nihta menei) gave a new dimension to the urban melodramas
of the 60s by reviving the effective fusions of music and image from the best
musical tradition.
Nikos Koundouros’ The Photographers (I Fotografoi) explored the cruelty
of history through an apocalyptic landscape of civil conflicts in border areas
between countries and entrenched identities, and was loosely based on the
ancient myth of Antigone. Photographers follow the cruel leader of the avengers
as his soldiers destroy every living thing around them. Visually, it is one of the
best films of contemporary Greek cinema, although Koundouros immerses
himself into an obscure mythology of interstitial spaces where homeless refugees
live suspended between territories and societies. It is at the same time a powerful
film, exploring violence and war with moral indignation and humanistic rage.
Panayiotis Karkanevatos’ Soil and Water (Homa kai Nero) was another
exploration of the Greek countryside as it hosted illegal immigrants after
the changes that took place at the heartland of tradition. Dimitris Makris’
Original Sin (Propatoriko Amartima) was a gritty film about sexual violence,
incest, and patricide—an extremely bleak psychological thriller about family
dynamics. Dimitris Stavrakas’ The Canary Yellow Bicycle (To Kanarini
Podilato) was an affectionate and humorous attempt to explore the influence
of education on the shaping of young minds.
Nikolaidis’ I Will See You in Hell, My Darling (Tha se do stin kolasi, agape
mou) belongs to the very personal, almost hermetic, works of an important
director, a self-conscious film noir which fantasizes about inner private
spaces and satanic rituals with a necrophiliac nostalgia for times lost or
wasted: it was the darkest of Nikolaidis’ films, made with only three actors,
and with haunting music by Nikos Touliatos and great photography by Yorgos
Argiroiliopoulos. It has exceptional cinematic accomplishments, but seems
to be a perfect exercise in style, a private fantasy and a personal paradise,
mostly refining the cannibalistic atmosphere of his previous Singapore Sling.
Vassilis Kehagias notes the “post-world” in the film as it frames a space
“out-of-here, a cinematic external field in which the viewer’s fantasies and the
gaps in the film converge separating us from the tasteless here and now.”11
Three international co-productions must also be mentioned; Katerina
Filippou’s The Boys (Ta Agoria) was a gripping psychological thriller about
the murder of a boy that happened in 1972 during the holidays of an
English school in Greece. Kostas Natsis’ Innocent (Athoos) was a drama
set in Paris, as a man, after release from prison, tries to live and rekindle
interest in life working as a taxi-driver. Finally, Michael Cacoyannis’ The
Cherry Orchard, starring an impressive international cast, received mixed

reviews. Cacoyannis was in his own universe of dysfunctional families and
hidden motives, of subtle gestures and sensitive words. The film represents
the ultimate consummation of his theatricality, transforming the stage
into a parable about something larger; as David Jays observes: “Although
Cacoyannis never elides the family’s irresponsibility, he also shivers with a
class on the verge of dissolution.”12
Panos Koutras’ The Attack of the Giant Moussaka (I Epithesi tou
Gigantiaiou Mousaka), a Hellenic adaptation of the cult movie by Irvin
Yeaworth, The Blob (1958), was a hilarious and campy lampooning of politi-
cians, with quirky transgender representations that exposed the amorality of
mass media through a creative pastiche of inter-filmic references, subversive
gender roles, and a caustic social commentary. The depiction of gender and
sexuality as public spectacles is tongue in cheek, as it shows the new trends in
sexual morality in Greek society. Thematically, the film foregrounded gender
as social performance, sometimes seen by the gender-benders themselves in
the imaginary mirror of their narcissism. The film was an interesting stylistic
melange of American films from the 1950s and the wittily explosive works by
Pedro Almodovar, and introduced a new sense of crackling serious humor,
through self-irony, parody, and sarcasm. It was so refreshing to watch a
film that, within such negative social context, didn’t take itself too seriously
and spoofs its own message. “We are all that moussaka,” says one of the
characters—meaning, we are all edible, digestible, and totally excremental!
The revival of comedies which became instant box office successes can
be seen with the release of a substantial number of them over the next ten
years. Papathanasiou and Reppas’ Safe Sex was followed by Perakis’ Female
Company (Thiliki Etaireia), Nikos Zervos, Female Vices (Vitsia Ginaikon,
2000), Olga Mallea’s, Rissoto (2000), and more importantly Papathanasiou-
Reppas’ Silicon Tears (To Gelio Bgike apo ton Paradiso, 2001) were the most
successful productions commercially, reviving the old tradition of comedy
blockbusters which succeeded in bringing the audience back to the cinema,
just like the good old days. Yet most of these films were in a renewed form
of erotic skin flick, titillating the senses of an audience which, despite its
presumed sexual liberation, felt repressed and sexually undernourished—
unless this is an indication of perpetual sexual stimulation or of a disguised
sexual insecurity. As for their scripts, most of them were extended television
films, which produced lots of laughs but had no real sense of humor.
The First Years of the New Century

The first year of the new millennium started with an increased number of
films in production. Around 45 films and documentaries were released in
2000 and 2001. From the documentaries, Philippos Koutsaftis’ Unsmiling
Stone (Agelastos Petra) was an extraordinary and haunting work on the city
life of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. Among the fiction films, Vangelis
Serdaris’ The Seventh Sun of Love (O Evdomos Ilios tou Erota) was a suggestive
and poignant historical drama about an army officer who returns to his
village mutilated from the Asia Minor campaign. The tense exploration of
the personal traumas of war is presented with affection and sensitivity, with
the music of Mikis Theodorakis adding emotional depth. Athena Rachel-
Tsangari’s first long experimental film The Slow Business of Going explored
the effects of the society of spectacle as a woman belonging to a fringe
political group travels the world recording experiences and passions.
Maria Iliou’s Alexandria is probably one the best films of the decade. It
tells the story of a mother and daughter as they discover the indelible marks
on their lives made by the past when they visit the city of the mother’s youth.
With visual force and sensitivity, Iliou constructed a Proustian narrative
about the recollection of the past through the eyes of two women in the
legendary city where ancient traditions and modern realities converge.
Vassilis Boudouris’ The Apple of Discord (To Milo tis Eridos) was a
sensitive exploration of the hidden emotions between two brothers as a
woman comes between them. Angelos Frantzis’ musical comedy Polaroid
was a pioneering experiment with the new handheld cameras, almost an
experiment with cinema direct. The story is about a group of friends who
put together a musical as they are running up and down the empty streets of
Athens, at the moment that all its inhabitants are transfixed in front of the
television sets watching the 1998 Mundial.
Constantine Giannaris released his August 15th (Dekapentaugustos)
in 2001, exploring the fears and insecurities of the petit-bourgeoisie as an
illegal immigrant invades the sanctum of their conventional bliss, the myth
of the previous decades, their comfortable and object-crammed apartment.
The story is about the exodus of a family from Athens during the religious
holiday dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin Mary towards their village.
In their empty house, the unwanted stranger, the uncanny intruder, takes
possession of everything they have acquired and enjoys some hours of
humanizing luxury. The film satirizes one of the main rituals of contem-
porary urban Greece with bitterness and empathy. Despite the latent anxiety
and fear, Giannaris infuses his story with unusual subtexts and references,
exploring the emotional bond between mother and child (the real meaning
of Mary’s life), adding an uncanny religious innocence to the incomprehen-
sible ecclesiastical ritualism.
In the same year, Lakis Papastathis produced his eerie and fasci-
nating adaptation of a short story, The Only Journey of His Life (To Monon
tis Zois tou Taxidion), an accomplished and majestic recreation of the
late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, with Greeks and Turks living
side by side under the shadow of a declining sultanate. The film was an
international production, and deserves more attention, since it is here that

Papastathis actually constructs an apt and evocative representation of the
elusive authentic “Greekness” that he had been struggling for in his previous
films. But now, instead of depicting a defensive Greek identity, an identity
under siege, he represents it as coexistence and interdependence, as mutual
differences converging within common spaces through binding rituals and
shared memories. The short story by Yeorgios Vizyenos (a legendary literary
figure, who died in a mental asylum) is intertwined with the personal story
of the writer as he remembers his early life and the formation of his artistic
conscience in a confusion between reality and madness.
The comedian Ilias Logothetis gives one of the most emotionally
charged performances in Greek cinema. The elegiac atmosphere of a lost
unity is magnificently recreated by Yannis Daskalothanasis’ cinematography.
Papastathis himself calls it “optic nostalgia for an era he hadn’t lived,”13 and
the film constructed a magical fairy tale of love and loss in the imaginary
land between sanity and madness, in an Ottoman Empire of illusions and
dreams.
Andreas Pantzis’ The Promise (To Tama) set in Cyprus in 1940 explored
notions of religious devotion and faith—an international production with
excellent cast and great cinematography by the Bulgarian Nikolay Lazarov.
Thanassis Skroumbelos’ Aliosha must also be also mentioned for its superb
use of jump cuts and fast editing to construct the story of a Russian
assassin and his Dostoevskyan inner battle, as he discovers that he has been
contracted to kill his own mother in Greece.
Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’ The Back Door (I Piso Porta), Sotiris Goritsas’
Brazileiro, Andonis Kafetzopoulos’ Stop Man (Stackaman), Dimitris
Giatzouzakis’ Pink Forever (Roz Olotaxos), Nikos Zapatinas’ Lump Sum
(Efapax), and Renos Haralambidis’ Cheap Cigarettes (Ftina Tsigara) show
the sustained attempts to reclaim audiences with good comic narrative films
that revived the tradition of the old commercial Greek cinema. Certainly,
2001 was the year of successful comedies, especially with the huge success of
Mihalis Reppas and Thanassis Papathanasiou’s The Silicon Tears (To Klama
Bgike apo ton Paradiso), a highly imaginative parody of the various genres
that dominated cinema in Greece.
In 2002, Penny Panayotopoulou’s Hard Farewells, My Father (Dyskoloi
Apoheraitismoi, o Pateras Mou), Nikos Panayiotopoulos’ I am Tired of
Killing My Lovers (Kourastika na Skotono tous Agapitikous mou), Nikos
Nikolaidis’ The Loser Takes Everything (O Hamenos ta Pairnei Ola), and
Yannis Oikonomidis’ Matchbox (Spirtokouto) distinguish themselves within
a set of mediocre films that explore emotional violence and loss of innocence
in an era of vulgar affluence.
The proximity of realistic representation to a distorted and grotesque
form of documentary-naturalism found in the last film its most extreme and
crude depiction. In most of these films, we see an autobiographical mode

dominating the narrative, an element that gives them, even when they are
using confronting language, an existential authenticity which was missing
from Greek cinema.
Katerina Evangelakou’s You Will Regret it (Tha to Metanioseis)
explored the new freedom that women desire to experience and demand
to achieve. Maria Paradeisi observes that, through a discontinuous
narrative and using “a light comic tone, Evangelakou presents the different
nature of female and male desires, by focusing on women’s fear of
facing the unknown and overturning familiar situations.”14 Nikos Perakis’
comedy The Bubble (I Fouska), set in the stock exchange of Athens before
the scandal of 1999, explored the ruthlessness and the superficiality of the
big investors.
A special film was Nikos Grammatikos’ The King (O Vasilias), an attempt
to explore the secretive and insular society of a Greek village as a young man
returns to start anew after escaping his former life of drug addiction and
urban squalor. The suspicion, fear, and malice of a society that has no place
for the stranger (in this film the social outcast is the stranger) are explored
through a realistic cinematic language reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s visual
idiom—yet fierce social criticism and a deep empathy for the outcast stops
the film short of pretension or self-indulgence.
The main character (superbly performed by Vangelis Mourikis) moves
through the claustrophobic village, the topos where presumably authentic
Greek hospitality abides, with horror and detachment, unable to achieve the
transforming redemption through interaction with the purity of natural life.
The outcast discovers that the village is the ultimate infernal punishment for
his inability to take control of his self and act with responsibility. Through
unstable shots, constant camera movement and unnerving close-ups,
Grammatikos constructs a story against the background of burnt forests and
abandoned houses, creating a tragic atmosphere of absence and lack. The
film stands out as the new parable of the character of the Greek countryside,
depicting it as a place of imprisonment and exile.
Just as many films in 2003 struggled to win audience support with
various stylistic elaborations of a renewed realism. Some special contribu-
tions among them, such as Marital Hibernation (Gamilia Narki) by Dimitris
Indares, Eyes in the Night (Matia stin Nihta) by Pericles Hursoglou, and
Oxygen, or Blackmail Boy (Oxigono) by Reppas and Papathanasiou, created
high expectations, especially in the way they struggled to fuse the cinematic
and the telefilmic.
Elisavet Hronopoulou’s feature debut A Song is Not Enough (Ena
Tragoudi Den Ftanei) represented the dichotomies in the female heart
between social engagement and family life, in a story set during the
dictatorship. Hronopoulou structured her story on a fragmented narrative
divided into two timelines and explored the difficulty of “coming to terms
with the past.”15
The most successful film of the year, which gained international distri-
bution and much praise, was Tasos Boulmetis’ A Touch of Spice (Politiki
Kouzina). It is a film that wavers between decent melodrama and sugary
sentimentalism and which, despite its technical artistry and interesting story,
fails to construct a convincing narrative about the destiny of the Greeks who
were expelled from Istanbul in 1963. Despite some good moments in the
script and superb cinematography, the movie fizzles out into cute episodes
and pretty landscapes unable to create atmosphere and mood.
The year of the Athens Olympics, 2004, was particularly interesting for
Greek films. Thirty-two feature films were made, two of them international
productions which indicated a growing appeal to find sponsors outside the
country and to make films that could suit international audiences.
The most successful film was Pandelis Voulgaris’ The Brides (Oi Nifes),
an international production under the supervision of Martin Scorsese. The
film sold 700,000 tickets in Greece alone and won a number of prestigious
awards at the Thessaloniki Festival, but it is rather weak and sentimental
and fails to stand next to Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963) or even
Emmanuelle Crialese’s Golden Door (La Porte d’Or, 2008), a film also
produced by Martin Scorsese. Nevertheless, it was an elegant and well-
designed melodrama, occasionally corny and vapid, but with stunning colors
and a dreamlike atmosphere of wonderment and strangeness.
Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow (To Livadi pou Dakrizei) was
the other highly ambitious film of the year, which failed however to win
international acclaim. It has great visuals and stunning cinematography
by Andreas Sinanos, but the film suffers from a rather complicated script
and a strange oscillation between epic and lyrical modes of representation.
When Angelopoulos becomes personal, as in the beginning of this movie,
his visual language pulsates with intensity and power. When he reverts to his
old monumental style, a certain incommensurability emerges between the
form and its significations. The personal is the new mode to have emerged
in the latest films by Angelopoulos. After the overtly autobiographical mode
in Eternity and a Day, the mode of the emotionally charged melodrama
invites the viewer to participate in an empathic union with the story and its
characters—an unexpected gesture on his part towards the tradition of the
much-excoriated Hollywood.
Ilias Giannakakis’ Alemagia was a poignant film about the Greek
diaspora returning from Ethiopia, while Denis Iliadis’ Hardcore was a
revealing exposé of the Athenian brothel culture and its interaction with the
reality shows that dominate Greek television. Yannis Soldatos’ documentary
on the great comedian Thanassis Vengos, A Man for All Times (Anthropos
Pantos Kairou) is also worth mentioning for its sincere exploration of the
life and drama of a great actor. Eleni Alexandraki’s The Nostalgic Woman
(I Nostalgos) was a successful adaptation of a literary classic by Alexandros
Papadiamantis made with a meticulous regard for atmosphere and settings.
Dimitris Athanitis’ Planet Athens (I Poli ton Thaumaton) was a charming
multinational drama set in Athens during the Olympics—when a variety of
characters from all over the world search for their personal miracle which
sometimes does arrive.
Kostas Zappas’ Uncut Family was a film about family psycho-sexual
dynamics, while Panousopoulos’ Testosterone was an interesting social
allegory with strange sexual obsessions. Lakis Lazopoulos’ My Best Friend
(O Kaliteros Mou Filos, 2001) and R20 (2004) were charming and delightful
comedies with a strong existential message, made by a master comedian.
Finally, Panos Koutras’ Real Life (Althini Zoi) was a surreal and complex
psychological drama of reversed roles and uncanny fantasies about death
and destruction. The scene with the burning Acropolis is definitely one of
the most memorable in recent Greek cinema.
However, another film by Constantine Giannaris was the most signif-
icant contribution of the year. Earlier in the decade, a frustrated young
immigrant from Albania hijacked a local bus and, with the threat of a gun,
demanded to be taken to the border. On the bus, he held almost 30 people
hostage and the whole incident became a media circus until they reached
the border, where the young man was killed by the police. This real incident
became the basis for Giannaris’ film Hostage (Omiros) which explored
the lethal interplay between genuine problems in society, their spectacu-
larization through the media, and the inability of the state to communicate
effectively with its own people. The story retained a strong psychoanalytic
undercurrent, as it is implied that the Albanian youth Elion, who had an
affair with the wife of a policeman, was sexually abused by the latter at the
police station: the gun, the hostages, and the return to his motherland was
a desperate and self-destructive attempt to retain his violated masculinity.
Stathis Papadopoulos seems totally immersed in the role, radiating with
anger, agony, and frustrated sexuality. Theodora Tzima excels as his confused
and overwhelmed mother.
Despite some problems with technique, largely due to the restrained
space of a bus, the film explores the Other as a psychological agent, and
constructs a narrative about what happens in the mind of an outcast when
everything and everyone are against him. This is a not a facile film about
xenophobia and racism; it is a complex story about a community of people
which, despite its new network of communication—the media—is unable
and ultimately unwilling to establish common communicative codes. With
Giannaris’ film the absence of a culture of dialogue and consent in Greek
society receives its most striking representation.
With all of these films it was becoming obvious that a new movement, an
innovative gaze full of curiosity, ingenuity, and contradiction was gradually

crystallizing and that the new directors had totally abandoned the excesses
of auterish and commercial traditions alike, and had formed distinct styles
of their own. A renaissance of independent cinema, uncontrolled by state
bureaucracy, was well under way. A distinct narrative language was slowly
being put together based on a new hybrid style of representation, inter-
mingling documentary and fiction, combining elements of burlesque and
pastiche, and paying homage to the great names of world cinema, while
showing both continuity with and departure from the conventions and
certainties of the past. Now the whole world becomes the studio, as the
camera moves everywhere without stylization or illusionist techniques. The
openness of space has created a roaming camera, insatiable and curious,
discovering elements of a new cinematic language in the most trivial and
insignificant details of everyday life. Thodoros Soumas concludes that:
The cinema of this generation is primarily fictional and narrative, following

the accepted narrative rules (usually of the American narrative cinema,
classical or independent). It is mainly a cinema with films based on
characters and situations . . . The movies of the new film-makers are open
and accessible, improve the relationship between cinema and its audience,
aspiring to establish a closer connection with it and to express its distinct
pulse.16
2005–2010: Social Collapse and Cinematic Renewal

After the successful if hugely over-budget Athens Olympics in 2004, the
winning of the football UEFA Cup, and—the ultimate boon of European
popular culture—victory in the 2005 Eurovision Song contest, it seemed that
throughout the world “Greece was the word!” Stathis Gourgouris defined
such “spontaneous Hellenomania” as:
. . . purely mythological, utterly explosive, and all embracing, unorganized,
and unguided by any political force, unreflective of any grand image or
‘great idea,’ [carrying] in the depths of bliss, a sense of the miraculous.17
Meanwhile, as appearances never deceive, the Greek government was

confident that it had the economy under control, had managed to avoid
a racist backlash regarding the increasing number of illegal immigrants
entering the country, and had prevented social unrest by satisfying union
demands for salary increases. It even acted against its own declarations
by granting tenure to part-time or epochal workers, thus inflating even
further the public sector; salaries were increased despite the fall in produc-
tivity, industrial activity, and investment. Society was having a great time,
with enormous public spending and private wealth amassed through tax
evasion, black-market activities and nefarious business with legal and illegal
investors. The seemingly endless funding packages from the European
Union continued in defiance of all common sense: the idea that Greece for
some reason was still an exception and a special case which placed it beyond
criticism and obligations seemed to dominate the political decisions and the
economic practices of the Union.
Soon, the underlying social crisis exploded. Vast bushfires in the
Peloponnese in the summer of 2007 proved the inability of the bureaucracies
to coordinate themselves against natural disasters. In December 2008, the
assassination of a youth in the center of Athens by two idle macho policemen
showed that the government was not in control of the state apparatuses
either. Soon after, massive confrontational demonstrations against a terrified,
impotent, and totally neutralized government erupted with immense force,
violence, and destructiveness. Nobody had seen anything similar since 1973;
and now it was not only the students, but the overwhelming majority of the
population which expressed its suspicion and distrust of a prime minister
who dedicated most of his time to computer games and lavish banquets.
Stathis Gourgouris aptly observes that:
The deeper historical and political significance of the December insur-
rection may still elude us, though there is no doubt that this event will
remain a key reference in radical history and in the history of youth
movements worldwide. The hermeneutical work in this case is made
harder by the fact that the insurgent actors demanded precisely that we
dismantle our ways of interpreting and representing the world.18
The conservatives understood that the social uprising was beyond their
ability or willingness to control and avoided claiming responsibility for what
had happened. The Greek political establishment has imposed a culture of
historical irresponsibility on the social reality and mentality of the country.
But the worst was still to come.
After the global economic meltdown in 2008, all the disguised
deficiencies of the Greek economy transformed overnight the affluent
society into a panic-stricken community of beggars. The establishment
that controlled all political processes since 1975 suddenly found itself
accountable, not to the Greek people whom it could manipulate and mislead
through the collusion of media, but to the European Union and the inter-
national markets. It could no longer hide its frauds and deceptions. Under
the pressure of the global financial crisis, all the concessions that had been
made for decades in order to help the Greek economy adjust to the interna-
tional environment simply became irrelevant and dangerous for the other
members of the Eurozone. Since the ruling party was once again unwilling to
take responsibility, it declared elections in October 2009, which it lost with a
massive swing away of 15 percent, securing first immunity from prosecution
for all its ministers—a principle on which both main ruling parties seem to
be in amicable agreement.
The socialists returned triumphantly to power, under the leadership
of Yorgos Papandreou Jr., the son of Andreas and grandson of Yorgos, who
appointed as his main ministers the people who had first created the problem
and who by now were miraculously considered “reformed” and thus capable
of solving it. By the end of 2010, the country essentially was supervised by
the International Monetary Fund and the European Union as an implicit
recognition of the failure of both conservatives and socialists to govern. And
the tragicomedy continues to this day with the new “socialist” government
trying to solve economic problems by implementing the most Thatcherite
policies ever concocted—policies that have deeply influenced not simply the
funding but the production of films made in the country. Until now, 2011,
Greece comes closer and closer to declaring once again, “Regretfully, we are
bankrupt!” as it did back in 1892.
While the Papandreou family and the Socialist Party came to power
again, as the messianic saviors of the country, a new element emerged: the
abstention vote rose up to almost 30 percent, something quite unimaginable
in such a politicized society. This period of unrest, frustration, and disen-
chantment with politics and politicians succeeded the previous ten years
of growth, affluence, and irresponsibility—and many were left wondering
if Papandreou Jr. wanted to save the collapsing economy or the corrupt,
incompetent, and dangerous post-1974 political establishment.
Under such a period of a presumed economic boom followed by a total
collapse, Greek cinema continued its own independent and lonely path.
Between 2005 and 2010 a number of interesting and challenging films were
made, probably because of the co-sponsorship by the European Union or,
on some occasions, by the national and private television channels, which
invested part of the prescribed 1.5 percent of their profits in making films.
An average of 20 to 25 films was produced every year for the last five years,
through multiple sponsorship and international productions, and with a
rather diverse audience in mind. For the first time, Greek film-makers try
to reach out and make movies for international audiences, by exploring
themes and constructing stories which touch upon the wider questions of
national and personal identity under the new conditions of globalization and
transculturality.
In 2005, Yannis Diamantopoulos’ The Blue Dress (To Galazio Forema)
presented a rather weak subversion of the masculine stereotypes of Greek
society with the facile Freudianism of its story, but it is an interesting movie
if only for its ingenious use of inner space to depict the psychological claus-
trophobia that permeates social reality. The central character of a transsexual
indicates a completely new “cultural hero” emerging from the ashes of all
great heroes of the past. All ideologues, political activists, and ambitious
reformers of social life converge in the new image of a masculinity that does
not know what to do with its body and disposes of its phallus.
Nikolaidis’ The Zero Years was another hermetic and highly personal
film, reminiscent of Pasolini’s Salo (1975) and Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1968),
as four women living in a state-owned brothel act out their sado-masochistic
fantasies with willing clients. If there was to exist something that might be
called “Mediterranean baroque,” it can be found in Nikolaidis’ later films.
Gratuitous violence, kinky yet mechanical sex, and great cinematography
create a strange melange which simply repeats what he has done before—this
film confirmed the fossilization of a visual style which had transformed itself
into a self-conscious manneristic extravaganza.
Lioumpe by Lagia Giourgou is a frank and honest exploration of
the theme of the stranger within a society that worships convention and
conformism. Yannis Oikonomidis’ Soul in the Mouth (Psyhi sto Stoma)
“documents” the latent violence permeating Greek society as an abuse of
meaning and verbal communication—it is an edgy experiment although it
somehow seems to implode within its own gritty and stifling realism. Yorgos
Nousias’ The Evil (To Kako) is an ambitious experiment with storyline
and digital effects. Dialogue that sparkles and is full of humor makes
this film unique as it consciously parodies Hollywood B-movies with a
minimal budget yet highly infectious and fascinating sense of action. Makis
Papadimitratos’ Tweet (Tsiou) is a strange film about a group of junkies
struggling to find drugs in the underworld of Athens—good cinematog-
raphy, akin to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), and good acting, but the
film’s sense of time shows it to have been made for television and that it was
rather overstretched for screening in cinemas.
Nikos Grammatikos’ Vigil (Agripnia) is a well-paced story about the
reconciliation between two brothers, one a corrupt policeman and the other
a priest; very good acting and a good script lead to a climactic ending. Yorgos
Lanthimos (b. 1973) made his debut with Kinetta, with minimal budget and
very few actors, in a Kafkaesque suspense story in which a policeman inves-
tigates a number of killings at a tourist resort. Lanthimos said: “All elements
are realistic but the end result looks totally unrealistic: at the moment
you film reality it is transformed into something else.” Maria Katsounaki
observes that this was a film:
. . . wavering between something artistically extreme and narratively
indeterminate. A handmade, unembellished film . .
. The deliberate
unnatural movement of bodies creates an interesting relationship between
space, bodies, and characters in front of the camera.19
This is a new style in Greek cinema, obviously influenced by Dogme

95 principles, which would eventually bring international recognition to
Lanthimos with his next movie (Dogtooth).
Renos Haralambidis’ The Heart of the Beast (I Kardia tou Ktinous) is

an effective adaptation of a contemporary novel in an attempt to revive
quality commercial cinema—unfortunately, as on many occasions the script
was rather weak, based on repeated punchlines and overused witticisms.
Kafetzopoulos’ Women are Cruel People (I Ginaika einai Anthropos Skliros)
was a funny comedy on sexual morality and contemporary advertising
practices. Within the same genre Nikos Perakis released his highly successful
Sirens in the Aegean (Seirines sto Aigaio) which nonetheless failed to reach
the heightened comic sense he had achieved in his early films.
Angeliki Antoniou released her award-winning Edouart in 2006; the
story of an Albanian immigrant who, after committing a crime, takes
responsibility for it. The film is an international production and presents a
new understanding of the threatening presence of the illegal immigrant. By
exploring the interiority of his mind, the film represents the ultimate fear of
Greek middle-class respectability, the Albanian immigrant, as a moral agent,
as an autonomous individual with an existential understanding of what is
right and wrong. Dimitris Koutsiampasakos’ The Guardian’s Son (O Yios
tou Filaka) was a sensitive depiction of life in the country as young people
leave urban centers and return to their family homes in the villages. The
exploration of the memories that they unearth there and the impact of these
on their own minds is skillfully and aptly represented in the film. Yorgos
Stamboulopoulos’ Pandora revisited the post-Civil War period through the
memories of an old man recollecting the secrets of the time when a Greek-
American woman had come and unsettled their rural peace.
In 2007, Yannis Smaragdis released his much-anticipated and discussed
El Greco, which was a commercial success, despite the fact that it is lacking
in narrative rhythm, character delineation, and effective script. The attempt
to “Hellenise” such a European, cosmopolitan but, most importantly, univer-
salist Christian artist dwarfed his stature and diminished his artistic legacy
into a picturesque provincial caricature. Goristas’ Friendships (Parees) was
a melancholic exploration of the relations between five friends as they
find themselves entangled in a web of suspicions about a murder. A strong
element of autobiography gives this otherwise weak film great emotional
strength. Filippos Halatsis released his macabre slasher horror Razor in
English, full of gore, effectively underscored by Panayotis Xanthopoulos’
music, and with great special effects by the Alafouzos brothers.
Straightstory was a campy and quirky reversal of the “natural order”
made by Efi Mouriki and Vladimiros Kyriakidis. In a dream, the whole world
is made by the values, institutions, and principles of homosexuality. Men
like men, and women like women. They only mate for procreation and are
not allowed to form heterosexual emotional bonds. Society is organized on
homo-normativity—heterosexual bonds are not only illegal but considered
morally and aesthetically abhorrent. The story about a boy developing
feelings for a woman and the persecution he suffers at the hands of his two
fathers is both the funny and tragic element of the film: because when he
wakes up from this dream, he sees that it is the heterosexual oppression that
persecutes him.
In 2008, two films by the old masters dominated interest. Angelopoulos’
The Dust of Time (I Skoni tou Hronou) starring William Dafoe, Bruno Ganz,
Michel Piccoli, and Irene Jacob, was one of the most ambitious experiments
with narrative time we have seen in Angelopoulos’ career. Its melodra-
matic, almost Sirkian mode, emerged dominant with emotional conflicts,
performed with Stanislavkian empathy in pure Aristotelian poetics. Despite
the film’s over-plotting (the converging storylines are confusing in many
ways), the film problematizes memory and reality within a cosmopolitan
environment with new elements, such as an explicit love, not simply for the
generation of socialist ideologues, but for the new generation which wastes
itself in drugs and self-destructive behavior.
Angelopoulos has expanded his narrative language here to incorporate
the new tragic realities, in a world without borders or revolutionary projects.
Yet one who has followed his cinematic development still remembers the
exquisite simplicity and lucid linearity of Reconstruction with nostalgia.
However, in an era of cynicism, resentment, and scorn, the emotional
power—even the sentimentalism—of this film functions as an antidote,
reminding its audience of a quality of being somehow forgotten or deferred.
The other grand master, Voulgaris, released his new vision of the Civil
War with Deep Soul (Psihi Vathia), using an emotionally overinflated story
as two brothers find themselves on opposite sides during the Civil War.
The performance of Thanassis Vengos makes the film explode with intense
emotional energy and psychological tension. However, the strange lighting,
bizarre camera filters, and Hollywood editing make the film rather uneven,
as the superb technique overtakes the tragic reality of the story.
Vangelis Seitanidis’ Under Your Makeup (Kato Apo to Makigiaz Sou)
is a simple personal story about a woman’s life spiraling out of control
after her involvement in a traffic accident. The interesting dialogue and
poignant story lead to certain improbabilities and oversimplifications in
the script which is kept together only through the good performance by
Ariel Constantinidis. Nikos Cornelios’ The Music of Faces (I Mousiki ton
Prosopon) is an independent film with next to no budget, totally made on
digital handheld camera, which explores the mystery of the human face
through the stories of different young people from dawn to dusk. There is
no script, only the free improvisation of actors who extract meaning from
the random interconnection of small and grand ideas and actions. “The film,
says Cornelios, is about the noisy crowd that each one of us carries within.”
Two comedies were also box office successes: Argyris Papadimitratos’
Bank Bang and the remake of the 50s comedy Ilias of the 16th Branch (O
Ilias tou Dekatou Ektou) by Nikos Zapatinas. Both films have a distinct and
contemporary sense of humor. Mihalis Reppas and Thanassis Papathanasiou’s
Strictly Appropriate (Afstiros Katallinon) is another outrageously insane film,
which depicts the story of two young art directors who, after failing to
produce a classical love story as their first feature, end up with a producer of
ancient porn films. The simultaneous production of hard-core porn and an
art film on Phaedra, Madam Bovary, and Anna Karenina creates scenes of
great comic explosions.
Tonis Lykouresis’ Slaves in their Prison (Sklavoi sta Desma tous) was
an evocative adaptation of a literary classic, by Konstantinos Theotokis,
with great performances and a successful reconstruction of early twentieth-
century Corfu. The film must be seen in contrast to Marketaki’s The Price
of Love (1983), if only to detect the new theme of political impasse that
dominates the story of a family doomed to self-destruction, unable to
move on and unwilling to accept change. The false “communitarian” feeling
created by the socialists in the 1980s finds here its ultimate debunking: the
fall of the family is the fall of all amoral familialism, of all familiocracy, of
the most powerful institution that dominates Greek politics. As Lykouresis
stated:
I am not interested in directing a period piece, dedicated in the antiquarian
depiction of an aristocratic family and representing the manner codes of
the period. I want to elucidate the personalities and the psychological
states of heroes from within a modern interpretive style, knowing that
similar aspirations and conflicts mark our contemporary life.20
Despite the meticulous precision in reconstructing a bygone era, Lykouresis

avoided naturalism through an impressionistic abstraction based on
painterly colors and nuances, reminiscent of Paul Cézanne, that make this
film an eloquent parable of the political and social morass dominating
contemporary Greek society.
In 2009, Panos Koutras’ Strella (A Woman’s Way) also dealt with
masculine stereotypes and the new queer identities that gradually replaced
them. The film is both liberating and shocking, exhilarating and blasphemous,
confronting Greek society and especially paternalistic masculinity with its
own phobias and insecurities. Released after 15 years in prison for murder,
Yorgos meets and has sex with a transsexual prostitute. Soon he will discover
that the transsexual Strella (a compound name comprised of Stella and
trella—“madness”) is his own son who has changed gender.
Koutras’ camera captures—in super-16mm film which enhances color—
the squalor and the poetry of everyday life and, at the same time, the need
for genuine communication and the sublime humanism exhibited by the
marginalized outcasts of contemporary life. The depiction of the dying
transsexual (so irreverently performed by the legendary transsexual Betty),
with its inspiring absence of fear and euphoric celebration of life till the last
minute is one of the most exhilarating and encouraging images of this film.
Koutras takes Greek cinema out of the closet, by showing its dirtiest
laundry—yet he does so with love, empathy, and compassion, totally
rejecting guilt-ridden introspection and opaque self-referentiality. As
Dimitris Papanikolaou concludes:
Strella puts things back again in their place, morally aesthetically, pedagog-
ically . . . From this point of view, the movie does not simply suggest a
model for a new family structure: by tracing the trajectories of desire that
keep it together it becomes the fairy tale that brings the new family to the
same table. So Strella becomes the complete homology of what in the past
we used to call with certainty “a film for the whole family.”21
The story explores the sexual labyrinth of normal families and problema-
tizes normality as a mechanism of psychological sterilization and emotional
death. Of course, it leaves many issues unanswered: despite Koutras’
statements, incest has been the most powerful taboo throughout human
civilization. Whenever it was transgressed, all values collapsed; this is the
story in, for example, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969). You cannot
have sex with your father and then throw a party to celebrate new forms of
family structure! The intensity of tragic transgression, even of a conscious
and deliberate tragic transgression, is lost in the film. Even at the level of
intentionally personal symbols, liberation should be followed or indeed be
preceded by moral responsibility—otherwise the mistakes of parents will
simply haunt the children. The film ends somehow awkwardly, since the
immense complexity of the issues raised are left unanswered. The sacred
hill of the Acropolis is full of fireworks and confetti in celebration of the
new year. The optimistic note about new practices and new forms of social
organization emerging from the margin of contemporary society proves
once again the truth that art offers hope even at the gates of Hell.
Panos Koutras, Strella (A Woman’s Way) (2009). Courtesy,

Panos Koutras. Credit DVD
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kinodontas) is a bleak parable about the family

as the locus of disseminating power and meaning. The film illustrates the extreme
forms of domination that family structures can impose on their own offspring,
creating the “iron cage” of the future. It gained wide international recognition and
expressed something quite different: a culture dominated by the incommensura-
bility between public and private discourse. In a confined isolated private space,
language is re-signified and manipulated; reality becomes unreal and the unreal
a valid form of communicative interaction. Boyd Van Hoeij called the film “an
eternal Big Brother house as designed by Lars von Trier.” And he continued:
The ingeniously constructed screenplay also shows how wrong or irrational
teachings can quickly spiral out of control, with increasingly disturbing
humor used at first to leaven the proceedings before making us laugh at
the painfully logical conclusions to all the preceding lies.22
It is obvious that Lanthimos is becoming an internationally acclaimed

director as he succeeds in constructing a language that is not reducible to
its cultural particulars. His visual idiom is transferrable and translatable,
his images can easily be interpreted and absorbed by audiences who know
nothing about Greece, while his stories strike a chord with the international
quest for a radical re-signification of tradition.
Another interesting film from 2009, by Philippos Tsitos, Plato’s Academy
(Akadimia Platonos), has the indicative subtitle: “You will never become
Greek” taken from a notorious racist slogan by ultra-nationalists. The story
is simple: a disgruntled and frustrated Greek turns his anger against all
foreigners, especially Chinese and Albanians, until his mother, after a stroke,
starts speaking only in Albanian. The world of certainties and rewards
surrounding his identity is then shaken and gradually collapses. Despite the
shortcomings of its script, Tsitos’ film captures the new urban landscape,
Yorgos Lanthimos, Dogtooth (2009). Courtesy, Yorgos

Lanthimos. Credit: DVD
filled as it is with unfamiliar symbols of cultural otherness, and records a

spatial reality punctuated by strange presences. The old reality of a singular
space for all has been transformed into an exclusivist club that keeps out
difference. The film depicts the atmosphere of an insular mentality and uses
a new form of gritty photographic realism to deal with a society in obvious
painful decline.
Made in the middle of the worst economic meltdown of 2008/9, when
the conservative government was simply plundering the country, the film
implicitly reflected the great fear of every modern Greek citizen: that within
Greek society the great unknown is the Greek himself. Given also the fact
that it is the mother that rediscovers her original language, one can easily
understand the allegory: we don’t really know much about the motherland,
her history, her origins, and her language.
Finally, Margarita Manta’s first feature film Golden Dust (Hrisoskoni)
explores what the director calls “the war between memory and oblivion.”23
After the death of a mother, the son wants to sell the maternal home, one
sister wants to keep it as it is, and the other sister wavers between emotion
and self-interest. The film dives into the Athenian negative, investigating the
plurality of selves struggling for visibility and domination. It is also a film
imbued with nostalgia for the ideal home, in which by now only death and
absence exist.
More recently, in 2010, Syllas Tzoumerkas’ first feature film, Homeland
(Hora Proeleusis) is about the conflict between three generations of a family
and offers a challenging exploration of the crisis in family values, paternal
authority, and the new family structure emerging in periods of social crisis
when secrets are revealed and the edifice of lies and pretensions collapses.
In the film’s assets is the music by the group Drog_a_Tek, a strange melange
of techno and Greek popular music, and Pandelis Mantzanas’ camerawork,
which captured social crisis with immediacy and directness. The film encap-
sulates par excellance the looming crisis in Greek society that exploded
through mass demonstrations and conflicts with the police in late 2008,
through a semi-documentary style, with bland colors and ironic references
to the ideas encapsulated by the Greek national anthem.
Athena Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg explores after Dogtooth the
emotionally disturbed world of children from overprotective families. The
film shocks and puzzles with a 23-year-old girl’s initiation to sex and decay.
The film received a number of international awards and frames the ultimate
target of most films made during the last ten years in Greece: the sinister
character of contemporary family.
Finally, although recent production has intensified after the success of
some films previously mentioned, we must mention Yannis Oikonomidis’
Knifer (Mahairovgaltis), a film that explores the limits of realism and of
realistic representation, as a lumpenproletarian moves from a village to
Athens where he gets involved in a triangle of sex, violence, and hatred. The
film is made in black and white with the brief emergence of color through
the theatrical illusion of a play as a commentary on a life eclipsed by the
absence of direction and hope.
In early 2011, Argyres Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel released
Wasted Youth, a portrait of Athens during a heatwave. The depiction of a
young skateboarder on the verge of a mental breakdown is framed by the
incredible negative energy, aggression, and violence that dominate the tense
social conditions of the city. The directors explain that the film:
. . . is also about the real existence of adolescence with the vivacity and the
energy that silently burns in it. It is also a film about a young man who
struggles to do what all young men struggle to do, without knowing that
maybe their future will be wasted—and as it happens it is wasted indeed.24
Later in the year came Panayiotis Kravvas’ The Death I Dreamed of (O

Thanatos pou Oneireutika), an original feature film of supernatural horror
based on a true story of a Satanist cult that caused a major scandal several
years earlier. The film is made with fast editing, handheld cameras and with
all the techniques of a music-video culture as it is shaped by contemporary
social networks and the internet. It received two awards at the Los Angeles
International Underground Film Festival and by June 2011 was enjoying a
moderate commercial success.
Finally, a number of commercially successful films were released between
2009 and 2011 for which their producers are preparing sequels or even
remakes: Hristos Dimas’ Island (Nisos), Stratos Markidis’ I Love Karditsa,
Panayiotis Fafoutis’ The Heiress (I Klironomos), Yannis Xanthopoulos’ All
Goes Well (Ola tha Pane Kala) and Nikos Karapanayiotis’ I am Dying for
You (Pethaino gia Sena). Many tickets were sold, while the new trends show
that local films have managed, to a considerable degree, to gain the trust of
cinema-goers—perhaps for the wrong reasons, but nobody can really tell:
under the current critical circumstances, even the wrong reasons are good
enough for bringing the people back to movie theaters.
The Horrible Language of Numbers

As we have seen, a number of successful but formulaic comedies were
made between 2000 and 2010—they were the real blockbusters and money-
spinners for the industry offering renewed hope for its survival. Art-house
movies remained unpopular and neglected—even Angelopoulos’ movies,
despite their international acclaim, became grand failures at the box office.
It is estimated that most Greek films sell an average of 30,000 to 40,000
tickets—and that makes them successful in the local market. Comedies sell
more (Dimas’ Nisos sold 350,000 in two weeks) and the dominance of this
genre shows another strong trend in the overall production scheme, a trend
that privileges well-written populist films which, although they seem to
parody social maladies, are pure entertainment.
Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day sold 200,000 tickets in 1998 while his
Weeping Meadow in 2003 only 40,000. His latest movie, A Dust of Time in
2009, sold even fewer than that and was taken off only three weeks after its
premiere in Athens. The two other great blockbusters of the decade were the
very Hollywood-like productions A Touch of Spice (Politiki Kouzina, 2003)
by Tasos Boulmetis with 1,600,000 tickets, and Voulgaris’ Brides (Nifes, 2004)
with 700,000—neither is the best moment of its director. Overall, it is still
hard to distinguish between movies made for television and movies for the
cinema—and this suggests that cinema seems to be losing ground.
In 1999, a new experiment started with Angelos Frantzis’ Polaroid, a
successful musical comedy made with handheld cameras and computer
technology for a minimal budget. The experiment gained wider support and
many films are totally independent productions made with tiny budgets and
almost entirely without complicated studio technology.
In 2005, Yorgos Noussias released his cult zombie film The Evil (To
Kako), made with almost no money (less than €10,000) and featuring
amateur actors in blood-soaked gory action and sparkling dialogue. It
was a major success at the box office and brought Noussias more money
(€150,000) to produce its 2009 sequel Evil in the Time of Heroes (To Kako
tin Epohi ton Iroon) with Billy Zane as the only professional actor. Both
films are parodies of Hollywood splatter movies and elicit genuine laughter
and “zombie-terror,” similar to the New Zealand film Black Sheep (2006)
by Jonathan King, each spoofing the franchise symbols of their country:
merino sheep in the case of New Zealand and the ancient Greeks in the case
of Noussias’ films.
During the last ten years, radical changes have been taking place in
film culture and its organization. In 2010, there were about 400 cinemas in
Greek national territory; most of them multiplexes with restaurants, cafés,
game-stations, and other recreational facilities. Only ten percent of cinema
venues belongs to independent entrepreneurs who continue the old culture
of art cinemas opening in either winter or summer. Most multiplex cinemas
belong to international companies (Village, AudioVisual, Odeon AE, and
so forth) which import and distribute films from countries with a large
production, mainly from the United States, with some from, for example,
France, Germany, the UK, and Australia.
Greece is a very small market and its ticket sales are not substantial
enough to attract international investment. The recent financial crisis and
high levels of electronic piracy through the internet and illegal DVDs have
further marginalized the market. At the same time, the multinational distri-
bution companies release only films that they anticipate will be successful;
so the most significant films of independent cinema from the United States
are only infrequently released and are mostly commercial failures. Despite
the continuing production of local feature films (around 20 to 30 every year
with an average budget of €300,000), the most commercially successful are
American films. The biggest box-office successes of the last ten years have
been Titanic, the Harry Potter movies, and Avatar. Of the Greek films after
Safe Sex, the most successful were A Touch of Spice (2003), Sirens in the
Aegean (2005), El Greco (2007), and Deep Soul (2008)—all of them actively
promoted by the distribution agencies of multiplex cinemas (as international
productions). Village also produced Alter Ego (2007) with the pop idol Sakis
Rouvas, but with no great success.
The most successful was Smaragdis’ El Greco, with almost 800,000
tickets, despite its well-deserved bad reviews. All other films usually sell
very few tickets, and most of them, even films by prominent directors such
as Koundouros and Angelopoulos, have received limited release. In an era of
diminished expectations, an average of 20,000 to 30,000 tickets makes a film
“successful,” although it won’t be enough to recoup its production costs.
On the other hand, we don’t know much about the makeup of the
viewers during the last ten years. Since the demography has changed signifi-
cantly, who goes to the movies today? There is certainly a solid and dynamic
audience base of cine-literate people in all major cities who go to the cinema
on all possible occasions. They also act as a dynamic and effective focus
group, through their attempts to purchase abandoned old cinemas, revive
them and use them as cine-cultural centers.
But what is happening with the immigrants? A substantial 15 percent
of the population is “non-Greek” and it would be interesting to know if
they ever go to the cinema and what kind of films they like watching. Do
these new citizens have access to existing artifacts and institutions of both
high and popular culture in the country? Have they established their own
cinemas? Are there any policies in place to attract these new citizens to
watch Greek movies so that filmgoing could function as a socializing space
and the topos of communal cohabitation?
Also, more studies should be conducted on the relationship between
ticket prices and average wages and to investigate how much money an
average worker can afford in watching movies each year. What is the leisure
time relative to that of working hours dedicated to filmgoing? It is estimated
that approximately 13,000,000 tickets are sold every year (based on data for
2009 with a projected increase of 4 percent for 2010). This means that it is
almost one ticket to each inhabitant per year against four tickets per inhab-
itant in France and three in Italy and Germany.
An overall income however of €100,000,000 was grossed by the industry
between 2009 and 2010. Yet investment in the production of new films has
been minimal. Of the gross amount assigned by the state to cinema, less
than 20 percent is invested in new films; the rest is spent on administration

costs, festivals, digitalization, and so on. An existing law from 1989 stipu-
lates that private television channels should be investing in film production,
something that has happened so far only infrequently and for specific
genres—comedies. The same legislation, as revised in 1992, prescribed that
the National Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), and all nationally broad-
casting private mass media, should invest 1.5 percent of their income in
the production or co-production of films—something, again, that happens
only infrequently and then far below the prescribed percentage, although it
remains to this day one of the persistent requests from film-makers.
In a strange way, Greek films that gain recognition in international
festivals have received minimal funding by the state and the Greek Film
Center. Yet the institutional framework prescribes a special levy on public
spectacles that has to be collected by the state in order to be reinvested in
the industry—something that does not happen either, and while under the
current fiscal crisis is rather unlikely to happen any time soon.
Recently, 45 new and old film-makers established a movement called
Cinematographers in the Mist attempting to change the institutional
framework and restructure the system of production, exhibition, distribution,
and funding of films in the country. Fresh negotiations were undertaken in
December 2010 during the discussion of a new law on funding cinematic
production, but under the current situation of near bankruptcy of the
country, any vision of more state funding is a mere illusion. (With the new
legal framework, the funding of films through the Greek Film Center was
given back to the Ministry for Finances, instead of that for Culture, while the
famous 1.5 percent was lowered to 0.75!)
These unfortunate financial circumstances, however, may generate a
unique opportunity to decentralize and de-bureaucratize the system of
funding by establishing independent centers in cities other than Athens,
thus ending the homogenizing and hegemonic role of the capital. In
November 2009, an independent Greek Film Academy (Elliniki Akadimia
Kinimatografou) was established, consisting of many important film-makers,
producers, and actors in an attempt to counterbalance the continuing heavy
presence of the state, the Thessaloniki Film Festival and the Greek Film
Center. It is a self-funded organization, attracting money from private
sponsors and individuals and giving its awards every year on the basis of
what film-makers themselves decide without any political or union inter-
ference. In a sector which has been so bedeviled by political factionalism
and narrow-minded unionism, the Academy has the potential of radically
changing film culture in the country.
The Academy actively works to promote and enhance film culture in
the country and abroad by meticulously and systematically studying the
history of Greek cinema, its adventures and transformations. The study must
be as wide-ranging as possible, starting with the great films and continuing

with the mass of melodramas, comedies, and war movies. No cinematic
work should be excluded—they all reveal something of the historical devel-
opment of Greek cinema in terms of its technological infrastructure and
distribution system and its aesthetics and ideology. And as we have tried to
show in this book, in studying its history, scholars of Greek cinema must
pay attention to Laskos’ melodramas, Koundouros’ parables, Sakellarios’
hilarious comedies, Cacoyannis’ mythic characters, Kanelopoulos’ symbolic
skies, and Angelopoulos’ epic landscapes, as well as Dalianidis’ gritty
urban stories, Foskolos’ didactic manuals, Nikolaidis’ decadent worlds, and
Marketaki’s oneiric dramas.
Furthermore, only through the creation of local centers, new studios,
and new locations for film culture can a proper and creative “competition”
be inaugurated among different “cultural centers” which will challenge the
monophony and uniformity of the Athenian domination which has endured
throughout the twentieth century. Unfortunately, after 1974, and despite its
declarations to the opposite, the Athenian capital has imposed a singular
view from the centre, constructing a visual history through the ideological
mechanisms of a conservative, conformist, and patronizing state that
ignored regional specificities, alternative versions of historical experience,
or perspectives from peripheral points of view. The over-centralization that
has created an immense state bureaucracy has also totally dimmed local
voices and darkened regional visibility. In the early days of Greek cinema, a
number of interesting films were made outside Athens—this tradition must
be revived, through independent productions outside the control of the
state.
Gradually, film-makers seem to have accepted the self-evident truth
that the Greek state sponsors only what privileges the hegemonic culture of
its political and social establishment. It is not simply a matter of a malfunc-
tioning and sluggish bureaucracy which controls funding, distribution,
exhibition, and promotion. It seems imperative for the state to perpetuate
its control over the production, even without financial inducement. But
ticket sales show that such “culture” is not endorsed by the great majority of
filmgoers any more. This accounts for the continuing popularity of the old
commercial cinema, especially of comedies and melodramas, and of course
the distinct preference for American movies, especially blockbusters with
spectacular digital effects and formulaic storylines. People are not watching
American movies because they are stupid or brainwashed but because most
of the American films are better films.
After decades of sterile Eurocentric elitism, contemporary Greek
directors no longer dismiss the Hollywood tradition. Greater knowledge of
and more exposure to American films, especially by independent producers,
have shown the complexity and richness of their visual language. Moreover,
they can see how the ideological and aesthetic battle lines along which
American culture fights for the representation of identity, gender, and
sexuality have evolved and can thus appreciate more the achievements of
both classical and new American cinema. Even in Angelopoulos’ films we
can clearly detect the psychologization of colors as found in Vincente Minelli
and the choreographed emotions of Stanley Donen.
Just as the best producers and directors in the past have done, it would
be more appropriate to revive the private independent sector, in the way
that happened with Finos, Zervos, Karagiannis, and Milas in the 1950s. It
would be the only way to inaugurate a new “Golden Age” of Greek cinema,
with production diversified through various genres, catering for different
audiences and co-funded by multiple sponsors in different centers and
through a healthy competition.
European Union programs such as MEDIA Plus and Eurimages,
television channels in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and many other
countries invest in international productions. Greek film-makers should
find ways of attracting these funds: the “cultural” potential for good films
does exist, and they must abandon the introspective culture of complaint
and look for the support and acceptance they deserve. (Koutras, Giannaris,
and Antoniou among others have been very successful in attracting foreign
sponsors.) Organized promotion and co-productions seem to be the two
main strategies for gaining international recognition and acceptance.
In a globalized economy, a film may respond to the questions of many
different societies. In this sense, today there are no “national cinemas” any
more; one could even claim that there are no European cinemas either, only
world cinemas. Language, instead of being a barrier, might as well further
enhance the rediscovery of local traditions or contribute to the reinvention
and internationalization of “local knowledge.” Local stories must be told for
the local communities, but in styles defined by global discourses and the
challenges of a technology developed in different contexts and for diverse
needs. The medium does not determine the message although it confines its
limits of response; a medium that is constituted by differentiated signifiers
is more likely to find responsive audiences outside the communities that
produced it.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the post-1974 period of inflated statism
is still strong and the people who consolidated it are still in power. The
excessive expectations of the state led to the demise of Greek cinema in
the 80s and to its provincialization ever since. The ties with that period
of excess and nothingness should be severed—the indifferent and hostile
state of the postwar period was simply succeeded by the conformist and
unimaginative control of a party bureaucracy that destroyed the creative
dynamism and social energy surrounding cinematic art. The hegemonic
role of the state can be seen in the fact that, despite the supposed “social”
nature of most films, none of them is about political figures and their
political actions, the way we have seen in Italy with, for example, Nanni
Moretti, Paolo Sorrentino, Mimmo Calopresti, Paolo Virzi, Guido Chiesa,
and Gianni Amelio.
There are no films about recent political events, not even about the
endless sexual and financial scandals which could have inspired great
comedies. (The Papandreou clan, for example, can be seen as the Adams
family of gratuitous gore and moral irresponsibility!) It seems that most film-
makers, especially after the New Greek Cinema, have internalized a sense of
obedience to the state, through self-imposed censorship; meanwhile, the
current political establishment has maintained its rhetoric of opposition
while in government since 1981. They have imposed a culture of complaint,
but not a culture of critique.
Every interesting Greek film produced since the 1950s articulated a
very strong subversive and adversarial message in political terms: from
Stella to The Travelling Players, from The Ogre of Athens to The Wretches
Still Sing, from Evdokia to The Edge of the City, and from The Sky to Strella.
Many recent films seem to restrict themselves in depicting the misery and
the confusion of contemporary life, the suffering of immigrants and the
inability for effective communication in a domesticated and sanitized way
that makes their social critique irrelevant and their political intervention
harmless. Instead of revealing to the viewer what happens, by foregrounding
the radical potential within the real, this new episodic realism fizzles out
into either inconsequential fragments or cute micro-histories by wasting its
energy on incomprehensible screams or doleful complaints.
Film-makers of the 80s were satisfied with making movies about the
heroism of the Left and the oppression of the Right in clear-cut distinc-
tions between right and wrong. Yet no film touched upon the structures
and forms of oppression implemented by the state apparatuses in their time
that imposed ideological and political uniformity; or even upon the struc-
tures that made the Left behave the same way as the Right when in power,
squandering all forms of moral and political legitimacy. Their critique of
history was naive and superficial and their understanding of the past was
antiquarian and romanticized. Consequently, they lost the new generations
for whom the past was a totally strange country; but the same young people,
through their exposure to diverse representational strategies, were sensitive
enough to understand that they were deliberately deceived. Together with
them, the whole cultural memory of the country was manipulated in an
attempt to control the minds of their generation. There is no question then
as to why, even at the height of the ideological delusions of the 80s, most
people preferred watching American films: they were not only well-made
but audiences also knew they could consciously see them as sublimated
fantasies and modern fairy tales.
After the Future

It seems that, despite its structural, ideological, and institutional problems,
Greek cinema does possess a solid creative capital which manifests itself
even under the most unfriendly conditions. Despite the lost battle with
television, an average of 15 to 20 feature films is produced every year,
together with a considerable number of short films and documentaries.
Productions for television channels have also proliferated and give the
opportunity to many new directors to make their living, gain popularity and
notice, and sometimes self-fund their films. Internationally, most of these
films gain recognition not at the box office but as art-house films in festivals
and retrospectives.
However, some, like Koutras’ Strella (2008) have the potential of
becoming cult films of international appeal, within specific communities at
least. Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) has already won international acceptance
among cinephiliacs for its bizarre vision of human reality; Athena-Rachel
Tsangaris’ Attenberg (2010), which won first prize for acting in Venice, is
another production of international standards.
In the overall production however, there are nearly always problems with
the script, since there are no classes at tertiary education level which teach
“applied” cinema—and most cinema people still work with the romantic
notion of a “genius” writer who can conjure up a good script. In reality,
teams of people are needed working on a script collectively. Moreover, the
abiding sin of Greek cinema is its ongoing inability to construct a complete
human character—an achievement that would express a cohesive vision of
human nature rather than, as was superficially claimed by Marxist critics, a
glorification of bourgeois individualism.
In any case, it will be interesting to see whether the plans will succeed
in bringing domestic audiences back to cinemas and revive the film culture
which contributed so much to social cohesion in the past. The future looks
interesting precisely because it is paradoxical. Cinematic art is morphing into
something new and strange. New technologies allow young cinematographers
to make their films on shoestring budgets, to promote and even distribute
them on the internet without mediation or agents. The trend will simply gain
momentum and in the near future cinematographers worldwide will be able
to screen their films on individual computers directly from the production
room to the consumer (sometimes even while in the process of being made).
Many young people already upload their irreverent and unclassifiable films as
messages in a bottle thrown into the oceanic pluriverse of cyberspace. These
films may not be as “good” as the ones we have been used to; but the medium
is new and its potentialities unexplored. YouTube, Myspace, Facebook and
so many other social networks offer the opportunity for the new art form to
grow and mature by negotiating its potential and testing its limitations.
The new “primitiveness” that one sees in many new films today is
probably the best way of renewing the narrative structures and the visual
languages of cinematic production, which has been suffocating for far too
long under the achievements of the New Greek Cinema; achievements
which by now are more or less cultural clichés, hagiological relics, and
aesthetic archaisms. It may also become the only way in which to escape
from subservience to the state and its powerful mechanisms of control and
domination: if cinema in Greece loses its oppositional aesthetics, then it
won’t be Greek any more.
A new political cinema is what is most needed at the moment:
de-centralized, anti-hegemonic, pluralistic—and it is indeed what has started
emerging in the last 15 years. As Petro Alexiou so succinctly observed:
The “new current” of films is characterized by tighter scripts and direction,
faster pace, less introspection and theorizing, more focus on relationships
and family dynamics, hybridity in genre and style, acute awareness of the
codes of popular culture and indifference to the issue of Greekness or large
political statements. They are realist in the sense that they probe contem-
porary social realities in innovative ways.25
Encouragingly, the new film-makers who are shaping the New Greek
Current are well aware of the pitfalls of the past, and struggle to avoid the
complacency that destroyed Greek cinema at the most critical moment of
its development. They also discard the parochial questions about where
Greece belongs, dispense with all antiquarian discourse about Greekness,
and are totally liberated from the delusional megalomania for socialist
utopias and communist paradises. In a world dominated by “the rise
of insignificance,” they have the courage to take on lost causes. They
experience a challenging cultural and aesthetic syncretism and want to
represent their existential adventure to the best of their abilities. They don’t
suffer from inferiority problems and they haven’t internalized the feeling
of having been left behind. They do not pretend to be who they are not
and that is a profound and inspiring feeling. They are neither heroes, nor
ideological fighters, nor model citizens; they have nothing to do with the
classicist fantasies of the state-fed intellectuals, or the Orthodoxist exclu-
sivism of a supposed pure and authentic Christianity. They struggle to
be themselves: individuals who express an individual vision of the world
without pretension, posturing, or self-exoticization. They also struggle to
be contemporaneous with their own era—and, by exploring the fluidity
and unpredictability of the present, they create new territories for the
cinematic gaze. As Orestis Andreadakis concludes: “Reaching the end of
the first decade of 00s we can clearly see that the New Current transcends
the film-makers themselves and propels them all into continuous explosions.”
(my emphasis)26
The current situation of Greek cinema is not just promising; clearly

a distinct renaissance is shaping up, which, breaking through the barriers
of language and introspection, constructs a significant new chapter in
the history of European and global cinemas. Let us hope that the current
economic crisis will not destroy, at the most sensitive moment of their
crystallization, the wonderful efforts of so many creative people.
R e ca p i t ula t io n
❦❦
“In the End, There is No End”
“Ultimately, only the screen talks!”

Filopimin Finos
The story of Greek cinema is one of complex diversity and chaotic pluralism.
Its main virtue has been the irresistible capacity to regenerate itself under
all and any circumstances; its main impediment, a strange reluctance to
reach out and share its achievements. Despite the fact that not all genres
were developed by the film industry, the film culture was always open,
receptive, and sensitive to new ideas, practices and suggestions. Like Greek
society, Greek cinema has always been a space of contrasts and juxtaposi-
tions, indeed, a space where contested truths coexisted in an uneasy and
sometimes paradoxical interdependence.
Also, just as with the country’s political life, the Greek film industry
was always inward-looking, withdrawn and lonesome, locked into a series
of dilemmas that led to a hermeneutics of doubt directed towards its
own self. But it was introverted without being introspective; it avoided
making comparisons and analogies, thus remaining unable to locate its
position within European and global cinemas. It also avoided establishing a
theoretical critical discourse on its own principles and values, staying firmly
within the realm of symptomatic criticism, ad hoc reviewing, and circum-
stantial self-loathing or childish self-depreciation.
In reality, many good films were produced in the country and some of
them could be safely and comfortably labelled as “great films” in the European
or even global canon. What has always been noticeably absent from their
promotion and, consequently, reception is the appropriate and commen-
surate contextualization. On most occasions, Greek films were framed and
interpreted either through the nefarious quest for an elusive “Greekness” or
through the perspective of national political instability—the social, formal, and,
one might say, anthropological claims that were articulated in Greek movies
were overlooked and lost. The truth is that very few Greek directors dealt
explicitly with the quest for “Greekness,” and then only in periods of crisis or
self-indulgence.
285
286 Recaptulation
The historical narrative presented here suggests that cinema in Greece

has been one of the most prolific, successful, and creative appropriations
of the central medium of modernity by a traditional, logocentric, and
non-perspectival culture. There were so many “cinematic” events which
occurred in the country over a short period of time and which have escaped
the attention and care of most scholars.
Early Greek film-makers taught the public another way of seeing by
establishing a new visual language based on different visual perception: they
had to re-thematize reality according to a distinct and novel form of pictorial
schematization. Such re-thematization managed to construct its grammar
of tropes and syntax of configurations only after the 1950s when modernity
as cultural experience and historical reality had reshaped Greek society.
The transition had to sever visual representation from the traditional,
pre-modern, non-perspectival visual principles derived from Byzantine
and post-Byzantine pictorial space. Through the cinematic medium, Greek
culture confronted the Renaissance perspective and the invention of photog-
raphy simultaneously. As an achievement in reinventing visual perception,
Greek cinema is of major cultural significance.
Important directors, producers, actors, and cinephiles transformed
social limitations and political restrictions, and established a thriving film
culture, which deserves more recognition and credit. The visual language of
the Greek national cinema was constituted through the efforts of many locals
and outsiders who worked with great dedication and persistence. Alongside
Dimitris Gaziadis, Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros one must
place Josef Hepp, Walter Lassally and Giovanni Varriano in order to under-
stand the full extent of the transnational character of the film industry.
Furthermore, Greek cinema has always been a space of convergence of
different cinematic styles, diverse modes of expression, and conflicting
visual strategies. It has also always been a locus where all of these facets
fused in order to facilitate a dynamic and inquisitive exploration of new
codes of representation for an unstable social reality that defined itself in the
cinematic eye in terms of trauma, loss, and absence. It is certainly true that,
with very few exceptions, no risks were ever taken with the medium. It is
also true that the technological infrastructure of the country did not foster
the production of radical reinventions of formal representation, or even a
critical reflection on its potential and limitations.
Such intellectual negligence was rather inevitable for the people who
created this new visual culture. They were so preoccupied with techno-
logical, political, and practical problems that they never reflected critically
on their own achievements. On the other hand, the state, with its intrusive
censorship and later with its paternalistic hegemony, had only one purpose:
to control production and to disseminate an ideology of oppression, self-
marginalization, and folkloric exceptionalism. The most effective strategy
Recaptulation 287
for the control of the public sphere was always the promotion of the idea
of a unique and “brotherless” nation with an exclusive destiny and mission.
By abolishing history and moral responsibility, the political establishment
controlled cultural production. Greek cinema was at the forefront of the
battle against such de-historicization. It looked at class, gender, and identity
as fundamentally social realities, as individual and collective experiences,
through a stark and austere (even in its melodramas) “stylistic pragmatism.”
The social reality, also with its political instability, oppression, and
insecurity, never promoted a prolonged and sustained dialogue with various
social forces and classes. However, Greek cinema remains the most exemplary
cultural activity, thus indicating the heterogeneity, pluralism, and diversity
of social structure in opposition to the official versions of “Greekness”
from a naive and parochial nineteenth-century historicism. Greek cinema
explored and depicted the nations at the margins of Greek society in direct
opposition to dominant discourses. In this, one can see the permanent
presence of what we have called “oppositional aesthetics.” Greek film-makers
(even the most conservative like Yorgos Tzavellas, Michael Cacoyiannis and
Yannis Dalianidis) depicted realities that undermined official ideologies and
confronted their audiences with uncomfortable truths.
However, despite being a heroic endeavor, Greek cinema is the ultimate
space where the compromises that Greek society has made in its history
could be easily seen and framed. Only during the last 20 years, when a
break between society and state has become glaringly obvious, can we see
attempts at social dialogue and social consent. Unfortunately, the Greek
state, even when motivated by good intentions, had a negative impact on
the development, dissemination, and promotion of Greek cinema. Gaziadis
had already in 1929 protested that the Greek state did not understand the
propaganda that cinema could play at. It also did not understand the cultural
effects of cinema or even its industrial and technological aspects. When it did
finally comprehend the power of the medium in the 1980s, it endorsed an
elitist and ideologically charged role of cinematic production that essentially
destroyed and annihilated production by parochializing and provincializing
it. In the 1990s, a markedly changed Greek society simply followed its own
path by establishing new cultural spaces outside the state-sponsored zones
of production and promotion.
In the 1920s, when Greek cinema first organized itself, film representa-
tions expressed the traumas of national catastrophes, political frustrations,
and social regression. In the 1940s, they expressed the confusion and
disorder of constant warfare and fratricidal irrationalism. In the 1950s,
movies contributed more than any other cultural activity to social cohesion
and the establishment of social identities. In the 1960s, films questioned the
precarious balance achieved during the decades of urban sprawl and indus-
trial development. In the 1970s, they radically opposed a political system
288 Recaptulation
of coercion and oppression. In the 1980s, films lost their edge and became
martyrological visions of a lost mythology. In the 1990s, they articulated
the rebirth of history through the influx of strangers after the collapse of
communism. In the first decade of the new century, they reinvented new
imaginary significations and new imaginative representations in order to
articulate new realities: the loss of paternal authority, the crisis of family,
the collapse of a defensive national identity, the emergence of new gender
codes and new sexualities, and the opening up of form and aesthetics to the
fluctuating ambiguities of the contemporary world.
The “dream nation” of the nineteenth century, as Stathis Gourgouris
has demonstrated, was transformed into the “dreaming communities” of the
twentieth—and their dreams are compensation, therapy, and redemption.
Greek film-makers confronted, often unintentionally, the nation with its
own image. Sometimes what was depicted was not particularly flattering.
On other occasions, it was confusing and bewildering; the new and the
old coexisted on the screen, leaving the audience with a sense of a deferred
integration and a constantly postponed identity cohesion. In other instances,
movies confronted the nation with its worst fears by challenging established
rituals and authorities, as expressed in its conformism and lack of agency.
The mirror reflected the person in front of it—the person changed only
when the holder of the mirror started to think on his/her self.
Notes
Chapter One
1. In Arkolakis, p. 212.
2. Gallant, p. 108.
3. Some scholars argue that these reels were staged at Méliès’ primitive studios; not
taken in situ.
4. Hepp, p. 307.
5. There are four forms of the name: Manakis, Manakias, Manakas and Maniakias.
The Greek death certificate reads Ioannis Manakias.
6. Christodoulou, p. 179.
7. Ibid., p. 180.
8. Lindsay, p. 76.
9. Florensky, pp. 201– 72.
10. Their archive is in Skopje, Macedonia.
11. Soldatos, Volume 4, p. 35.
12. Georgakas, “Greek Cinema for Beginners,” pp. 2–8.
14. Fraser, p. 208.
15. Xanthakis, pp. 104–5.
17. Existing scenes from Gaziadis’ film will be incorporated by Vassilis Maros into
his documentary, The Tragedy of the Aegean (1961).
19. Nirvanas, Volume 5, p. 445.
20. A complete copy of the silent movie was found and restored in 2004.
22. Delveroudi, p. 368.
23. Soldatos, Volume 4, pp. 45–6.
24. Hess, p.24.
25. Hestia, 6 Oct 1929.
26. Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema, p. 24.
27. In 1969, Laskos produced a remake of Daphnis and Chloe, but it was a pale
and rather silly imitation. In 1966, one of the few pioneer female directors, Mika
Zaharopoulou, released her only film, Daphnis and Chloe, stressing the subtext of
pederasty that Laskos had omitted from the original Longos story. In her version,
Daphnis was seduced by a wealthy homosexual who abducted him to Paris. Daphnis
and Chloe meet years later as adults.
289
290 Notes
28. Kazantzakis, pp. 72–4.

29. Ibid, pp. 72–4.
30. Mitropoulou, p.135.
32. Makris, “Recent Films,” p. 926.
33. Makris, “Films,” p. 805.
35. Theodosiou, pp. 194–6.
36. Ibid, p. 197.
37. Makris, “Film Reviews,” p. 647.
38. Makris, “Greek Films,” p. 1094.
39. Rouvas and Stathakopoulos, Volume 1, p. 53.
41. Gregoriou, p. 26.
43. Ibid, p. 151.
44. Ibid, p. 46.
45. Soldatos, Volume 1, pp. 52–4.
46. Ploritis, p. 20.
47. Constantinidis, “Greek Film and the National Interest,” p. 4.
48. Mitropoulou, Greek Cinema, p.103.
Chapter Two
1. Andritsos, p. 22.
2. Ploritis, “The ‘Notorious’ Greek Cinema,” p. 20.
3. A similar story, but with a communist invasion was Alfred Green’s Invasion USA
(1952).
5. Ibid., p59.
6. Ibid., p. 86.
7. Iliadis also wrote the first short history (Greek Cinema) in 1960.
8. Angeli, p. 87.
10. Mitropoulou, p. 127.
11. Peckham and Michelakis, p. 74.
12. Eleftheriotis, “Questioning Totalities,” p. 238.
13. Georgakas, “Stella,” p. 15.
14. Moshovakis, “Stella,” p. 112.
15. Anderson, p. 45.
16. Lassally, p. 36.
17. Fenek-Mikelidis, p. 26.
18. Dimopoulos made 46 films and 2 documentaries, wrote 7 scripts and 12 literary
books.
Notes 291
Chapter Three
2. Ibid, p. 290.
3. Lassally, p, 85.
4. Dalianidis, p. 92.
5. Kamvasinou, p. 264.
6. Strangely enough, some peculiar Greek characters appear in almost all his films
made before 1955.
7. Mitropoulou, p. 339.
8. Lassally, p. 90.
9. Moshovakis, 1997, p. 31.
10. Cacoyannis, p. 75.
11. Stavrakas, p. 753.
12. Varriano, Lassally, and Hepp are the three great “outsiders” who created
“authentic” Greek images.
13. Soldatos, Corporeal Odysseys, p. 125.
14. Levy.
15. Agathos, p. 166.
16. Despite their differences, we can easily detect striking similarities with Tony
Richardson’s Tom Jones, for which Lassally was also director of photography.
17. Kaplan, p. 253.
18. Gauntlett, p.275.
19. The story is similar to Yesim Ustaoglou’s Waiting for the Clouds, especially its
questioning of identity.
20. Kyrou, “Kanal,” p. 47.
21. Kyrou, Cinematic Star, p. 14.
22. Quoted in Soldatos, Volume 4, p. 487.
23. Karderinis, p. 56.
24. Katsounaki, “Alexis Damianos.”
25. Soldatos, Corporeal Odysseys, p 164.
26. Malvey, p. 75.
27. Eleftheriotis, “A Cultural Colony of India,” p. 108.
28. The Greek Film Musical.
29. Papadimitriou, p. 141.
30. Ibid, p. 144.
31. Polan, p. 78.
32. Bakogiannopoulos, pp. 12–14.
33. Bouloukos, p. 55.
34. Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema, p. 143.
Chapter Four
1. Rafailidis, Greek Cinema, p. 25.
2. Dönmez-Colin, “Umut/Hope,” p. 47.
3. Papargyris, p, 104.
292 Notes
4. Constantinidis, “What Did You Do in the War, Thanassis?,” p. 93.

5. Fainaru, p. 12.
6. Ibid, p. 13.
7. Kael, p. 304.
8. The film was based on Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda (1948).
9. Chalkou, p. 62.
10. Kolovos in Aspects of New Greek Cinema, p. 24.
11. Vakalopoulos, p. 262.
12. Rafailidis, “Ford Foundation in Greece”
13. Rentzis, p. 28.
14. Rafailidis, Film-Construction, p. 124.
15. Kolovos, Essays, p. 10.
16. The term tsonta originates from the Italian word giungere (guinta) which means
“addition and interpolation.” Vassos Giorgas and Dimitris Koliodimos released their
documentary Cinema Nude (To Cinema Gymno, 2010), with interesting interviews
by the protagonists of the industry. Some of the views expressed in the film are
incorporated here.
17. Dimitris Koliodimos identified him as Nasos Spyris, an erstwhile actor and
scriptwriter. However, it seems that even this might have been a pseudonym.
18. Koliodimos, “On Pornography,” p. 22.
19. Nico Mastorakis is an interesting case. He was the producer of Angelopoulos’ first
short film, Transimission. He collaborated with the Dictatorship of 1967 and later left
Greece to become the producer of Z-rate movies in the US.
20. Kousoumidis, p. 227.
21. Rouvas and Stathakopoulos, Volume 2, p.108.
22. Rosenstone, p. 116.
23. Karali, p. 183.
24. Bresson, p. 126.
25. Hanlon, p. 362.
26. Horton, p. 105.
27. Deleuze, p. 109.
28. Rafailidis, Greek Cinema, p. 94.
29. He produced a total of 186 films: 28 were co-productions; 78 in colour.
30. Statistics from Rouvas and Stathakopoulos, Volume 2, passim.
31. Panayiotopoulos, p. 95.
32. Kousoumidis, p. 241.
33. Georgakas, “And Behold a Pale Horse,” p. 110.
Chapter Five
1. Clogg, p. 189.
2. Clarke, p. 167.
3. The first quote is from Papandreou, p. 56.
4. Karalis, p. 262.
5. Koliopoulos and Veremis, p. 162.
Notes 293
6. Papandreou was nicknamed Monsier l’Asteriske, because of his quaint habit of

adding footnotes about Greek reservations to just about anything.
7. A[damompoulos], M[ihalis], p, 23.
8. Schickel, pp. 446–7.
9. Dan Georgakas, “Stone Years,” p. 222.
10. Derrida, p. 144.
12. Roman, p. 23.
13. Fainaru, p. 58.
14. Sotiropoulou, p. 224.
15. Alexiou, “An Interview with Sotiris Goritsas.”
Chapter Six
1. Hallam and Marshment, p. 47.
2. Andreadakis, p. 44.
3. Koliopoulos and Veremis, p. 200.
4. Sorlin, p. 215.
5. Schutz, p.105.
6. Faubion, p. 182.
7. Kanellis, p. 47.
8. Aktsoglou, p. 71.
9. Papanikolaou, “Repatriation on Screen,” p. 266.
10. Tsitsopoulou, p. 253.
11. Kehagias.
12. Jays.
13. Papastathis, p 57.
14. Paradeisi, p. 132.
15. Ibid, p. 139.
16. Soumas.
17. Gourgouris, “Euro-Soccer and Hellenomania.”
18. Gourgouris, “We are an Image of the Future.”
19. Katsounaki, “From Sfikas to Lanthimos.”
20. Lykouresis.
21. Papanikolaou, “Strella,” p. 24.
22. van Hoeij.
23. Quoted in Kagios.
24. See the directors’ note at myfilm.gr/8328.
25. Alexiou, “Greek Cinema.”
26. Andreadakis, p. 44.
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Index
Proper Names and Film Titles in English
(1966) 164 Aliferis, Tzanis 93, 113

100 Hours of May (1963) 127 Aliosha (2001) 261
1900 (1975) 179 Alkaiou, Maria 153
1922 (1978) 185–6 Allegory (1986) 219
201 Canaries (1964) 118 All Goes Well (2010) 275
400 Blows (1959) 112 Almadovar, Pedro 259
Alter Ego (2007) 277
Abduction of Persephone, The (1957) 83 A Man Escaped (1954) 112
Absences (1987) 223 A Man for All Times (2004) 263
Absentees, The (1996) 252 A Matter of Dignity (1957) 75, 77–8
Abuse of Power (1971) 157 A Matter of Life and Death (1972) 157
A Crazy Crazy Family (1965) 118 Amelio, Gianni 281
Acropol (1995) 251 America, America (1963) 263
Adamopoulos, Mihalis 197, 293 Amok (1963) 108–9, 135
A Dream of Passion (1978) 187 Anderson, Lindsay 75, 76, 290
Adventures of Villar, The (1926) 11 And It Goes to Glory Again (1980) 190
Aeschylus 173, 176, 178 Andreadakis, Orestis 241, 283, 293
Agathos, Thanassis 103, 291 Andreou, Errikos 94, 118, 126, 139, 156,
Age of the Sea, The (1978) 186 164, 175
Aggelidi, Antouaneta 171, 183, 212, 249 Andritsos, Kostas 95, 113, 132, 134
Agnes of the Harbour (1952) 62 Andritsos, Yorgos, 45, 290
A Heron from Germany (1987) 214 Angel (1982) 202–3
A Hero with Slippers (1958) 82 Angeli, Kay 60, 290
Akin, Filiz 142 Angelopoulos, Theo xiv, xv, xix, xx,
Aktsoglou, Babis 253, 293 8, 117, 126–7, 143–5, 148,
Alafouzos Brothers 269 149–50, 154, 155–7, 159, 162,
A Laughing Afternoon (1979) 182, 187 171, 175–85, 187, 190–1, 193,
Alcoule, Pope, 183 199, 209–10, 217, 220–1, 225–6,
Aldebaran (1975) 174 230–1, 237, 238–9, 241, 242, 244,
Alemagia (2004) 263 250–1, 253–4, 263, 270, 275–7,
Alevras, Nikos 183 279–80
Alexandraki, Eleni 252, 264 A Night in Casablanca (1946) 64
Alexandrakis, Alekos 108 Anna Rodite (1948) 51
Alexandria (2000) 260 Anna’s Engagement (1972) 148, 151
Alexiou, Petro 234, 283, 293 Antigone (1961) 96–7
299
300 Index
Antonioni, Michelangelo 100, 115, 120, Axelos, Kostas 49

176, 179, 230 Ayoupa (Bed of Grass, 1957) 83, 163
Antoniou, Angeliki 231, 249, 269, 280
Antonopoulos, Yorgos 182 Bachelor, The (1997) 253
Apaches of Athens, The (1930) 22 Back Door, The (2001) 261
Applauses (143) 35, 37 Backstage Crime (1960) 94
Appointment with an Unknown Woman Bakogiannopoulos, Yannis 140, 161,
(1968) 134 291
Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty” 7 Balamos (1982) 213
Archons (1976) 183 Bardot, Brigitte 90
Argiroiliopoulos, Yorgos 258 Barefoot Battalion, The (1954) 64–5
Aristopoulos, Kostas 148, 152, 182, 233 Barkoulis, Andreas 84
Arkolakis, Manolis 289 Bataille, Georges 228
Armenis, Yorgos 256 Bates, Alan 103
Arnshtam, Zev 45 Battle of Mafeking, The (1900) 3
Aroni, Mary 118 Battleship Potemkin (1925) 22, 45
Arseni, Anastasia 233 Bazaka, Themis 211
Arvanitis, Yorgos 133, 144, 157, 221, 226 Bazin, Andrè 111, 159
Asdrahas, Spyros 179 Beekeeper, The (186) 220–1
Asimakopoulos, Yorgos 90 Behatoros, Kostas 8
A Song is Not Enough (2003) 262 Belarike, Jimmy 165
Asphalt Fever (1967) 135 Belle de Jour (1968) 268
A Spy Called Nelly (1981) 198 Belling, Bob 165
Assignment Skybolt (or Spies in the Belogiannis, Nikos 190
Saronic Bay, 1968) 125 Ben’s Kid (1909) 7
Astero (1929) 17–19, 23, 144 Bergen, Candice 124
Astero (1959) 85 Bergman, Ingmar 99, 254
Astrapogiannos (1970) 127 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927)
Astruc, Alexander 40 67
A Taste of Honey (1961) 97 “Berto” 166, 207
Athanitis, Dimitris 236, 264 Bertolucci, Bernardo 166, 179
A Touch of Spice (2003/4) 263, 276–7 Betty (1979) 189
Attack of the Giant Mousaka, The (1999) Betty 271
259 Bezzerides, A. I., 92
Attenberg (2010) 274, 282 Big Shot (1977) 183
At the Battle of Crete (1970) 139 Big Streets (1953) 59
At the Frontiers of Treason (1968) 139 Bio-Graphy (1974) 173
At the Gates of Hell (1959) 85 Birth of a Nation (1915) 176
Attila 74 (1974) 172 Bistikas, Alexis 229, 233–4
August 15th (2001) 260 Bitter Bread (1951) 58
Auntie from Chicago (1957) 82 Bitter Life (1965), 119
Avdeliodis, Dimos 219, 227, 257 Bitter Rice (1949) 59
Avgerinos, Dimitris 127 Black Earth (1952) 59–60
Avlonitis, Vassilis 82 Black Sheep (2006) 276
Away from the World (1929) 20 Black-White (1973) 152
A Woman is Accused (1966) 110 Blob, The (1958) 259
Index 301
Blood of a Poet, The (1930) 115 Cacoyannis, Michael xiv, xvi, xix, 47,
Blood of Statues, The (1982) 200 61, 67–70, 72, 75–9, 89, 97–9,
Blood on the Land (1964) 134 100–4, 124, 127, 156, 172, 183,
Bloodstained Christmas (1952) 61 232, 258–9, 279, 285, 287, 291
Bloodstained Sunset (1959) 85 Calopresti, Mimmi 281
Blue Angel, The (1930) 226 Cameron, James 277
Blue Beads (1966) 137 Canary Yellow Bicycle, The (1999) 258
Blue Dress, The (2005) 267 Cannibals, The (1969) 185
Bogris, Dimitris 34 Canon and the Nightingale, The (1968)
Bokolis, Kostas 165 124
Bombardment of Monastiri, The (1916) 5 Capra, Frank 67, 82, 130
Boorman, John 237 Captain Meidanos, the Image of a
Bordello (1985) 211–12 Mythical Fighter (1987) 223
Borderline (1994) 236 Captain Scorpion (1943) 32
Boudouris, Vassilis 252, 260 Captives of Hatred (1972) 133
Boulmetis, Tasos 227, 263, 276 Caravan Serai (1986) 219
Bouloukos, Stathis, 291 Carne, Marcel 61–2, 64
Boyle, Danny 268 Casablanca (1942) 58, 69
Boys, The (1999) 258 Cassavetes, John 176, 190
Boys in the Sand (1971) 166 Castellani, Renato 67
Bramos, Hristos 161 Castells, Manuel 230
Brave Die Twice, The (1973) 140 Castoriadis, Cornelius 49, 171
Brave of the North, The (1969) 139 Cavafy (1994) 236
Brazileiro (2001) 261 Cavani, Liliana 185
Break (1982) 200 Celebration of King George I (1908) 3
Brecht, Bertolt 176 Cerdova, Lila 103
Bresson, Robert 100, 112, 179, 292 Cezanne, Paul 271–2
Bridegrooms of Eutichia, The (1962) Chabrol, Claude 149
119 Chalkou, Maria 159, 292
Brides, The (2004) 263 Chandler, Raymond 93
Broken Blossoms (1918) 27 Chaplin, Clarlie 12, 15, 35–6, 227, 253
Broken Hearts (1945) 50 Charioteer (1994) 236
Brother Anna (1963) 108 Charlie Chaplin Arch Bandit in
Brynner, Yul 164 Arachova (1927) 15
Bubble, The (2002) 262 Chase, The (1946) 40
Bujold, Genevieve 156 Cheap Cigarettes (2001) 261
Bullets fall like a hailstorm (and the Cherry Orchard, The (1999) 258
wounded artist sighs) (1977) 183 Chiesa, Guido 281
Bumbach, Erich 7, 20 Chistof, Georges 165
Buňuel, Luis 228, 267 Christodoulou, Christos 5
Burstyn, Helen 187 Christodoulou, Christos K. 289
Business in the Balkans (1996) 252 Chronicle of Sunday, The (1975) 116
Butler, David 22 Churchill, Winston 46
Byron, Lord 232 Cinderella (1899) 3, 7
Byron, the Ballad for a Demon (1992) 232 Cinema Paradiso (1988) 86
Byzantine Rhapsody (1968), 125, 223 Circle of Viciousness (1971) 166
302 Index
Citizen Kane (1941) 73 Damianos, Alexis 121, 128, 156, 181,

Clair, Rene 68, 79 236–7
Clandestine Nation (1989) 180 Damned, The (1969) 272
Clarke, Peter 292 Dandoulaki, Katia 157
Clogg, Richard 193, 292 Danezi-Knutsen, Aliki 249
Close . . . So Close . . . (2002) 249 Dangerous ones-A Protest, The (1983)
Clouzot, Henry-Georges 126 132
Cocteau, Jean 56, 78, 115 Danikas, Dimitris 161
Coffee Oracle, The (1956) 82 Danillo Trelles (1985) 213–14
Colours of Iris, The (1974) 173 Daphnis and Chloe (1931) 25–7, 163
Come In, Give Us a Kiss, You are Done Daphnis and Chloe (1966) 289
(1985) 218 Daphnis and Chloe (1969) 289
Commoners and Aristocrats (1959) 86 Daskalothanassis, Yannis 261
Como, Perry 188 Dassin, Jules xvi, 91–2, 125, 172, 187,
Concert for Machine Guns (1967) 135 208
Confrontation (1982) 200 Dawn, The (1993) 233–4
Constantine I (King) 9, 10 Day, Doris 90
Constantine II (King) 105, 168 Days of 36 (1972) 148, 149–50
Constantinidi, Ariel 270 Days of Wrath—A Requiem for Europe
Constantinidis, Stratos xiii, 42, 148, (1995) 253
290–1 Day the Fish Came Out, The (1967) 124
Coppola, Francis Ford 176, 206 Dead City (1951) 58
Corpus (1979) 189 Death by Hanging (1968)150
Cossery, Albert 185 Death I Dreamed of, The (2010) 275
Cotton Club, The (1983) 206 Death of Alexander, The (1966) 120
Courbet, Gustave 205 Death Will Return (1961) 94
Coward, Noel 115 Debbie Does Dallas (1978) 166
Cowie, Peter xiii Deep Soul (2009) 241, 270
Cow’s Orgasm, The (1996) 252 Deep Throat (1972) 166
Crialese, Emmanuelle 263 Deleuze, Gilles 180, 292
Crystal Nights (1991) 230 Deliolanis, Pericles 161
Cunning Female . . . Rascal Woman Delphic Celebrations, The (1927) 16
(1980) 189 Delveroudi, Eliza-Anna 21, 162, 289
Curtiz, Michael 58 Demetriadis, Tetos, 23
Customs and Traditions of Macedonia Deren, Maya 115, 215
(1906) 5 Derrida, Jacques 213, 293
Cyprus, The Other Reality (1976) 182 Desires in the Cursed Swamp (1966) 110
Desires in the Wheat fields (1960) 80
Dadiras Dimis 83, 86, 138–9 Diamante, Virginia 8
Dafoe, William 270 Diamantopoulos, Yannis 267
Dali, Gizela 164 Diamonds on Her Naked Body (1972)
Dalianidis, Yannis xv, 85, 113, 129, 165
130–2, 134, 136, 140, 157, 162, Dimas, Hristos 275
175, 279, 287, 291 Dimitrakopoulos, Spyros (Spyridion) 7
Dam, The (1982) 200 Dimopoulos, Dinos 81, 83–5, 90, 91,
Damaskou, Olympia 8 118, 135, 157, 182, 185, 233, 290
Index 303
Dimopoulos, Mihalis (Michel) 159, 161 El Greco (2007) 268, 277

Discreet Charm of Males, The (1998) Emmanuelle (1974) 166
254 Emmer, Lucciano 68
Division (1965) 118 End of an Era (1994) 235, 253
Dogtooth (2009) 183, 244, 268, 273–4, Engagement with Problems (1937) 32
282 Enigma, The (1998) 254
Domenica d’Agosto (1950) 68 Enigmatic Mr Jules Verne-Nemo-
Donen, Stanley 280, 291 Allegory II, The (2002) 219
Donousa (1992) 231 Equinox (1991) 229
Donskoy, Mark 45 Eroica (1961) 97
Dorizas, Michael 14 Ertugul, Muhsin 24, 25
Double Indemnity (1944) 94 Eternity and a Day (1997) 253–4, 263,
Double Sacrifice (1945) 50 276
Doubts (1964) 95 Euridice B. A. 2037 (1975) 173–4
Dovzhenko, Alexander 97 Euripides 97, 156, 183, 226
Downhill (1961) 130 Evdokia (1971) 145–7, 281
Doxiadis, Apostolos 203, 224 Eve (1953) 60–1
Doxobus (1987) 223 Evil, The (2005) 268, 276
Dr. Epaninondas (1937) 32 Evil in the Time of Heroes (2009) 276
Dracula of Exarheia (1983) 204 Evil Way, The (1933) 24
Dream Factory (1990) 227 Exchange of Captives in Asia Minor, The
Dreyer, Carl 149 (1923) 14
Dreyfus Affair, The (1899) 7 Excursion (1966) 116
Drop in the Ocean (1995) 252 Exile on Central Avenue (1979) 188
Drunkard, The (1948) 52, 54, 56, 61 Expulsion, The (1964) 110
Ducce Narrates How he Conquered Eyes in the Night (2003) 262
Greece (1942–5) 35 Eyewitness (1993) 233
Duchess of Plakentia, The (1955) 60
Due Soldi di Speranza (1952) 67 Face to Face (1966) 120
Dust of Time, The (2008) 270, 276 Factory, The (1981) 198
Dönmez-Colin Gonül 142, 145, 289 Fafoutis, Panayiotis 275
Fainarou, Dan 291, 293
Earth (1930) 97 Fairy and the Brave Lad, The (1969)
Eastern Province (1979) 188 135
Edipo Re (1967) 100 Family as the Protector Against AIDS
Edison, Thomas 3 (1986) 217
Edouart (2006) 269 Fantazis, Loros 29
Efstratiadis, Omeros 165 Fate of Maroula, The (1917) 9
Eisenstein, Sergei 22, 29, 45, 64, 69, 97, Faubion, James 248–9, 293
145, 190, 219 Fear (1966) 113
Eleatic Stranger (1995) 252 Female Company (1999) 259
Electra (1962) 75, 97–9, 156, 183 Female Vices (1999) 259
Electra, My Love (1974) 97 Fenek-Mikelidis Ninos xiv, 78, 161, 290
Electric Angel (1981) 199 Ferreri, Marco 185, 228
Eleftherios Venizelos (1980) 189 Ferris, Kostas 127, 148–9, 153–4, 173,
Eleftheriotis, Dimitris 71, 136, 291 187, 188, 206–7, 226
304 Index
Fertis, Yannis 99 Galatis, Dimitris 164

Fever of Pleasure, The (1974) 136 Gallant, Thomas 289
Filippou, Katerina 258 Gance, Abel 22
Final Countdown (1984) 209 Ganz, Bruno 270
Finos, Filopimin XVII, 33–4, 36, 37, 60, Garbo, Greta 23
91, 96, 140, 181, 280, 285 Gardelis, Nikos 84
Fist of the Cripple, The (1930) 23 Gardelis, Stamatis 132
Flaherty, Robert 27, 114 Gauntlett, Stathis 106, 291
Flemming, Victor 64 Gavala, Maria 159, 189, 212
Floating (1985) 212 Gavras, Costa 49, 105, 143, 150, 197
Florensky, Pavel 289 Gaziadis, Anastasios 10
Floriniotis, Yannis 190 Gaziadis, Mihalis 51, 64
Fokas, Spyros 85, 119 Gaziadis Brothers 15
Fonsou, Anna 164, 167 Gaziadis Dimitris 16–20, 22–5, 28,
Ford, John 79 29–30, 40, 41, 55, 62, 96, 127,
Forgotten Faces (1946) 50 144, 286, 289
For Insignificant Reason (1974) 174 Gazoros Serron (1974) 172
For Whom the Bell Tolls? (1943) 40 Genet, Jean 49
Foskolos, Nikos 95, 140, 113, 118, Gentleman in Grey, The (1997) 253
132–3, 139–40, 157, 279 Georgakas, Dan xiii, 8, 72, 190, 211,
Foundas, Yorgos 71, 135 289, 290, 292–3
Fox Follies (1929) 22 George I (King) 2, 4
Fraggoulis, Yannis, 161 Georgiadis Vassilis 113, 117, 124, 132,
Fragrance of Time, The (1997) 253 134–5, 138, 140, 157
Frantzis, Angelos 249, 260, 276 Georgiadou, Mirella xiii
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2007) 219 Germans Strike Back, The (1947) 52–4,
Frazer, Sir James George 9 56, 147
Frederica, Queen of Greece 45–6, 105 Germany Year Zero (1945) 67
Free Fall (1995) 251 Giannakakis, Ilias 263
Frentzos, Yorgos 257 Giannaris, Constantinos xiv, 249,
Freud, Sigmund 177, 197 254–6, 260, 264, 280
Friendships (2007) 269 Giannikopoulos, Dimitris 172
From Here to Eternity (1953) 69 Giatzoudakis, Dimitris 229, 261
From the Edge of the City (1998) 254–5, Gilda (1946) 58, 68
281 Gini, Kaiti 164
From the Life of the Little Princes, (1911) Giorgas, Vassos 292
4 Giourgou, Lagia 235, 267
From the Snow (1993) 234–5, 248 Girik, Fatma 142
Fuller, Loie 1 Girl and the Horse (1973) 167
Fuller, Samuel 119, 153 Girl in Black, The (1956) 75–7
Funès, Louis de 147 Girl of Number 17, The (1969) 126
Fylaktos, Filippos 175 Girls of Athens (1961) 80
Fyssoun, Petros 108 Girls under the Sun (1968) 124
Give Your Hands (1971) 139
Gabriela the Whore of Athens Glikofridis, Panos 113, 157, 174–5, 182
Gage, Nicholas 208 Glytsos, Michael 8
Index 305
Godard, Jean Luc 120, 150, 179 Hands Up, Hitler (1961) 95
Godfather III 208 Hanlon, Dennis 180, 292
Gogou, Katerina 190 Happy Day (1976) 181–2
Golden Apples of Hesperides, The (1997) Happy Life (1993) 233
253 Haralambidis, Renos 252, 261, 269
Golden Door (La Porte d’Or, 2008) 263 Haralambopoulos, Stelios 251
Golden Dust (2009) 274 Harbor of Tears (1929) 17
Golden Haired Girl, The (1978) 187 Hard Farewells, My Father (2002) 261
Goldmann, Lucien 128 Haritos, Dimitris 161
Goldwin, Samuel 33 Harold, Meredith 228
Golfo (1914) 8 Haronitis, Lefteris 172
Gone with the Wind (1939) 64 Hatziargiri, Mary 62
Goodbye Berlin (1994) 236 Hatzidakis, Manos 50, 71, 78, 91, 93,
Good Homeland, Comrade (1986) 219 227, 245
Goritsas, Sotiris 23–5, 248, 253, 261, Hatzikostas, Kostas 217
269 Hatzinasios, Yorgos 133, 157, 223
Gospel According to Matthew (1964) 97 Hatziyiannis, Vaggelis 85
Goudelis, Tasos 161 Hatzopoulos, Takis 172
Gourgouris, Stathis 265–6, 288, 293 Hawaii (1995) 251
Gousgounis, Kostas 164, 168, 252 Hayworth, Rita 68
Grammatikos, Nikos 233, 252, 262, 268 Heart of the Beast, The (2005) 269
Grande Buffe, The (1973) 185 Heinz-Hummel Karl 119
Great Train Robbery, The (1903) 7 Heiress, The (2009) 275
Greca, Stella 51 Heleni (1984) 208
Greece of 1938 Speaks . . . (1938) 33 Helmi, Katerina 188
Greek Miracle, The (1922) 16 Hepburn, Katherine 156
Green, Alfred 290 Hepp, Josef xv, 4, 7, 9, 11–12, 14, 20,
Gregoriou, Grigoris 37, 55–9, 78, 79, 29–30, 40, 52–3, 55, 58–9, 96,
83–4, 89, 95, 108, 110, 118, 285, 291
139–40, 290 Hertzog, Werner 153
Griffith, D. W. 15, 17, 27, 176 Hess, Franklin L. 23
Grigoratos, Dionysis 186, 225 Highway of Treason (1968) 139
Guardian’s Son, The (2006) 269 Him and Her (1966) 118
Guazzone, Enrico 6 Hinas, Phanis 150
Guilt (2010) 257 Histoire d’un crime (1901) 3
Guthrie, Tyrone 100 Hitchcock, Alfred 40, 73, 94, 149, 222
Gypsy Girl of Athens, The (1922) 13 Hitler, Adolf 58
Gyzis, Nickolas 6 Hoeij, Boyd van 273, 293
Güney, Gilmaz, 145, 242 Holevas, Markos 233
Holidays in Vietnam (1971) 157
Hades (1995) 248, 251 Holmes, John 165, 166
Halaris, Hristodoulos 191 Homeland (2010) 274
Halatsis, Filippos 269 Hondrokostas, Yorgos 217
Hallam, Julia 239, 293 Honey Moon (1979) 187
Hammett, Dashiel 200 Horn, Dimitris 77
Hands, The (1961) 95 Horton, Andrew xiv, 180, 292
306 Index
Hostage (2004) 265 Ioselani, Otar 237

Hot Month of July, The (1966) 118 Iphigeneia (1977) 183
Hourmouzios, Aimilios 48 I Plucked a Red Rose for You (1993) 233
Hours (1995) 249 Iron Door (1978) 187
Hoursoglou, Pericles 234, 253, 262 Island (2009) 275
House in the Countryside (1994) 235 Island of Aphrodite, The (1969) 125
House of Lust (1960) 80, 164 Island of Death (or Cruel Destination, or
Hrisovitsianos, Yorgos 172 The Devil’s Children, 1975) 167
Hristodoulou, Yannis 50 Island of Silence, The (1959) 85–6
Hristofis, Hristoforos 187, 199 Island of the Brave, The (1959) 86
Hristomanos, Constantinos 8 It is a Long Road (1998) 256–7
Hronopoulos, Kostas 172 It was a Quiet Death (1986) 219
Hronopoulou, Elisavet 262 Ivan the Terrible (1944 & 1945) 190
Hronopoulou, Mary 131, 224 Ivan’s Childhood (1962) 115
Hudson, Rock 130 I Will See You in Hell, My Darling
Hunt, Linda 208 (1999) 258
Hunters, The (1977) 181, 183–4
Hush! (1971) 35 Jackals, The (1981) 132
Jacob, Irene 270
I Accuse Humans (1966) 118 Jaguar (1994) 235
I Accuse My Body (1969) 166 Jancsò, Miklos 97, 176, 179, 237
I am Dying Every Morning (1968) 132 Jarman, Derek 234
I am Dying for You (2009) 275 Jays, David 259, 293
I am Tired of Killing My Lovers (2002) Jealous Man, The (1956) 62
261 Jeremy, Ron 165
I Dream of My Friends (1993) 233 Jimmy the Tiger (1966) 127
Iliadis, Denis 263 Jinxed Man, The (1951) 62
Iliadis, Frixos 58, 290 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 215
Ilias of the 16th Branch (1959) 86 John and the Road (1967) 127
Ilias of the 16th Branch (2008) 270 Johnny Belinda (1948) 292
Iliopoulou, Vassiliki 227 Johnny Keln, My Lady (1991) 230
Iliou, Maria 252, 260 Jones, Jim 190
Illegals, The (1959) 78 Jo the Menace (1955) 81
I Love Karditsa (2009) 275 Journey, The (1962) 91
Incursion (1946) 49 Journey of Return (1983) 204
Indares, Dimitris 244, 249, 251, 262 Journey to the Moon (1902) 7
Innocent (1999) 258 July 24th, 1974 (1974) 172
Innocent Body, The (1997) 253
In the Name of the Law (1970) 132–3 Kael, Pauline 156, 292
In the Shadow of Fear (1988) 225 Kafentzopoulos, Anthonis 200, 261, 269
In the Streets of Istanbul (1931) 25 Kagios, Pavlos 293
In the Time of the Hellenes (1981) 199 Kalogeropoulou, Xenia 117
Invasion USA (1952) 290 Kalogerou, Spyros 126, 135
Invincible Lovers (1988) 225 Kambanellis, Iakovos 73, 124, 127
Ioannopoulos, Dimitris 36, 50 Kamvasinou, Marikaiti 291
Ionesco, Eugene 118 Kanal (1957) 111
Index 307
Kanellis, Ilias 161, 249, 293 Kinetta (2005) 268

Kanellopoulos, Takis 114–17, 128, 181, King, Jonathan 276
215, 256, 279 King, The (2002) 248, 262
Kapakas, Kostas 258 Kiriakidis, Achilleas 161
Kaplan, Robert D. 104, 291 Kiriakopoulos, Hristos 139
Kapnisis, Kostas 93, 157 Kiss me Maritsa! (1930) 22
Kapsaskis, Sokratis 119 Kittou, Thekla 182
Karagatsis, Mihalis 49 Klavas, Kostas 95
Karagiannis, Kostas 138 Knifer (2011) 274
Karaindrou, Eleni 210, 221, 225–6 Knock Out (1986) 219
Karali, Aimilia 179, 292 Kocyigit, Hulya 142
Karalis, Vrasidas 292 Kokkinos, Anthonis 235, 253
Karamagiolis, Menelaos 254 Koliodimos, Dimitris xxi, 161, 167, 292
Karamanlis, Constantine 105, 170, 193–4 Koliopoulos, John 195, 247, 292–3
Karamanlis, Costas 246, 247 Kollatos, Dimitris 120, 127–8, 225, 233
Karanikolas, Pavlos 165 Kolokotronis, Theodoros 174
Karapanayiotis, Nikos 275 Kolovos, Nikos 159, 161, 292
Karderinis, Kostas 115, 291 Komninou, Maria 163
Karezi, Tzeni 86, 118, 135 Konitsiotis, Klearhos 79
Karkalou (1984), 213 Konstantarakos, Stavros 212
Karkanevatos, Panos 236, 258 Kontaratos, Apostolos 3
Karydis-Fuchs, Aristidis 58, 93–4, 224 Kontes, John 96
Karypidis, Yorgos 200, 225 Kornelios, Nikos 229, 253, 270
Kassovitz, Mathieu 255 Korras, Yorgos 159, 212, 225
Kastoria (1969) 114 Kotopouli, Marika 24
Katakouzinos, Yorgos 202, 224, 251 Kouka, Katerina 234
Katalifos, Dimitris 224, 236, 256 Koundouros, Nikos, xiv, 24, 27, 67,
Katrakis, Manos 97, 210 72–4, 78–9, 100–1, 123–4, 128,
Katsaros, Mihalis 179 164, 172, 185–6, 202, 211, 232,
Katsaros, Yorgos 95, 118 258, 277, 279, 285
Katseli, Aleka 99 Koundouros, Roussos 127
Katsounaki, Maria 121, 161, 268, 291, 293 Kourkoulakou, Lila 85, 89
Katsouridis, Dinos 94, 147, 157, 223 Kourkoulos, Alkis 227
Kavoukidis, Nikos 108, 118, 172, 232 Kourkoulos, Nikos 91, 133, 135, 157
Kazan, Elia 92, 208–9, 263 Koutras, Panos 249, 259, 264, 271,
Kazan, Lakis 164 280–2
Kazantzakis, Nikos 28, 102, 289 Koutsafis, Philippos 259
Keaton, Buster 147 Koutsiompasakos, Dimitris 269
Kefalas, Anastasios 15 Koutsogiannopoulos, Thodoros 161
Kehagias, Vassilis 161, 258, 293 Koutsomitis, Kostas 224
Keitel, Harvey 250 Kraounakis, Stamatis 210, 257
Kemal Mustafa 10 Kravas, Panayiotis 275
Keynes, John Maynard 195 Kristel, Sylvia 228
Khan, Mehbood 58 Krouska, Vera 187
Kierion (1967) 122, 149, 155 Kybele 24
Killer Loved So Much, The (1960) 93 Kyriakidis, Vladimiros 269
308 Index
Kyriakos, Konstantinos 163 Leons 3

Kyrou, Adonis 49–50, 110–12, 128, 291 Lesbian August (1974) 166
Kyrras, Yorgos 252 Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) 64
Letter from Charleroie (1965) 127
Lady and the Tramp, The (1968) 135 Letter to Nazim Hikmet (1976) 182
Lagiarni (1930) 23 Let Women Wait (1998) 254
La Haine (1995) 255 Levy, Emmanuel 291
Lake of Desires, The (1958) 85, 163 Liappa, Frida 159, 199, 219, 229, 235
Lambeti, Elli 77 Liaropoulos, Lambros 127, 182
Lambrakis, Grigoris 105, 197 Lieutenant Natasha (1970) 133, 245
Lambrinos, Andreas 60, 85 Life (a beautiful butterfly) (1995) 251
Lambrinos, Fotos 127, 163, 223 Life Sentence (1988) 132
Lamore (1979) 188 Life with Alkis (1988) 225
Landscape in the Mist (1989) 221, 225–6 Like the Prairie Cock of Wyoming (1995)
Lang, Fritz 16, 21, 73 251
Langlois, Henry 48 Limelight (1952) 35
Lanthimos, Yorgos 249, 268, 272, 282 Lindsay, Vachel 6, 289
Lapathiotis, Napoleon 212 Lioumpe (2005) 268
L’Arrivée d’un Train 1 Little Agnes (1939) 32
Laskari, Zoe 130–1, 133 Little Car, The (1956) 81
Laskos, Orestes 25–7, 30, 39, 50, 62, 86, Little Chauffer, The (1953) 62
163, 279, 289 Little Dolphins of Amvrakikos, The
La Sortie des Usines Lumière 1 (1993) 233
Lassaly, Walter xvi, 75, 77, 90, 97–8, Little Mouse, The (1953) 90
103, 119, 122, 125, 233, 285, 291 Little Shoe-Shine Boy, The (1962) 108
Last Mission (1948) 51 Little Vixen, The (1959) 86
Last of the Commitadje, The (1970) 139 Livanou, Betty 199
Last Spring, The (1972) 116 Loafing and Camouflage (1984) 201
Last Tango in Paris (1971) 165 Loberg, Ann 124
Last Temptation, The (1964) 119 Loggos, Gabriel 8, 11, 96
L’Atalante (1934) 27 Logothetidis, Vassilis 53, 82
Law 4000 (1962) 130, 131 Logothetis, Ilias 261
Law Abiding Citizen (1974) 175 Lola (1964) 135, 136
Lazaridou, Olia 200 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
Lazarov, Nikolay 261 The (1962) 98
Lazopoulos, Lakis 264 Longos 25–6, 100
Lazy People of the Fertile Valley (1978) Look Out Danger (1983) 202
181, 185 Loser Takes Everything, The (2002)
Lean, David 62, 69 261
L’Eclisse (1961) 100 Lost Angels (1948) 52
Lefakis, Mihalis 181 Louisiana Story (1948) 114
Lefteris Dimakopoulos (1993) 234 Loumos, Ioannis, 23
Le goûter de bébé (1895) 1 Love and Blood (1967) 132
Le Million (1931) 68 Love and Waves (1928) 17
Lenin, Vladimir 250 Love for Ever (1969) 134–5
Lenin in October (1937) 45 Love in the Sand-dunes (1958) 84
Index 309
Lovers in the Machine of Time (1990) Mantzanas, Pandelis 274

227 Man with the Carnation, The (1980)
Love Stories (1959) 119 182, 190
Love Under the Date Tree (1990) 227 Marangos, Thodoros 35, 152, 172, 189,
Lubitsch, Ernst 16, 82 198, 236
Lumières Brothers 1, 7, 16 Maria of Silence (1973) 158
Lump Sum (2001) 261 Maria Pentagiotissa (1928) 13
Lunar Fugitive, The (1994) 236 Marie du Port, La (1949) 62
Lust and Passion (1960) 80, 164 Marihuana . . . Stop! (1970) 137
Luxemmberg, Rosa 199 Marina (1947) 51
Lykas, Petros 126 Marinakis, Vardis 249
Lykouresis, Tonis 127, 187, 200, 271, 293 Marinos Kondaras (1948) 51–2
Lyon, les Cordeliers (1895) 1 Maris, Yannis 93, 94, 130, 157
Lysistrata (1972) 157 Marital Hibernation (2003) 262
Marketaki, Tonia xix, 127, 148–9,
M (1931) 73 151, 155, 159–60, 171, 181, 201,
Macedonian Wedding (1960) 114 204–5, 229–31, 235, 271, 279
Madalena (1960) 90 Markezinis, Spyros 29, 169
Madras, Ahilleas 12–14, 20, 40 Markidis, Stratos 275
Magic City (1954) 67 Markopoulos, Gregory 84, 215, 220
Magician of Athens, The (1931) 13 Markopoulos, Yannis 118–19, 120
Maiden’s Cheeks (1960) 91 Maros, Vassilis 96, 127, 289
Mainas, Hristos 225 Marshland (1973) 157
Makarios, Archbishop 48, 169–70 Marshment, Margaret 239, 293
Makris, Dimitris 187, 200, 219, 259 Marsyas, Apollon 26
Makris, G. N. 29, 34–5, 289 Martelli, Filippo 7–9
Makris, Orestis 54, 82 Martis, Nikolaos 88
Malkovich, John 208 Marx, Brothers 64
Malle, Louis 190 Marx, Karl 173
Mallea, Olga 252, 254, 259 Mastorakis, Nico 167, 168, 292
Mallick, Terence 115 Mastroianni, Marcello 220–1, 230
Malti, Loukia 26 Matchbox (2002) 261
Malvey, Laura 130, 291 Matsas, Nestor 127
Mamangakis, Nikos 115–16, 124 Mavrikios, Dimitris 188
Manaki Brothers 4–6, 250 Mavrodimakis, Evangelos 3
Mangos, Hristos 126 Mavrodimakis, Harilaos 7
Mania (1985) 212 Mavroidis, Dinos 200, 212
Maniatis, Mihalis 202 Mavromatis, Vassilis 127
Maniatis, Sakis 172 Mavropanos, Kiriakos 164
Man of Aran, The (1934) 114 May (1976) 182
Man of the Train, The (1958) 84 Mazomenos, Vassilis 253, 257
Manousakis, Kostas 84, 109, 113 Mazzetti, Lorenza 76
Manousakis, Manousos 183 Medea (1969) 97, 100
Manta, Margarita 249, 274 Medea 70 (1970) 127
Manthoulis, Roveros 96, 117, 120, 128 Megalexandros (1980) 182, 190–2
Mantoudi Euboia ’76 (1976) 183 Megara (1974) 172
310 Index
Mekas, Jonas 173 Mother’s Curse, The (1961) 134

Meliès, Georges 3, 7, 289 Mourabas, Hristos 151
Melodrama? (1980) 189 Mouriki, Efi 269
Melville, Herman 200 Mourikis, Vangelis 262
Melville, Jean-Pierre 126, 222 Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) 40
Meravidis, Dimitris 16, 26, 29–30, 33, Mourouzi, Nadia 220
35, 40, Mr Arkadin (1955) 40
Mercouri, Melina 68, 70, 92–3, 194, Ms Director (1964) 118
208, 218, 238 Munch, Edward 145
Metaxas, Ioannis 31–3, 41, 149, 182 Murder at Kolonaki (1960) 93
Meteora (1923) 14 Murderess, The (1974) 148, 153–4
Meteor and Shadow (1985) 212 Murnau, F. W. 27
Metropolis (1927) 21 Music, Poverty and Pride (1955) 82
Metropolis (1974) 172 Mussolini, Benito 31, 51, 195
Metz, Christian 159 My Aunt the Hippy (1970) 137
Michael is Completely Broke (1923) 12 My Brother and I (1997) 253
Michael Michael 12 My Love Wua-Wua (1974) 175
Michael’s Dream (1923) 12
Mihalopoulos, Panos 132 Naked on the Street (1969) 131
Mihelakis, Pandelis 70 Naked Sting (1975) 166
Mikaella, the Sweet Temptation (1975) Napoleon (1928) 22
166 Narrative/Adventure/Language/Silence
Milas, Petros 280 (1979) 189
Minelli, Vincente 280 Nathanael, Elena 119
Minotis, Alexis 40 Natsis, Kostas 258
Miracle in Milan (1951) 78 Necktie, The (1991) 229
Miranda, Carmen 69 Negulesco, Jean 292
Mirella, the Flesh of Pleasure (1973) 166 Neighbourhood Girl, The (1954) 60
Mirror (1975) 115 Nets of Shame, the (1965) 164
Mish-Mash (1982) 201 Never on Sunday (1960) xvi, 92–3
Miss Julie (1951) 61 New Parthenon (1974) 172
Mitropoulou, Aglaia xiv, 42, 48, 64, 289, Nezeriti, Elli 95, 96
290, 291 Nico (Christa Päffgen) 49
Mitsotakis, Constantine 106, 228 Night Adventure (1954) 49
Mitterand, Francois 194 Night and the City (1951) 92
Mizrahi, Tongo 31, 32 Nightmare (1961/2) 94, 126
Model (1974) 172 Night Without Dawn (1939) 34
Money—A mythology of Darkness Night with Silena (1986) 219
(1998) 257 Nikolaidis, Nikos 135, 171, 173–4, 182,
Moraitis, Makis 160 188, 203–5, 223, 258, 261, 267,
Moreau, Jean 230 279
Moretti, Nanni 281 Nikolinakos, Mihalis 84
Morning Patrol (1987) 221 Nikolopoulos, Hristos 234
Moshovakis, Andonis 98, 290–1 Nirvanas, Pavlos 19, 23–4, 289
Mosquito, The (1969) 127 No! (1969) 138
Mother India (1957) 58 No Budget Story (1997) 253
Index 311
Nolan, Dana 140 Panic (1969) 126

Noose, The (1987) 223 Panousopoulos, Yorgos 187, 199, 212,
Nostalgic Woman, The (2004) 264 251, 264
Notorious (1946) 40 Pantzis, Andreas 252, 261
Nousias, Yorgos 249, 267, 276 Papadakis, Yannis 233
Novak, Jason 56 Papadantonakis, Tonis 34
Novak, Maurice 33 Papadiamantis, Alexandros 153, 264
Ntaifas, Ion 93 Papadimitrakis, Lambros 182
Papadimitrakopoulos, Ilias 88
Obrinsky, Daniel 199 Papadimitratos, Argyris 270
Occasions of No, (1965) 127 Papadimitratos, Makis 268
October 28th, time 5.30 (1970) 139 Papadimitriou, Lydia XIV, 136–7, 291
Odyssey of an Uprooted Man (1966) 136 Papadimitropoulos, Argyres 275
Oedipus Rex (1957) 100 Papadopoulos, Nikos 132
Ogre of Athens, The (1956) 24, 72–4, Papadopoulos, Stathis 264
281 Papadopoulos, Yorgos 168–9
Oh Babylon! (1989) 226 Papadoukas, Yannis 35
Oikonomidis, Fivos 172 Papaflessas (1971) 156
Oikonomidis, Yannis 249, 261, 267, 274 Papagiannidis, Takis 186
Oikonomou, Heraclis 28 Papahristou, Sophia 253
Olga Robarts (1989) 226 Papaioannou, Costas 49
Olives, The (1964) 127 Papakostas, Yorgos, 164
Olmi, Ermanno 206 Papakyriakopoulos, Panos 209
Only Journey of His Life, The (2001) Papalios, Yorgos 148
260–1 Papaliou, Maria 183
Open Letter (1968) 122 Papamihalis, Vion 29, 38, 48, 50
Ophüls, Max 67 Papamihial, Dimitris 157
Orfanelli, Alevize 32 Papandreou, Andreas 191, 193–5, 207,
Original Sin (1999) 258 213, 215, 228–9, 245–6, 293
Oshima, Nagisa 150, 228 Papandreou, Yorgos, 105–6
Ostria (1984) 209 Papandreou, Yorgos Jr. 246, 267
Other Aspect, The (1991) 229 Papanika, Kaiti 227
Other Letter, The (1976) 182 Papanikolaou, Dimitris 163, 255, 272, 293
Outlaw, The (1943) 83 Papanikolaou, Kostas 172
Oxygen, or Blackmail Boy (2003) 262 Papanikolaou, Mihalis 127
Ozu, Yasujiro 115, 179 Papargyris, John 146, 291
Papas, Irene 96–7, 99, 103, 233
Padre Padrone (1977) 206 Papastathis, Lakis 127, 159, 199, 223,
Panayiotatos, Dimitris 219, 227 260–1, 293
Panayiotopoulos, Nikos 173–4, 181, Papatakis, Nikos 49, 122, 221–2, 223
185, 189, 209, 224, 233, 253, 258, Papathanasiou, Thanassis 244, 259,
261, 292 261–2, 271
Panayiotopoulos, Yannis 127 Papayannopoulos, Dionysis 210
Panayiotopoulou, Penny 249, 261 Paradeisi, Maria 293
Pandora (2006) 269 Paraskevas, Ilias 83
Pangalos (General) 21 Parenthesis (1968) 116
312 Index
Paris, James 87, 110, 138, 156 Porter, Edwin S. 7

Parthenis, Konstantinos 151 Prehistoric Women (1949) 64
Pasolini, Pier-Paolo 78, 97, 100, 124, Preminger, Otto 130, 228
152, 267 Prevelakis, Pandelis 28, 185
Passion of Jesus, The (1916) 9 Price of Love, The (1983) 205, 271
Past of a Woman, The (1968) 130 Process, The (1976) 182
Pastrone, Giovanni 6 Prokopiou, Yorgos 11, 96
Pathe, Charles 3 Prometheus in Second Person (1974) 173
Paul, King of Greece 45, 105 Promio Alexandre 1
Pavlos Melas (1974) 175 Promise, The (2001) 261
Paxinou, Katina 40, 125 Prophetic Bird of Paul Klee’s Sorrows,
Peckinpah, Sam 204 The (1995) 219
Peekham, Robert 70 Protectors, The (1973) 151
Peppermint (1999) 258 Proust, Marcel 173
Perakis, Nikos 201, 259, 269 Psaras, Tassos 174, 182, 199, 219, 229
Peresiadis, Spyridon 8 Psychoule Brothers 1
Performance for a Role (1978) 186
Perkins, Anthony 93 Quartet in Four Movements (1994) 236
Peron, Juan 195 Queen of Clubs (1966) 119
Pervert, The (1975) 165 Quiet Days of August, The (1991) 229
Perverts (1963–4) 80, 164 Quin, Anthony 102
Perverts Since Their Birth (1974) 166 Quirico, Giorgio de 212
Phaedra (1962) 93
Philippou, Ioannis 51 R20 (2004) 264
Photograph, The (1986) 49, 221–2 Radio Moscow (1995) 252
Piccoli, Michel 270 Rafailidis, Vassilis 88, 144, 159, 160–2,
Pickford, Mary 6 181, 187, 291–2
Pink Flamingos (1972) 133 Rage (1962) 134
Pink Forever (2001) 261 Ravens (1991) 229
Place of the Skull (1973) 148, 152 Ray, Nicholas 153
Planet Athens (2004) 264 Razis, Finos 99
Plato’s Academy (2009) 273 Razor (2007) 269
Playing in Two Beds (1975) 166 Real Life (2004) 264
Please Women, Do Not Cry (1992) 232 Rebellious Commoner, The (1971) 157
Plessas, Mimis 94, 125–6, 157 Rebel Without a Cause (1955) 119
Ploritis, Marios 42, 46, 50, 290 Rebetiko (1983) 206, 213
Plyta, Maria xv, 60–1, 78, 89, 108, 157 Reconstruction (1970) xv, 143–5, 147, 270
Poe, Edgar Allan 200 Red Daisy, The (1989) 226
Polan, Dana 291 Redgrave, Vanessa 156
Polaroid (2000) 260 Red Lanterns (1963) 134
Polenaki, Maria 117 Red-light District 67 (1967) 110
Polenakis, Stamatis 35 Red Psalm (1971) 176
Politis, Fotos 9 Red Rock, The (1949) 55
Politis, Kosmas 97 Reed, Carol 73, 79
Polk, George 122, 225 Refugee Girl, The (1938) 27, 31
Polk Case, The (1988) 225 Refugees (1916) 5
Index 313
Refugees of War, The (1921) 12 Sade, Marquis de 228

Regarding Vassilis (1986) 219 Safe Sex (1999) 245, 277
Regiani, Serge 220 Sagiannou, Mary 23
Rehearsal (1974) 172 Sakellarios, Alekos 39, 51, 56, 82, 86,
Reisz, Karel 76 91, 218, 279
Reject Child of Destiny, The (1924/5) 14 Salo (1975) 250
Rejected, The (1982) 200 Sanctis, de Giussepe 59
Remembrance (2002) 257 Sanjinés, Javier 180
Rendezvous on Air (1965) 137 Sartzetakis, Hristos 105, 197
Renoir, Jean 29, 57, 62, 64, 79 Savalas, Telly 164
Rentzis, Thanassis 152, 160, 171, 173, Scarface (1932) 94
189, 199, 292 Scenario (1985) 212
Reppas, Mihalis 244, 259, 261–2, 271 Schickel, Richard 293
Request (1980) 182, 189–90 Schloendorf, Volker 153
Retsos, Aris 200, 221 Schroeder, Barbet 153
Revenge (1983) 202 Schuster, Mel xiii
Revolution of 1821 (1926) 15 Schutz, Alfred 293
Richardson, Tony 75–6, 97, 291 Scorsese, Martin 176, 263
Ricordi Mi (2009) 249 Scream (1964) 95
Riefenstahl, Leni 109 See You (Mirupafsim) (1996) 252
Rififi (1955) 92, 125 Seitanidis, Vangelis 241, 270
Rikaki, Lukia 236 Sennett, Mack 11
Rilke, Rainer-Maria 173 Serdaris, Vangelis 125–6, 157, 167, 252,
Ripley, Arthur 40 260
Rissoto (2000) 259 Serenity (1958) 84, 220
Rivals, The (1968) 151 Settle Down with the Thunders (1946) 35
River, The (1960) 78 Seventh day of Creation, The (1966) 134
Robbery in Athens (1969) 125 Seventh Seal, The (1956) 99
Rocha, Glauber 122 Seventh Sun of Love, The (2000) 260
Rohm, Mikhail 45 Severin, Andrej 199
Roman, Max T. 218, 293 Sex at Thirteen Knots (1974) 165
Romantic Note (1978) 116 Sfikas, Kostas 101, 159–60, 171–3, 219,
Rome Open City (1945) 64 220
Rooster’s Slaughter, The (1996) 252 Shadows (1959) 49
Rose (1982) 199, 213 Shadows on the Sand (1970) 127
Rosenstone, Robert 178, 292 Shakespeare, William 50
Rossellini, Roberto 55, 57, 64, 67 Shaven Heads (1986) 219
Rotha, Paul xii Shepherdess’ Lover, The (1932) 23
Roubanis, Thodoros 119, 125 Shepherdess’ Lover, The (1956) 83
Roumbou, Sophia 126 Shepherds of Disaster, The (1966) 49,
Roundup, The (1965) 50, 110–12 122
Roussea, Jenny 135 She-Wolf, The (1951) 60
Roussopoulos, Yorgos & Yannis 35 Shirt With No 9, The (1988) 224
Rouvas, Angelos xiv, 289, 292 Shock Corridor, The (1963) 130
Rouvas, Sakis 277 Sica, Vittorio de, 78–9
Ruttman, Walter 67 Silhouettes (1967) 124
314 Index
Silicon Tears (2001) 137, 259, 261 Spanos, Yannis 127

Simenon, Georges 93 Spathis, Tina 164
Simitis, Costas 245, 246 Spathopoulos, Kimon 15, 25
Sinanos, Andreas 263 Spetsiotis, Takis 212, 229
Sinful Gypsy Women (1969) 164 Spyridakis, Takis 236
Sinful Hands (1963) 80 Spyridion Baby (1912) 7
Sinful Women of the Night (1966) 164 Spyridion Chameleon (1912) 7
Singapore Sling: the Man Who Loved a Spyridion, Quo Vadis (1911) 7
Corpse (1990) 228 Spyris, Nasos 292
Siopahas, Hristos 209 Stalin, Josef 45–6
Siren of Atlantis, The (1949) 64 Stalone, Telly 165
Sirens in the Aegean (2005) 269 Stamatiou, Kostas 161
Sirk, Douglas 130, 233 Stampoulopoulos, Yorgos 122, 190, 203,
Six Pervert Women Ask for a Murderer 229, 269
(1976) 166 Stanwyck, Barbara 68
Sjöberg, Alf 61 Starry Dome (1993) 233
Skalenakis, Yorgos 119, 125, 223 Stassinopoulou, Maria 163
Skarabaiou, Iris (Elli Igglesi) 17, 28–9 Stathakopoulos, Hristos xiv, 289, 292
Skopeteas, Yannis 163 Stavrakas, Dimitris 99, 188, 258, 291
Skroubelos, Thanassis 172, 230, 251, Stavrakas, Lykourgos 57
261 Stavros, Aris 228
Sky (1962) 114–15, 281 Steele, Lexington 166
Slaves in their Prison (2008) 271 Stella (1955) 47, 61, 68–72, 76, 93, 136,
Slow Business of Going, The (2000) 260 281
Smaragdis, Yannis 204, 236, 269, 277 Stella Dallas (1937) 68
Social Decay (1932) 24 Stephania (1966) 130–1
Society Zero o’clock (1965) 135 Sternberg, von Josef 226
Soil and Water (1999) 258 St Fanourios’ Cake (1991) 229
Sokou, Rosita 48 Stigma (1982) 200
Sokourov, Alexander 115 Stolen Kiss, The (1964) 130
Soldatos, Yannis xiv 31, 161, 254, 263, Stone Years (1985) 210, 212–13
289–91 Stop Man (2001) 261
Solomos, Dionysios 254 Stories of a Honey Bee (1981) 198
So Long (1990) 227 Storm, The (1930) 20, 23
Something Sizzling (1963) 137 Storm at the Lighthouse (1950) 55, 57
Song of Parting, The (1939) 33–4 Story of a Counterfeit Pound, The (1954)
Songs of Fire, The (1974) 172 65–7, 163
Sonia (1980) 117 Story of a Life (1965) 130–1
Soray, Turkan 141–2 Straightstory (2007) 269
Sorlin, Pierre 248, 293 Stranger of the Night, The (1961) 95
Sorrentino, Paolo 281 Stratzalis, Kostas 164
Sotiropoulou, Chrysanthe 222, 293 Strella (2009) 271, 281–2
Soul and Flesh (1974) 175 Strictly Appropriate (2008) 271
Soul in the Mouth (2005) 268 Struggle (1974) 172
Soumas, Thodoros 161, 265, 293 Struggle of Blind People (1976) 183
Southerner, The (1945) 64 Studies on the Same Theme (1976) 183
Index 315
Study My Son Study (1981) 198 The Garden of God (1994) 236
Suburb of Dreams, The (1961) 107 The Happy Face of Leonora (1982) 200
Such a Distant Absence (1985) 212 The Lost Treasure of Hursit Pasha (1995)
Sudden Love (1983) 202 251
Sun of Death, The (1978) 185 The Music of Faces (2008) 270
Suspended Step of the Stork, The (1991) Theodoraki, Stella 249
230–1 Theodorakis, Mikis 64, 99, 102, 104,
Sweet Bunch (1983) 202–3 260
Synodinos, Yannis 3 Theodosiadis, Nikos 126
Synodinou, Anna 84 Theodosiou, Nikos 290
Theodosopoulos, Theodosis 175
Tabou (1931) 27 Theophilos, (1987) 223
Take Your Places (1973) 152 Theophilos 191
Tallas, Gregg C. 63–5, 79, 83, 125, 163 Theos, Dimos 122–3, 126–8, 149,
Tarkovsky, Andrey 115, 176–8, 225, 254 155–6, 182, 219, 223, 252
Tasios, Pavlos 148–51, 181–3, 189, Theotokas, Yorgos 47
200–1, 219 Theotokis, Konstantinos 204, 271
Tatassopoulos, Stelios 24, 29–30, 59, 60, The Passage (1990) 227
86, 129 The Photographers (1999) 258
Taviani Brothers 205 Thérèse Raquin (1952) 62
Teacher with the Golden Hair, The The Ways of Love are Nocturnal (1981)
(1969) 135 198
Tears for Electra (1966) 131 Thief of Reality, The (2001) 249
Tegopoulos, Apostolos 135–6 Thieves’ Highway, The (1949) 92
Terirem (1987) 223 Thin Red Line, The (1998) 115
Terra Incognita (1994) 236 Third Man, The (1949) 73
Terra Trema, La (1948) 90 Thirst for Life (1964) 119
Terzakis, Angelos 49 This Night Remains (1999) 258
Testimonies (1974) 172 Thomopoulos, Andreas 174, 181, 187,
Testosterone (2004) 264 209
Thalassinos, Errikos 94, 175 Those who Spoke with Death (1970) 131
Thanasoulias, Yorgos 172 Three Ages (1996) 252
Thanassi, Take Up Your Gun (1972) 157 Three Greeks From Amerika (1929) 33
Thanassi, tighten your belt (1980) 189 Tierney, Gene 228
Thanassis in the Country of the Slap Time of Assassins, The (1993) 233
(1976) 182 Tobros, Yannis 48
Thasos (1961) 114 Tolstoy, Leo 120
That Summer (1971) 157 Tom Jones (1963) 98
The Apple of Discord (2000) 260 Topos (1985) 249
The Children of Helidonas (1987) 223 Tornatore, Giusepe 86
The Children of Saturn (1985) 212 Tornes, Stavros xix, 213–15, 219, 220
The City Never Sleeps (1984) 209 Touliatos, Nikos 258
The Descent of the Nine (1984) 209, 213 Tragedy of the Aegean, The (1961) 96,
The Deserter (1988) 225 289
The Four Seasons of the Law (1999) 257 Trainspotting (1996) 268
The Fugitive (1991) 230 Transmission (1968) 127, 292
316 Index
Travelling Players, The (1975) 8, 51, 175, Ulysses’ Love (1984) 209
176–80, 184, 281 Umberto D. (1952) 55
Treason (1964) 109 Umüt/Hope (1970) 145
Treasure of the Deceased, The (1959) 82 Uncut Family (2004) 264
Tree of Wooden Clogs, The (1979) 206 Underground Trajectory (1983) 203
Tree We Wounded, The (1986) 219 Under Your Makeup (2008) 270
Trial of Jean d’ Arc, The (1961) 100 Under Your Makeup (2009) 241
Trial of the Judges (1974) 174 Universal Government (1985) 217
Triantafillidis, Nikos 252 Unknown Woman of the Night, The
Triers, Lars von 262, 273 (1969) 108, 157
Trikoupes, Charilaos 2 Unslaved Slaves (1946) 50
Triumph of Time, The (1996) 253 Unsmiling Stone (2000) 258–60
Trojan Women (1971) 156 Until the Ship (1966) 121–2
Truffaut, Francois 112 Up, Down and Sideways (1992) 232
Tsakiris, Dimitris 23 Urban Jungle (1971) 157
Tsangari, Athena-Rachel 249, 260, 274, Ustaoglou, Yesim 291
282
Tsangas, Hristos 221 Vafeas, Vassilis 188, 200, 209, 224, 226
Tsatsos, Constantinos 46 Vagena, Anna 151
Tsemperopoulos, Yorgos 172, 203, 227, Vakalopoulos, Hristos 160, 226, 232,
261 292
Tsiforos, Nikos 50–2, 86, 90, 118 Vakousis, Manos 232
Tsilifonis, Andreas 209 Valkanizater (1997) 253
Tsiolis, Stavros 126, 135, 157, 212, 219, Valley, Michelle 228
225, 227, 232, 251, 254 Vallone, Raf 93
Tsirbinos, Tonis 161 Valtinos, Thanassis 209
Tsitos, Philippos 273 Vamvakaris, Markos 106
Tsitsopoulou, Vassiliki 257, 293 Varieté (1984) 209
Tsouf (1969) 35 Varriano, Giovanni xvi, 95, 101, 114,
Turkish Prisoners (1912) 5 285, 291
Turn, The (1982) 132 Varsamidis, Symeon 253
Tweet (2005) 268 Vassilakou, Katerina 236
Two Moons in August (1978) 187 Vassileiadis, Polyvios 118
Two Suns in the Sky (1991) 229 Vassileiadou, Georgia 82
Typaldos, Nikos 236 Vassilikos, Vassilis 101, 105
Tyros, Andreas 161 Vembo, Sophia 32, 70
Tzavellas, Yorgos 36–7, 50–2, 54–6, Venezis, Ilias 84
61–2, 65–7, 77, 79, 82, 89, 96, Vengos, Thannasis 147–8, 157, 162, 181,
127, 158, 163, 285, 287 182, 189, 198, 256, 263, 270
Tzima, Theodora 264 Venizelos, Eleftherios 7, 9, 10, 22, 85
Tzimas, Nikos 127, 182, 190 Veremis, Thanos 195, 247, 293
Tzitzios, Yorgos 161 Vertigo (1963) 130
Tzitzis, Stratos 249 Veryitsis, Nikos 198, 203, 224
Tzoumerkas, Syllas 249, 274 Victimes de l’alcoolisme, Les (1902) 3
Victory of Samothrace, The (1990) 227
Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) xv, 237, 243, 250–1 Vidor, Charles 58
Index 317
Vigil (2005) 268 Wedding of Michael and Concetta, The

Vigo, Jean 27 (1923) 12
Villar (Nikolaos Sfakianos) 11 Weeping Meadow, The (2004) 241, 263,
Villar in the Women’s Bath of Faliron 276
(1920) 11 Welles, Orson 73, 79, 179
Villa with the Lilies, The (1945) 50 Wenders, Wim 237
Villiers, Frederic 3 We Only Live Once (1958) 82
Violent John, The (1973) 148, 151–2, 155 What did you Do in the War, Thanassis
Violet’s Fragrance (1985) 212 (1971) 147–8
Virzi, Paolo 281 When the Bells Toll (1964) 129
Visconti, Luchino 79, 90, 272 When the Husband is Away (1938) 32
Visit of Sultan Mehmet V to White Red (1993) 233
Thessaloniki and Monastiri, The Wild Bunch, The (1969) 204
(1911) 5 Wilde, Oscar 118
Vivankos, Patris 226, 233 Windfall in Athens (1954) 67–8
Vizyenos, Georgios 261 Wind of Hatred (1954) 32
Vlahopoulou, Rena 218 With Glittering Eyes (1966) 112–13
Vogel, Jan 275 Without Identity (1962) 130
Vogiatzis, Lefteris 233 Woman Who Saw Dreams, The (1988)
Voglis, Yannis 124 224
Voice of the Heart, The (1943) 36, 37 Women are Cruel People (2005) 269
Vortex, Medusa’s Face (1967), 123–4, Women Today (1976) 183
202 Wood, Ed 204
Voulgaris, Pandelis 108, 126–7, 148–9, Wretches are Still Singing, The (1979)
151, 156, 181–2, 189, 210–12, 182, 188–9, 281
224, 229, 241, 251, 256–7, 263,
270, 276 Xanthakis, Alkis 289
Voupouras, Hristos 225, 252 Xanthopoulos, Lefteris 219, 230
Voutsas, Kostas 189, 209 Xanthopoulos, Nikos 135–6
Vouyouklaki, Aliki xix, 83–5, 90, 91, Xanthopoulos, Panayiotis 269
133, 135, 140–1, 157, 162, 167, Xanthopoulos, Yannis 275
185, 189, 198, 244, 245 Xanthos, Dionysis 203
Vouyouklakis, Takis 140 Xarhakos, Stavros 124, 157, 206
Voyage in Italy (1953) 78 Xenakis, Iannis 49
Voyage to Cythera (1984) 209–10, 213
Voyeur (1984) 167 Yannidis, Kostas 31
Vratsanos, Dimos 9, 11, 14 Yannoulis, Stamatis 233, 235
Vrettakos, Kostas 224 Yates, Peter 208
Year of the Heatwave, The (1991) 229
Waiting for the Clouds (2003) 291 Yeaworth, Irvin 259
Wajda, Andrey 111 Yes, Certainly But . . . (1972) 148, 150–1,
Wandering (1979) 187 159
Warhol, Andy 124, 173 Younaris, Dimitrios 11
Wasted Youth (2011) 275 Young Aphrodites (1963/4) 27, 100–1
Wax Doll, The (1915) 8–9 Your Eyelids are Shining (1961) 127
Wedding Greek Style (1964) 117 You Will Regret it (2002) 262
318 Index
Z (1968) 49, 105, 143, 150 Zero Years, The (2005) 268
Zafeiropoulos, Ioannis 172 Zervas, Markos 36
Zahariadis, Nikos 45 Zervos, Anthonis 57, 280
Zaharopoulou, Mika 289 Zervos, Nikos 152, 204, 259,
Zahos, Cleanthis 3 Zervos, Yorgos 85, 163
Zahos, Spyros 172 Zervoulakos, Yorgos 157, 164
Zalmas, Stavros 234 Zinnemann, Fred 69
Zane, Billy 276 Zois, Kostas 124, 200
Zannas, Pavlos 57 Zorba the Greek (1964) xvi, xix, 75,
Zapatinas, Nikos 261, 271 101–4, 119
Zappas, Kostas 264 Zouboulaki, Voula 70
Zecca, Ferdinard 3 Zouboulakis, Yannis 161
Zero Visibility (1968) 132–3 Zoya (1944) 45

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Chapter One: Early Greek Cinema: 1905–1945

Chapter Two: Constructing a Visual

Chapter Three: Glory and Demise: 1960–1970

The Solitary Case of Takis Kanellopoulos 114

Chapter Four: The Formalist Moment: The

Chapter Five: The 1980s: Hope and

Chapter Six: The Polyphony of the

Until such a volume is prepared, we focus here on the realities that

other battleground for the development of cinema in Greece—a country

Even in current times, with the permeation of everyday life by digital

or American companies, and has essentially liberated production from its

its specific contribution to the representation of Greek historical experience.

Furthermore, since 1995 a wide variety of genres, diversified approaches

not isolated individuals but groups of people and mechanisms of indus-

visual modality of perceiving reality. Many important intellectual Western

cinematographers had abandoned the one-dimensional space of Byzantine

This survey also briefly deals with the representations of “others” in

A note on the transliteration of names and titles

I a m deeply indebted to m any people for their assistance in the

Early Greek Cinema: 1905–1945

Constructing the Cinematic Gaze

governments, starting in 1900 and culminating in the Goudi Uprising of 1908

Meanwhile, in 1905 in Macedonia, the brothers Yannakis (Ioannis) (1878–

Manaki brothers, The Abvella Weavers (1905/6).

made by Harilaos Mavrodimakis, the first scientific documentaries to be

intellectuals revert to pre-Greek state notions, such as the “purity” of the

Another comedian of the period, Michael Michael of Michael (1895–

Michael Michael, The Marriage of Michael and

Ahilleas Madras, Maria Pentagiotissa (1928/9). Greek

Ahilleas Madras, The Magician of Athens (1931). Greek

Organization and Challenges

Gaziadis and Meravidis, The Delphic Celebrations (1927).

indiscreet observer of an irrelevant story. Gaziadis seems to have understood

Dimitris Gaziadis, Astero (1929). Greek Film

Nirvanas’ testimony highlights another aspect of this project regarding

First Greek Republic in April 1924. The Republic, supported by liberal

(1927), Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1928) and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship

1930), based on an operetta and a musical comedy respectively, managed

Orestis Laskos, Daphnis and Chloe (1931). Greek Film

created a surprising interplay between mental states and bodily images

Tongo Mizrahi, The Refugee Girl (1938). Greek Film Archive

It has encoded the collapse of political and moral authority by exposing

Developing Film Culture

The Athens of the 1930s was still a collection of self-sufficient neighbor-

the background of a rising modernity that fragmented all accepted forms of

to the cinema, they were sentenced to up to six months imprisonment.

Greek Cinema Reborn

During the German occupation, only German, Italian, and Hungarian

Dimitris Ioannopoulos, The Voice of the Heart (1943). Greek Film

Yorgos Tzavellas, Applauses (1943). Greek Film Archive Collection.

Gregoris Gregoriou (1919–2005), one of the most prolific directors of the

of pantomime, an attempt to show emotions and reactions in an obvious and

officials, and state bureaucrats. Marios Ploritis (1919–2006), a pioneer of

Consequently, after liberation, Greek cinema continued to develop through

the Greek language. Cinematographers had to invent a new visual idiom in

Stamatis Polenakis, Ducce Tells How He Conquered Greece (1942).

Constructing a Visual Language:

Rebuilding the Industry and Reconnecting with the

300,000.) The emergence of dense working class populations in Athens,

Theotokas, who presented themselves as the custodians of liberal humanism,

For both political orthodoxies, cinema was a spurious “uncontrollable”

Meanwhile, the presence of censorship was strong and loomed as a

The Solitary Case of Takis Kanellopoulos 114