By Werner Busch.

Cinematic Antiquity

Europe as a subcontinent has seen many influential cultures, but none of them has had such an elementary and manifold effect on our current world as the Hellenes. Greece is the often-cited cradle of Europe. Its accomplishments in antiquity today hold fundamental meaning not only for students of the humanities. The whole world watches the Olympic Games, another Greek cultural gift, every four years. So it's no surprise that some of the very first pieces of film developed in Greece were capturing the Olympics in 1906. In the same year the Macedonian Brothers Yiannis and Miltos Manakia started further documentary filming in their home country. 1915 saw the first Greek feature-length film GOLFO, but short documentary subjects dominated the country's scarce film production up until the end of the 1920s.

One of the outstanding documents of this time is THE DESTRUCTION OF SMYRNA from 1922, capturing the catastrophic results of the Greek-Turkish conflict in the city that is today called Izmir. The film's director Dimitris Gaziadis, who had studied film and made his first contact with silent movies in Germany, founded the first major film production company in Greece in 1927, called DAG Film. This year is often cited as a turning point for Greek film history – from then on instead of solitary pioneers there are organized companies generating a lot of success with the domestic audience through a flourishing film industry far into the 1930s.

The Golden Age

The second phase of Greek film history starts in the middle of the Nazi occupation period. Instead of watching the heavily advertised German and Italian films, the Greek population in 1943 were surging into cinemas that played Dimitris Ioannopoulos' VOICE OF THE HEART, a movie regarded to be the first modern Greek film and the beginning of a neo-realist trend. It was produced by Fino Film, which until its preliminary dissolution in 1977 remained the country's biggest and most important production company, churning out more than 150 movies in the process. Also in 1943, actress Katina Paxinou was the first Greek national to win an Oscar for her role in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. Director Grigoris Thalassinos (aka. Gregg C. Tallas) soon built another bridge to the US making THE BAREFOOT BATTALION in 1953.

The 50s and 60s are regarded as the Golden Age of Greek Cinema. Every year saw more than 50 new movies produced, with several directors and actors such as Nikos Tsiforos, Ellie Lambeti and Irene Papas winning international renown. Mihalis Kakogiannis, too, started his career in the 50s with the film STELLA, a clear-cut film noir like many works from this era. In his Hollywood production ALEXIS SORBAS, starring Anthony Quinn, he created a myth that even today instantly comes to mind when thinking about cinema and Greece: the Sirtaki. It was an invented folk dance, choreographed especially for the movie and still inseparably linked to composer Mikis Theodorakis' musical score.

Smell the ashes…

Theodorakis also composed other film scores, for example for Sidney Lumet's SERPICO or Constantin Costa-Gavras' Z from 1969. Another Greek composer also managed to carry his flag far out of his own country's borders: Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, better known under his alias Vangelis, who became immortal with his music for CHARIOTS OF FIRE, BLADE RUNNER oder 1492. Only very few directors in the 20th century reached a similar level of success, and most of those had emigrated early in their lives. Besides Costa-Gavras there was Georgios (George) P. Cosmatos, who in the 80s and 90s had big budget Hollywood hits like RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II and TOMBSTONE. Greek cinema in the meantime was in artistic and commercial decline, which only ended at the turn of the century.

A New Beginning

SAFE SEX, a frivolous comedy from 1999, was an unexpected hit and went on to become the highest-grossing Greek film of all time, selling even more tickets in domestic cinemas than James Cameron's TITANIC. Other movies – now with gradually higher budgets – could repeat some of the success in the following years, notably A TOUCH OF SPICE or NYFES. The trend to more popularly accepted films held on for some time and had the production companies flourishing. As in the very beginning of Greek cinema, domestic films could hope for a loyal audience granting them quotas of viewership that are unique in Europe.

Yorgos Lanthimos' DOGTOOTH in 2009 was already the third Greek film to win a major award at Cannes (it was the Prix Un Certain Regard). Lanthimos is thereby standing in a tradition with Greek filmmakers like Costra-Gavras und Theodoros Angelopoulos, he is today regarded as one of the young prodigies of a artistical and cinematical film culture of renewed strength in Greece.

Links

• Detailed historical summary of Greek cinema history
• Greek Film Centre
• Hellenic Film Commission Office
• Union of Film, Television and Audiovisual Technicians
• Thessaloniki Museum of Cinema
• Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos

• NOWHERE (GR 2009. Michael Monemvasiotis)