After a period of intense fighting the UN intervene and draw a Green Line through the middle of Cyprus, separating the Turkish and Greek territories.Thousands of refugees are relocated, and killed. The Green Line slices through homes, villages and the heart of the capital Nicosia.58
Figure 1.4 The U.N Buffer Zone dividing Nicosia city stating the forbidden area is the ‘dead zone’
(Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer Zone in Cyprus)
Spatial division is another prominent feature in the real and imaginary landscape.
Drawing a green line down the middle of the capital Nicosia in 1964 and separating the Greek and Turkish-Cypriot communities in 1974 when the entire island was divided has sustained in very forceful ways what it means for these communities to have divided and uninhabited spaces. The buffer zone emerges as a powerful and recurring visual metaphor in many films, through which filmmakers explore themes of memory, dislocation and the representation of time. I will return to a more expanded analysis of the buffer zone in Chapter Seven. It is an area of 346 kilometres which runs along the green line for 180.5 kilometres, with an approximate 10,000 people living in villages or working on farms around the zone.59 Barb wire fences which sustain the division between the island’s Greek and Turkish-Cypriot population are captured forcefully in many films, such as Buffer Zone (1996), Parallel Lives (Marinos Kartikkis) and Espresso (1999), linking mobility or immobility with the physical geography of the island.
Anyone who has travelled across the island before and after 1974 becomes aware of the physical transformation in the landscape. In the early 1990s I
inadvertently entered a forbidden zone on the southernside of the buffer whilst travelling through a popular suburb of Nicosia known as Ahlanja, where the green
66 line intersects between the south and north of the capital. My memories of this experience centre on the vast and uninhabited landscape which stretched out on the other side of the U.N. barrier, together with an overwhelming sense of desolation.
These sentiments, more than any prospect of imminent danger, prevailed. The abandoned and divided spaces in post-war Cyprus are historically removed from the Europe Deleuze describes in his cinema work, but there are some important points of comparison. Deleuze observes the spaces of post Second World War European cities, shattered by bombs, and in the passage below highlights the many
disconnected spaces:
[…] after the war, a proliferation of such spaces could be seen both in film sets [decors] and in exteriors, under various influences.The first, independent of the cinema, was the post-war situation with its towns demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns, and even in places where the war had not penetrated, its undifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks, warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron.60
He identifies the intimate connection between a shattered landscape and its
infiltration into the ‘film sets [decors]’. Deleuze’s paradigmatic shift from Cinema 1 to Cinema 2 which breaks with the movement-image entails a new relationship between real time and real spaces. Through a radical reversal, time ‘increasingly appears for itself ’.61 Why did this shift take place after the Second World War, and not before or after? In the Introduction to Pure Immanence, John Rajchman
describes how Deleuze’s philosophy ‘imagined the art of cinema’ in the
‘circumstances of uncertainty following World War II’. This sentiment is reflected in Cinema 2 where Deleuze states:
Why is the Second World War taken as a break? The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were ‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste grounds, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction […]. Situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once […].62
In this key passage which bridges his thesis from the cinema of movement to a cinema of inaction and time, Deleuze brings historical time and physical spaces into focus, examining their inextricable link. The slowing down of narrative time which heralds the ‘break’ between movement-images and subsequent time-images precipitates the post-war conditions where the physical environment becomes
‘deserted but inhabited’ creating the milieu for uncertainty. Accordingly, in post-war European Cinema, characters’ immobility reflects their perplexity in a world where nothing is seen to be certain or stable. Inaction is the result of the shattering
67 of motor-sensory responses where characters are no longer motivated to respond to situations in the familiar spaces they usually inhabited. Sensory reaction, which is found in the action-images of Hollywood narratives before the war, expresses the movement of male protagonists whose essential role is to connect the threads of the narrative as they move from shot to shot and frame to frame continuously.
In the passage below, Deleuze synthesises key features from both cinema volumes as he comments on Rossellini’s films. Here the ‘sensory-motor-schema’ of
‘old cinema’ has succumbed to the presence of time ‘in the pure state’:
Hence Rossellini’s great trilogy, Europe 51, Stromboli, Germany Year 0: a child in the destroyed city, a foreign woman on an island, a bourgeois woman who starts to ‘see’ what is around her. Situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once: what tends to collapse, or at least to lose its position, is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action-image of the old cinema. And thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage, it is time, ‘a little time in the pure state’ which rises up to the surface of the screen.63
When we examine these instances from Cinema 2 it is possible to detect Deleuze’s meandering journey from the very solid destruction of post-war spaces to the disintegration of a cinematic narrative which creatively manifests the impact of a character’s weakening sensory motor actions, as time emerges to occupy cinematic space. Deleuze captures a certain detachment between man and his surroundings, and believes that our ‘belief in the world’ can be restored again, through cinema.64
These conditions which apply to the post-war landscape in Europe apply to the context of 1974. In the case of Cyprus, it is the refugees’ flight and
displacement coupled with the divided and uninhabitable spaces on the island which define its physical spaces as ‘disconnected’. Upon reflection, this notion expresses my experiences of the geographical space when I was walking in Ahlanja in the 1990s.
The Greek-Cypriot refugees’ eviction and re-location focuses our attention on another fact of disconnection. In diary entries by Greek-Cypriot refugees, there is compelling testimony of how the trauma of leaving their homes overwhelms them into a state of inaction and helplessness:
15 August
Refugees inTrikoukkia.Thursday, today. We woke up in Trikoukkia because we had taken refuge from the Turks. The kids’ noise woke us up…
We sat here and sat there until noon…
17 September
We do not forget our hopes, and our only hope is in you, my God. We are waiting, waiting.
That blessed day will sometime come and we are all waiting for it.
68 Below is an account by a man called Dionysios, a farmer from the village of
Argaki:
Just after we fled from the village I got sick […]
I said to myself in that first week, we’ll soon be back in our village. I said to the family in August, ‘By November 1st we’ll be back.’ When November 8th had passed I said to them, ‘We’ll go soon. By Easter we’ll be back!’[…]. Then Easter came, and I still have the hope that we will. I do not lose hope.65
In filmic representations of these experiences, narrative continuity is dislocated and the irrational cut is exploited to visualise refugees’ displacement and hopelessness, as they experience what Deleuze describes in a different context as an ‘interminable waiting’ when time begins to unfold.66