Observaciones de Tailandia

The first literature on film was written between 1923 and 1933, mostly as empirical testimonies of the film-viewing experience. The magazine Cinema and the journal Cinematic Library were launched in 1923 but ceased publication within one year. A magazine carrying a French title, To Parlan,

tongo Mizrahi, The Refugee Girl (1938). Greek Film Archive

was published from 1931 to 1933 and is extremely important for the early debates on what constituted “Greek cinema.”

Dimitris Gaziadis’ short book How I Can Play in the Cinema (1926) was heralded as the first attempt at critical reflection on the art of cinematic perfor- mance. Moreover, the fortnightly journal Cinematic Star (Kinimatografikos Astir) was first published by Heraclis Oikonomou in 1924 and continued until 1969, when more informed and theoretically inclined magazines appeared. It was in these early magazines, before newspapers and literary journals added special pages on films, however, that the first reflections on acting and directing, as well as some interesting reviews on specific films, were published.

Most literary writers of the period refused to see any other worth in cinema beyond its entertainment value. It was only Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) who during his extensive travels realized the importance of cinema for contemporary audiences. Having visited the Soviet Union on a number of occasions between 1925 and 1929, he witnessed the seminal importance of cinema for the establishment of the new society and watched films by the Russian avant-garde. He tried to write a numbers of scripts which were never produced into films, although at least one of them was later incorporated into his monumental play Buddha.

In one of his letters to his disciple Pandelis Prevelakis, Kazantzakis made some sensitive and extremely prescient comments:

When writing for films you are forced to transform the most abstract idea into image . . . A multitude of psychological problems and especially dreams, subconscious, visions can be perfectly expressed only through cinema . . . You are overtaken by a bitter pleasure and pride when you create through such shadows passions, loves, urges, and unite and separate and create humans who silently, in a fleeting moment, vanish . . . This cruel satisfaction of the immense drive and its sudden disappearance charac- terizes what I have written so far.28

One could claim that Kazantzakis was the first Greek thinker who under- stood the cinematic experience phenomenologically as the interplay of photosensitized surfaces that appear fleetingly and disappear without a trace—except that on the film itself. “I must learn to use this new weapon well,” he wrote to Prevelakis, “which as I practice it, I like more and more because it sharpens my eye beyond belief.”29

The first serious film reviewer was Elli Inglesi (1897–?) who, under the pseudonym Iris Skarabaiou, established the foundations for film criticism before anyone else in the country.30 _{Her reviews combine formal and}

thematic criticism and offer a rare insight into the development of the termi- nology of film criticism in Greek, which was then predominantly a matter of French words transliterated into Greek—a practice that continues to this day.

Skarabaiou was one of the first reviewers to discuss the problem of lighting and to suggest ways in which directors could deal with the brightness of the Mediterranean sun and the glare of the Greek landscape. The fact that the first serious reviewer was a woman is unusual for a patriarchal society such as Greece, but may reflect the sense of modernity surrounding the new medium. Other important reviewers were Vion Papamihalis (who also made movies after 1945) and the ambitious young intellectual, Spyros Markezinis, who was later to become an ill-starred politician and who wrote under the initials RO-MA.

Unlike the writings of Inglesi, the tenor of most reviews was rather dismissive and in many ways unfair. For example, Loros Fantazis (a pseudonym) wrote in 1930:

As the reader can see, these films are nothing more than journals (documentaries), presenting natural beauties, with insignificant directing skills, clumsy, and destined to serve, I can’t deny this, intensely, tourism but not, as it interests us here, Art.31

Indeed, the search for “authentic Greek images” through “art films” would always oscillate between the commodification of the landscape for the purposes of tourism and the serious attempts at its cinematic framing through the camera eye.

Special mention must be made of G. N. Makris, a film reviewer for the literary journal Nea Estia since 1932. Makris was one of the very few intel- lectuals who saw the new art as “a new way of looking at the visible world.”32

“The camera,” he believed, “has the magical power to recreate the visible world, to recompose time, to narrow or to enlarge space, and to mobilize everything according to its own rhythm.”33 _{Makris based his reviews on}

the aesthetics of Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir and was one of the first film critics to discuss the dichotomy between European and American cinemas—accepting them both as equivalent and complementary modes of representation.

Generally speaking, it was in the 1930s that the urban landscape of Athens was gradually discovered as material for visual representation. Visually, Athens had remained an enigma for the camera; ancient ruins coexisted with contemporary huts and formless buildings in stark and unflattering juxtaposition. Gaziadis, Meravidis, Hepp, and Tatassopoulos started exploring the Attic landscape by delving into the lives of ordinary people and the misery of refugees. They did not see the landscape and its people as idyllic images in a bucolic serenity, as was common in the dominant literature of the period. On the contrary, they focused not on the architectural ruins of a glorious past but on the human ruins of a chaotic present. Such representation outlasted these early cinematographers to become one of the hallmarks of Greek cinema.

The Athens of the 1930s was still a collection of self-sufficient neighbor- hoods replicating the memory of distinct villages. The major film audiences in urban centers were abruptly urbanized villagers who worked in the expanding industries of the capital, and the millions of Anatolian refugees living in small villages around Athens, which were later to be incorporated as the suburbs of the expanding capital. For both audiences, the trauma of displacement and exile was so fresh and deep that it could not be confronted openly and critically. This accounts for the frequent production of idealized fustanella movies, which reminded the audience of their origins by extolling the virtues of the “true nation,” monumentalized by the symbolic ethnicity of their “authentic” costume.

Thematically, the genre was a kind of populist therapy for social displacement and communal loss, and, at the same time, a symptom of a community in search of an “archetypal” identity in conditions of instability and uncertainty. These states of mind permeated Greek cinema for many decades to come. The ultimate function of such films, however, was a special strategy of nation building which was achieved through the shared experi- ences at the cinema and the establishment of spaces of communal bonding. As in other nations, the experience of going to the movies was a socializing rite of passage which helped to forge personal, social, and national identities.

Due to the lack of a functional and profitable studio system, it was technically impossible for film-makers such as Gaziadis, Meravadis, Hepp, Laskos and others to bring together a complete story on the basis of narrative sequentiality. They were compelled by circumstances to avoid grand narratives or phantasmagorical stories, that is, the kind of historical reconstructions and period dramas that had been produced in Italian cinema since its establishment. Most of their films remained virtual documentaries that depicted existing realities in their multiplicities and contradictions, often blending genuine political tensions and ideological subversions with triteness and banality. The storylines were mostly a pretext, sometimes arbitrarily inserted, and often inconsequential.

Nonetheless, by depicting existing realities they eschewed dividing cinema into high and popular, into cinema for the select few and cinema for the masses. Early criticism against cinema as an art was based on its appeal to the masses and was consequently judged as being unqualified for producing works of art (meaning high art, of course). Certainly, there was an imminent danger in this. It led to the mindless comedies of the postwar period and set the limits for the creative imagination in the mise-en-scène, the camera angle and finally the story itself in all subsequent films.

On the other hand, it kept the cinematic eye close to ordinary people rather than to ideological fantasies or to the historicist delusions of the official state apparatuses. Even the fustanella dramas can be seen as a visual quest for origins during a prolonged period of instability and unrest and against

the background of a rising modernity that fragmented all accepted forms of self-determination and produced a continuous anxiety about belonging and identity. The humbleness of the Greek cinematic eye has remained its main source of renewal and simultaneously its own worst enemy.