CoMo No. 13: Greece (May, 2023)

[sally]

he wasn't always swearing

i glanced at him on icm but i got the sense his heart's not in it anymore....

anyway watched another film i've been meaning to watch since mubi days:


blood on the land - vasilis georgiadis (1966) #CoMoΕλλάδα




oh....he's definitely a nice boy (an insufferable saint, but who can complain when you're caught between those eyelashes and the chest hair)







this greek western (from red lanterns director) is not exactly ideologically subtle...



but it's filmed in the now mildly familiar rocks of meteora, so the scenery, hot man, and ubiquitous upright phallic energy make it largely bearable

[Mario Gaborovic]

If you guys are talking about Dimitris, he was banned on icm long time ago because he continuously offended others despite multiple warnings. That's what admins told me.

That's why sticking to the rules can't be labeled as hate speech, and it makes more damage to the political correctness, but he let his emotions overwhelm him.

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you want ass? there is ass, and ass, and ass, and ass, and boobs and ass

FLOWERS AND BOTTOMS (Christos Massalas, 2016) #CoMoΕλλάδα

https://vimeo.com/195011907

[sally]

continuing my unofficial study of bells in silent movies




astero - dimitris gaziadis (1929) #CoMoΕλλάδα

beautiful pastoral greek tale making full use of landscape and mythical past

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ibid ↑

as she was combing her hair


he was stroking his mustache


what a lovely skirt, honey! (he says)
what a lovely skirt, honey! (she says)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astero_(1929_film)
Astero (Dimitris Gaziadis, 1929) is considered a romantic fustanella film.

The fustanella was traditional Greek attire.
It is a pleated skirt-like garment that is also referred to as a kilt
and was initially featured in the film Golfo (Konstadinos Bahatoris, 1915).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fustanella

The fustanella film (or fustanella drama) was a popular genre in the Greek cinema from 1930s to 1960s.
This genre emphasized on depictions of rural Greece and was focused on the differences between rural and urban Greece.
In general it offered an idealized depiction of the Greek village, where the fustanella was a typical image.
In Greece today, the garment is seen a relic of a past era with which most members of the younger generations do not identify.

[sally]

fit - athina rachel tsangari (1994) #CoMoΕλλάδα

i can't remember atternberg at all, but i really like this funny short from her

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ibid ↑

New thread dedicated to the "New thread dedicated to pictures of people sticking their tongues out"

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THE CAPSULE (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2012) #CoMoΕλλάδα

New thread dedicated to the "New thread dedicated to pictures of people sticking their tongues out"
New post
New pictures

[sally]

Mourning Rock should be up your sally, alley

fucking hell, you sadistic maniac. i've never seen anything so horrific, archaeologically...i'll have nightmares now

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MOURNING ROCK (Filippos Koutsaftis, 2000) #CoMoΕλλάδα

In the mystery schools of ancient Greece, the decay of the earth’s resplendent beauty began at the fall equinox,
which was associated with the goddess Persephone’s melancholic return to the underworld.
The myth of Persephone was in fact the basis for the famed Eleusinian Mysteries.

In ancient times, Eleusis was the site of ultimate pilgrimage for many Greeks and Romans,
where the tale of Persephone’s descent into the underworld was commemorated at the Great Mysteries each autumn equinox,
and her return each spring was celebrated in the Lesser Mysteries in the spring.

And the rituals surrounding the September equinox,
when the darkness began to usurp the light,
were by far the most sacred time of year.

The mysteries of the ancient world surrounded the September equinox with extraordinary veneration.
To them, the death of summer opened the gateway to eternity.

A documentary about Eleusina.
The past and the present, in complete antithesis, coexist in a place spoiled by modern industry


but which long ago hosted the Eleusinian Mysteries,
the secret ceremonies that initiated the ancient Greeks into the miracles of life, death and the afterlife.

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THE OGRE OF ATHENS (Nikos Koundouros, 1956) #CoMoΕλλάδα

https://letterboxd.com/sobchack/film/th ... of-athens/

To the nascent viewer, unfamiliar with Greek Cinema, this film may appear mystifying for stretches at a time.



And that's where I think context becomes important to understand the heap of praise bestowed on it.
By the 50s Greece not only had to deal with recovery from Axis occupation during WW2 but also the ravaging effects of a violent civil war - between Communist rebels and a US-supported right wing government - that lasted from 1946 to 1949. The Rightists won. And this is important because it set the tone for a very tenuous political climate in the ensuing decade. After years of violence, hunger, poverty, and mass killings, Greeks were mostly happy to just rebuild and move on.



Unlike Italy - where neorealism flourished as genuine socialist artistic movement - Greece was weighed down by a ruling clique that was hell bent on suppressing leftist ideologies. Oddly, out of this came a great renaissance in the Greek cinema, largely dominated by the studio Finos Film. But, the films of this era were essentially populist melodramas and comedies, largely reminiscent of the "White Telephone" films of Fascist Italy. Devoid of any overt political posturing, these were movies meant to entertain in the broadest, bottom line sense.



A lot of that changed in the mid 50s with Cacoyannis' "Stella (1950)." But even more significantly with "The Ogre of Athens." It was downright revolutionary. It was unlike any film ever produced in post-war Greece, stylistically and thematically. Additionally, it had its own singular merits that transcended just Greek films: it subverted "noir" archetypes and managed to conflate Expressionism with neorealism.



The other element that may appear odd to the "outsider" is a narrative approach still very much rooted in the characteristics of Ancient Greek drama. Much like Japan with Kabuki.



Story logic becomes less important than the focus on inner turmoil through exaggerated gestures, poetic interludes, symbolic satire, and the intervention of the chorus (here: the bar patrons, the performers, the police, the neighborhood onlookers). Even the Kafkaesque nature of the film owes more to classical Greece than to contemporary fiction.



"The Ogre Of Athens" ... truly stands apart from so much of the Greek cinema before and after it. It was a bold effort that introduced "auteurism" to Greece and made possible a more adventurous approach to filmmaking...

[sally]

o drakos is a masterpiece. this is not

the policeman of the 16th precinct - alekos sakellarios (1959) #CoMoΕλλάδα

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NOW ENTIRE EARTH CLINGS TO YOU, BECOMES FLESH OF YOUR FLESH, AND CRIES OUT OF CHAOS (Théo Delidis, 2014) #CoMoΕλλάδα

Shot during a summer on the Cycladic islands, in Greece, alone and with someone else.
Without any preconceived idea, except random meetings, the film was structured after the shooting, by the systematic organization of all the materials, and with the will to edit all these images and sound as a circular and cosmogonic structure.


It was shot with a Coolpix P5 and it is also a holiday movie.

[sally]

not sure if this is some avant-garde political comment or just random old-timey chaos but in amongst this footage #CoMoΕλλάδα of kaiser wilhelm ii visiting greece (unknown vips in Hats, military prancing and local dancing) there's footage in negative of a waterfall. surreal.

[sally]

kg - cynthia madansky (2018) #CoMoΕλλάδα

Subjectively capturing the spirit of contemporary Athens, Madansky turns to Greek anarchist poet Katerina Gogou as a source of inspiration.

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THE IDLERS OF THE FERTILE VALLEY (Nikos Panayotopoulos, 1978) #CoMoΕλλάδα

While reading Laziness in the Fertile Valley I had urges to go chop wood, wash a random person's car, scrub the refrigerator, pen a college-level organic chemistry text, anything to differentiate myself from the beyond-pathological degree of sloth depicted in this family of hideous ne'er-do-wells. What I ended up doing was, obviously, sit on my butt and turn pages.

Albert Cossery (1913–2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer of Greek Orthodox Syrian and Lebanese descent, born in Cairo.
Son of small property owners in Cairo, at the age of 17, inspired by reading Honoré de Balzac, emigrated to Paris.
He came there to continue his studies which he never did devote himself to.
In 60 years he only wrote eight novels, in accordance with his philosophy of life in which "laziness" is not a vice but a form of contemplation and meditation.



Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery's biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. The youngest is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he — try as he might — has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

despite...

It won the Golden Leopard at the 1978 Locarno

it wasn't well-recieved unequivocally...

A one-joke movie: a family of bourgeois boys (Pop and sons) retire to the country house for a short holiday that ends up lasting for years. They take turns screwing the maid, strolling the grounds, etc, until all they want to do is sleep: most of the day, then most days of the week, then for years. The horror of getting out of bed is just too much. And that's it. That's the movie. All two hours of it. —Kaj Kipling

distant echoes of Bunuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and of Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe)

films such as Reconstruction (Angelopoulos, 1970), TheTravelling Players (Angelopoulos 1975), Evridiki BA 2O37 (Nikolaidis, 1975), The Idlers of the Fertile Valley (Panayotopoulos, 1978), Happy Day (Voulgaris, 1977) or Evdokia (Damianos, 1971) are points of reference for the generation of the “Greek Weird Wave”, which pays a tribute to the cinematic modernity of the 1960s and the 1970s

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ANTIGONE (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1971) #CoMoΕλλάδα

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my brain flew away after watching this insanity


https://youtu.be/0CvMHmtlE5s

[sally]

the wizard of athens - ahilleas madras (1931) #CoMoΕλλάδα

omg where to start, fever-dream doesn't do it justice. cottafavi might be addressing the audience in antigone out of intellectual courtesy, but i think back in the 30's the 'wizard' of this movie was actively trying to cast a spell on the viewers, the only explanation for such insanity and viz jiri, it clearly worked!

so, the 1931 wizard of athens, made by ahilleas madras and starring frida poupelina, utilises footage (i am guessing due to budget restraints, artistic intentions and the desire to just use the damn stuff) from the unreleased 1922 film the gypsy girl of athens, also made by ahilleas madras and starring frida poupelina. which is very economical HOWEVER, they even used the intertitles from the old film without modification, so without the least explanation the heroine alternates throughout the film as dollie (greek/english intertitles) and lily (greek/french intertitles) and this is mildly confusing before you even get to the plot which is, i am tentatively guessing, as follows:

demented american heiress with kitten fetish is sent to greece for education by father, she is briefly captivated by the ancient ruins where she hallucinates a horizontally split-screen montage of dancing nymphs crushed by hovering architecture, then there is a lengthy aside featuring contemporary (staged) street scenes and none of the main actors. back to dollie/lily living it up chased by suitors (one helpfully holds her shopping whilst she purchases a pram which she immediately fills with kittens) until she meets a thief masquerading as a prince, who then abducts her to steal her pearls (black) after a party where she tries out her new swan dance. the thief throws her off the cliff where finally, after over half way through the movie, she is rescued by the wizard (this 'hero' who is actually way too old to be playing the role), who is so magic that she decides to abandon everything to live with him. until one day when some old rich south american (?) industrialist falls over in front of her, which is the prompt for her to leave the wizard and marry the industrialist (this wedding is conveyed using the exact same footage of her earlier swan dance party). the wizard is very sad so he takes a lot of drugs. meanwhile the industrialist's OCTOGENARIAN sister flies in and starts dance-flirting all over the place causing such a scandal that the industrialist decides to return home with the heroine, who discovers birds, rabbits, haymaking, and putting grapes in the mouths of poor children. during this time the wizard decides to try to reclaim dollie/lily, who runs off with him again and they make a living performing risque smut in hotels (cue bizarre dance scene where she pulls a snake between her legs) however industrialist turns up, takes her back, wizard is still sad, tries again to get her, only for her to say she can't escape industrialist, so the wizard prepares to leave, she seeing him leave falls off a cliff and drowns, so then he seeing her drowned also throws himself off a cliff and drowns beside her. the end.

i am unable to gif it for the pure filth thread, but also there is the most hilarious knife-polishing scene i've seen in a while

highly recommended.

[sally]

to the most resting bitch face ever (with spaghetti)......



the eternal return of antonis paraskevas - elina psikou (2013) #CoMoΕλλάδα

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FROM GREECE (Peter Nestler, 1966) #CoMoΕλλάδα

When Filmecho/Filmwoche called the film “communist”, it was doomed.
It was rarely shown and originated the stigma that ultimately made it impossible for Peter Nestler to continue to work in Germany.

Sotiri Petroula, Sotiri Petroula
Lambrakis took you to him, Freedom took you.
Hero martyrs lead the way.
Your blue eyes lead the way.

Sotiri Petroula, Sotiri Petroula.
Nightingale and lion, mountain and clear sky.
Lead our people, lead him forward.
Hero martyrs lead the way,
your blue eyes are calling us.

https://youtu.be/W4Jum5Rd8HY

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During this period, due to the increasing demand for technological support, many foreigners were invited to Athens as cameramen, maintenance
technicians, and projectionists. Some chose to stay. Among them, the German-Hungarian Josef Hepp (Giozef Chep, 1887–1968) worked relentlessly 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-enscène, 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.

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 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 indestructibility of superstition.” “In Europe,” he concluded, “such mummeries only contribute to the public hilarity, and bring the Church which parades them into contempt.”

THE ADVENTURES OF VILLAR (Joseph Hepp, 1924) #CoMoΕλλάδα

Wannabe Chaplin with bad gags.

https://youtu.be/WLNc_nsdS14

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THE HOURS: A SQUARE FILM (Antouanetta Angelidi, 1996) #CoMoΕλλάδα

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the wizard of athens - ahilleas madras (1931) #CoMoΕλλάδα

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 the fact that it was called a “masterpiece of bad cinema,” 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.

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GRANDMA DESPINA (Janaki Manaki, Milton Manaki, 1905) #CoMoΕλλάδα

https://youtu.be/v1d-W0T6N6E

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. 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.”

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.

[sally]

chevalier - athina rachel tsangari (2015) #CoMoΕλλάδα

really liked fit, don't remember attenberg, the capsule was a hideous perfume ad and this was a long meh.

[sally]

coatti - stavros tornes (1977) #CoMoΕλλάδα

whereas this, i loved. late 70s was a great time for greek cinema

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[sally]

motorway 65 - evi kalogiropoulou (2020) #CoMoΕλλάδα