By Jorge Sotirios
The first images that come to mind regarding the Greek cinema are usually three: Zorba the Greek, Melina Mercouri and Shirley Valentine — a sunny mixture of passion and tourism that lulls the viewer into a false reality.
Fortunately the retrospective of Greek film entitled "Cinemythology", now showing at the AFI Cinema (Paddington, Sydney) provides a challenging antidote to these simplistic images. This overview of a nation's cinema, spanning over 60 years, will do much to undermine stereotypical perceptions that have sought to keep other cultures in their place. Here is a medium that is used to address the effects of history upon Greek society and its psyche as it seeks to adjust to the realities of the 20th century.
History has not been kind. Dictatorships, foreign occupation, civil war, poverty and exile are just some of the elements of recent Greek history. Cinema has sought to deny, reflect, escape and transcend this reality. The strands of history and its discontents are woven into the fabric of celluloid.
The earliest attempts of the Greek cinema remain to us only in fragments concerned with pastoral idylls and stylised representations of classical myths. It was not till the early '30s that an openly Marxist film reached the screens. Social Decay (1932) was probably the first film of its kind seeking to question the underpinnings of capitalism. In it, a young student is forced to abandon his studies and enter factory life, where the oppressions he suffers lead him to incite his fellow workers in the struggle for a fairer economic system.
This sort of film was short-lived. The cinema suffered greatly with the onset of social and political upheavals. In 1936-1941, the extreme right Metaxas dictatorship was in power (it banned even the bouzouki as subversive!). the Italians and Germans occupied the country in 1941-45, and the subsequent civil war (1946-49) left the country in ruins. Few films of quality were made. Those made were generally light comedies, a number of them made in Egypt financed by wealthy backers of the Greek diaspora.
However, whilst cinema-goers flocked to see innocuous melodramas, in the fifties arrived directors with singular artistic visions, Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros being the most well known.
Koundouros' Magic City (1954), strongly influenced by neo-realism, concentrated on the raw poverty and squalor of lives on the fringes of the city. His next film, The Ogre of Athens (1956), is also considered a classic, not least because of its mood of Cold War paranoia centred upon a man under suspicion.
The '50s and '60s were the heyday of film production, catering for a broad audience with light comedies and escapist entertainment. Finos became the major studio producing a phalanx of stars, technicians and directors for hire.
In the late '60s arose the beginnings of a more substantial cinema. Thanos & Despina (1967) highlighted the patriarchal structures of church and state that oppose the yearnings of young love. Evdokia (1971) focused on the high-spirited affair between a soldier and a prostitute juxtaposed against the deadliness of social structures.
It was also at this time that the theme of migration surfaced on the screen. The mass exodus in the '40s and '50s was the first time Greeks left en masse purely for survival. The romanticised image of Germany, the US and Australia as models of a better life was thus formed. Until the Ship Sails (1966) vividly conveys the frustrations of a villager desperately seeking a way to escape to the ship that will take him to Australia. Reconstruction (1970) is a Rashomon-like piece that uses the pretext of a murder to highlight the poverty and lack of opportunities that drive Greeks from their homeland.
This film inaugurated what was to be known as the New Greek Cinema of the '70s. Primarily a director's cinema, it introduced the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Pantelis Voulgaris and Costas Ferris.
They brought a new subject matter and also experimented with form (long takes, montage within the shot, direct sound). This was not an abstract exercise, since it was always harnessed to a historical awareness. And it was all the more significant since these directors produced films in the context of the colonels' junta (1967-74).
Voulgaris' Happy Day (1976) is a symbolic allegory of political oppression set on a nameless island. It is made all the more potent by the director's experiences imprisoned in the Makronisos concentration camp.
1922 and Rembetiko deal with the influences of the East upon Greece. What becomes evident in these films is the limitations of the romantic image of the glory of ancient Greece. This demeans the reality of modern Greece. To regard it as simply the cradle of Western civilisation denies the Eastern elements that make up its character.
Rembetiko recreates the period when the refugees of Asia Minor returned, bringing with them their Anatolian-inspired music. It is now a part of Greek musical tradition but then was seen as illegitimate. Once again, it is the vitality of the marginalised which brings creativity to a slowly petrifying centre.
Recent cinema has benefited from the belated arrival of women directors and the re-examination of the past by its major directors. Tonia Marketaki and Friedda Liappa portray the oppressions, solitude and vibrancy of women within society in such films as The Price of Love (1984) and Love Wanders in the Night (1981) while Angelopoulos depicts the lonely return of a communist to his homeland in Voyage to Kythera (1984), and the effects of the civil war are examined in Costas Vrettakos' The Children of Helidona (1987).
Perhaps the only glaring omissions in this retrospective are Angelopoulos' epic Brecht-like fresco The Travelling Players (1975) and Voulgaris' Stone Years (1985).
These films do much to contest those contrived pieces concerning themselves with the southern European experience — the most offensive being Shirley Valentine, Mediterraneo, and Cinema Paradiso. Discarding the Hollywood ideology, this retrospective aims to re-examine one's perceptions. It is true that, like Zorba, the Greeks love to dance — but to the beat of their own drum.
Cinemythology is at the AFI Cinema in Sydney until May 15. For details of showings, ring the AFI on 361 5398.