CINEMA IN GREECE

Greece is not a rich country and it would be surprising if it had much of a film industry. In fact it has enjoyed some periods of intense filmic activity and the Greeks, ever in the vanguard of the arts, have left a distinctive mark even if not much has attracted an international audience.

Open-air cinema in Athens

While Athens has her Multiplex screens for indoor viewings, the greater joy is the variety of summer outdoor cinemas. In the warm balmy evenings, one sits on comfortable plastic chairs drinking, smoking or nibbling at nuts with the sky to gaze at if the silver screen does not enchant. It is a special treat. I recall years ago watching a solid diet of Aliki Vougiouklaki’s films when an uncle of my lovely wife ran summer cinemas in the pleasant spa town of Aidipsos on the island of Euboea. Innocent pleasures indeed!

Mercouri and Fountas in Stella

With the post-war rebuilding of Greece and her lethal Civil War (1946-9) it was not until 1955 that a significant film emerged and this was the drama Stella, the debut of alluring Melina Mercouri. The film was a retelling of Carmen with Mercouri as a rebetika singer in love with Georgios Fountas as a footballer. Directed by Michael Cacoyannis, it was enlivened by a musical score by Manos Hadjidakis.

A more popular type of film was ushered in with The Aunt from Chicago in 1957, an evergreen comedy featuring hatchet-faced Georgia Vasileiodorou conspiring ingeniously to marry off her conservative nieces. Mercouri, with her ouzo-stained husky voice and great glamour captivated in Never on Sunday (1960) playing the feisty Piraeus prostitute. The film was directed by American Jules Dassin, later Mercouri’s husband, and had another great Hadjidakis musical soundtrack.

Mercouri smoulders in Never on Sunday

Mercouri went on to be a prominent Leftist politician, together with Dassin a doughty opponent of the military Junta in power from 1967 to 1974. She became Minister of Culture in the 1980s, arguing passionately for the return to Greece of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. By the time she died in 1994, she had become a cherished National Treasure.

1955-75 was the heyday of the Greek popular cinema when a group of players, much loved and instantly recognised by their Greek audience, produced a flood of escapist comedies and musicals to general delight. Typical artistes were ubiquitous scheming Lambros Konstantaras (80 films), Dinos Iliopoulos, Kostas Voutsas, Jenny Karezi and Maro Kontou. One of my favourites was beetle-browed Dionysos Papagiannopoulos, whose air of injured self-esteem at the effrontery of youth always makes me laugh.

Maro Kontou and Konstantaras

Papagiannopoulos

Another considerable star was Rena Vlahapoulou. She could sing and she could dance but most of all she delivered her comedienne’s lines with rasping aplomb. As the film industry went into decline, we would seek out Rena in the Athens theatre where she played revue to packed audiences.

Rena Vlahopoulou enchants

However the unchallenged Queen of the Greek cinema was Aliki Vougiouklaki (1934-96). Blessed with a warm singing voice, dark eyes and a bouncy personality, Aliki featured in family melodramas and light comedies always with a reassuring happy ending. The Greeks loved her unconditionally, her private life was a national obsession and her movies are endlessly repeated on current TV.

Matchless Aliki Vougiouklaki

There was to be sure a serious Greek cinema. Costa-Gavras directed the politically charged Z in 1968, starring Yves Montand, thinly disguising police bias and government corruption. Irene Papas brought distinction to her leading roles in the ancient classics Antigone and Electra. More recently the industry has produced worthy art-house films pleasing an intellectual minority..

A much more representative movie and a global hit was Zorba the Greek, starring Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates. It is an Anglo-Greek co-production of 1964, directed by Michael Cacoyannis with Quinn and Bates reinforced by Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova. The splendid musical score was composed by iconic Mikis Theodorakis, happily still with us. The film traces the adventures and misadventures, some comic some tragic, of feckless but irresistible Zorba (Quinn). As their latest scheme, a log bearing conveyor, collapses into the sea amid huge confusion the film ends with Quinn and Bates laughing uncontrollably as they dance the sirtaki together on the island beach.

Quinn and Bates in Zorba the Greek

The film celebrates the Greek spirit. The author of Zorba, Nikos Karantzakis, wrote: I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a feeble little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. This film epitomises the magnetic originality and the warm, turbulent emotions of the Greek people.

SMD

2.02.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016