In the hiaitus between good commercial cinema and the new perception of filmic representation that was emerging there stands a unique film-maker whose work deserves closer study and recognition. A lonely auteur from Thessaloniki, Takis Kanellopoulos (1933–1990) made only seven movies, all independent productions, which are suffused with overwhelming poetic elements that surface in a narrative lyricism dealing with the trauma of war, human loneliness, and the magic of sensuality. He does not seem to fit any classifiable continuity, belong to any particular movement, or respond in a direct way to any of the immediate problems of his society.
Kanellopoulos began his career with the ethnographic documentary Macedonian Wedding (Makedonikos Gamos, 1960), a film that can comfortably occupy a place next to the best achievements of the genre and which was created in the vein of Robert Flaherty’s The Man of Aran (1934) and Louisiana Story (1948). The cinematic eye recorded local customs and traditions, but not with the ideological bias of a Germanic Volkskunde that sought to justify preconceived notions about the noble savages inhabiting the mountains. On the contrary, Kanellopoulos explored human interactions, ritualistic patterns, and states of mind in an effort to foreground common spaces, gestures, and interactions where patterns of social cohesion and individual behavior converge. He repeated his achievement in his other two documentaries, Thasos (1961) and Kastoria (1969), descending into an unfamiliar Greece, replete with shadows, demonic presences, and dark primitive rituals, in an attempt to find the underlying emotional texture of human culture in its most pristine, pre-civilized authenticity.
His first feature film, Sky (Ouranos, 1962), was one of the most peculiar anti-war movies ever made: based on recollections in the personal letters, stories, and diaries of veteran soldiers from the Greek-Italian war of 1940, it captured the fear of loss, the incomprehensibility of fighting, and the strange emotions of heroic self-negation and altruism. In the spaces between the anonymous heroes and the fear of death, Kanellopoulos depicted the complex realities of history, the immense beauty of the natural world, and the uncompromising moral resolve of the common people. The sheltering sky embraced everything and everyone, creating the mythic dome against which human anxiety could be projected, sublimated, and immortalized.
Kanellopoulos was the first director who totally abandoned the luxuries and comforts of the studio, letting the camera roam in the open without a single point of reference or any sense of orientation. The use of widescreen deep focus and long sequence shots enabled the characters to fuse with the grand spectacle of nature and to become elemental forces themselves. Ironically, an Italian’s camera, Giovanni Varriano’s, framed with almost transcendental depth the otherness of creation, engulfing the grandeur of a human existence in agony and elation.
With his first feature movie, Kanellopoulos explored humanity before the original sin by depicting the abiding innocence in the human soul, and in the process revealed himself as a unique film-maker whose vision was analogous to that manifested in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930), in Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) or The Mirror (1975) and even in Terrence Mallick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and Alexander Sokurov’s contemporary cinema of transcendental contemplation. Like them, Kanellopoulos explored the extremely puzzling moral question of human goodness and kindness. “I believe in the goodness of humanity,” he said. “I believe in the saint, who is full of love and affection and nothing can change it.”22
Kanellopoulos produced only two more movies during the 1960s, both of which were distinct for their minimalist photography, sparse dialogue, and emotional subtlety; his Excursion (Ekdromi, 1966) is one of the most sensual visions of human relations ever produced, a celebration of ephemeral happiness, a mesmerizing exploration of the mystery of the human senses. Through the use of static shots, he creates a suggestive and illusive atmosphere, depicting how a passionate love triangle experiences the contradictions of desire and the dichotomies of the human heart. The story of two soldiers in love with the same woman and the questions of loyalty and friendship that this raises presents in its full maturity the central theme in Kanellopoulos’ film-making: love-trust-death.
Kanellopoulos is one of the few directors who privileged image over word: he was not afraid to let silence dominate the screen and the story. With sporadic and minimal dialogue, woven together by the expressionist music of Nikos Mamagakis, the script of his movies followed blurry, hazy, and static images, creating an air of strangeness, distance, and awe. Kanellopoulos was able to transform the faces of actors into indecipherable fragments of a paradise remembered: and he became the only Greek director who confronted the Freudian uncanny as a diffused natural reality and as the primeval ground of existence, which could break through the conventions of civilized life. With Kanellopoulos, the most brutal experience, the experience of evil in war, was “derealized” by his empathic and compassionate camera. Through his work, cinematic experience received absolute unity, oneiric dimensions and profound density—one can indeed claim that he was the first director to explore the formal possibilities for a radically new aesthetic representation of the real. He was also the director with whom the crisis of representation that modernism had addressed in Europe with Nouvelle Vague and Antonioni found its first elaboration in the Greek visual tradition, but in a unique way which needs to be situated in the wider context of world cinema, especially next to Yasujiro Ozu and the experimental American tradition by Maya Deren.
Kanellopoulos’ cinematic gaze was deeply introspective, perpetually turned towards the nostalgic recreation of a lost innocence in search of a state
of grace. It was comprised of understatements, enigmas, and situations in abeyance. His last successful film was his underrated Parenthesis (1968). Based on the play Still Life by Noel Coward, it was the story of a man and woman who meet briefly at a station after their train breaks down. It is his most stylized and static film, since only two actors appeared for 84 minutes, expressing and experiencing the whole gamut of human emotion, from lust to sympathy, repulsion to empathy, and disgust to intimacy. As Kostas Karderinis wrote:
His heroes do not have names or characteristics. They are not interested in such details, since they simply have six hours to share. That was the time that the train stopped for repairs in Thessaloniki, the city of the unknown man, the train that made them meet and the train that was going to separate them again, after this brief deviation in their life.23
The rest of the film is a long monologue by the female protagonist as she remembers and relives the lost experience: “You didn’t ask for my name neither did I . . . Now that the dream came into us and became our reality, I dreamed that I went back there, it was winter, but no . . . I didn’t find you . . . but I found that brief parenthesis that brought us together . . .” The film rests in the camera’s hovering over the minute details of objects, flowers, and images that made that experience possible and which are now an indelible part of the woman’s identity. Mamagakis’ music, based on the shrill sounds of the mandolin and the cembalo, provide a rich emotional background for such a transforming and guilt-laden encounter.
Kanellopoulos’ later movies, The Last Spring (I Teleutaia Anoixi, 1972), The Chronicle of Sunday (To Hroniko tis Kyriakis, 1975), and especially Romantic Note (Romantiko Simeioma, 1978), unfortunately ossified his unique style into self-referential projects, which should have been short films
takis Kanellopoulos, Excursion (1966). Greek Film Archive
but which Kanellopoulos expanded in a desperate attempt to tell a story that simply no longer existed. In Romantic Note he dispensed altogether with plot line and used the camera as the eye of an innocent bystander, looking here and there, unfocused and unattached and salvaging from oblivion and trivialization only fleeting experiences.
In 1980, Kanellopoulos released his last film Sonia, an elegiac farewell to a whole way of being and to a style that by then resembled a relic from the past. In an era of loud political statements, he abstained from all public decla- rations: the visual whispers were overpowered by the tumultuous rhetoric of ideologies. Yet the intimate theme of an ephemeral and affectionate love affair between a lonely young woman and a married middle-aged music teacher was treated with religious compunction, sympathy, and tenderness— and for this very reason passed unnoticed.
After 1980, Kanellopoulos stopped making movies altogether and remained a man apart, a hermit whose vision of cinema as an individuating project was never realized; yet his early films belong with the best films ever made in the country. His style was unique and unparalleled, and explored its own possibilities in only a few movies, which when considered as a whole make the most complete and consistent oeuvre of Greek cinema, emulated only by that of Theo Angelopoulos.