Preámbulo del artículo XX

Film production started immediately after liberation, with some interesting melodramas about the ravages of war, and with their number increasing each year. During the immediate postwar years, production fluctuated because of the raging civil conflict and the scarcity of funds. Six films were made in 1945, only four in 1946, five in 1947, eight in 1948, seven in 1949, and seven in 1950. Yet the number was not insignificant given the strict censorship, police restrictions on moving around the country, and the lack of availability of film itself. Also, screening them was problematic: most cinemas showed only money-making Hollywood films. The directors themselves had to find time slots within the existing screening timetables in order to show a local film (having convinced the venue owners); only if that screening was a commercial success could it then be shown again. Despite all odds, certain Greek films slowly gained the confidence of the audience, especially in the cities.

Among the successful films were The Villa with the Lilies (I Villa me ta Noufara, 1945) by Dimitris Ioannopoulos, Double Sacrifice (Dipli Thysia, 1945) by Yannis Hristodoulou, and Broken Hearts (Ragismenes Kardies, 1945) by Orestes Laskos and Nikos Tsiforos, all of which are of special interest since they were commercially successful melodramas and defined the atmosphere of nostalgia for a lost ideal, or a broken unity, which dominated most films until the mid-1950s.

Double Sacrifice was an interesting exercise in film-making since it had been started before the war and was completed five years later: viewers could easily see the differences in the cityscape and the faces of actors.

Vion Papamihalis’ Unslaved Slaves (Adoulotoi Sklavoi, 1946) was one of the best films of the period and depicts a group of young amateurs who try to stage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream just before the German occupation. The popular musician Manos Hatzidakis (1925–1994), who composed the soundtrack for many acclaimed movies of the next decade, made his debut with this film. (It was in reality made by the critic Marios Ploritis who decided not to have his name credited.)

In 1946, Yorgos Tzavellas released his Forgotten Faces (Prosopa Lismonimena), one of the best films of the period. As in his subsequent work, Tzavellas focused on the predicament of common people against the background of invisible yet omnipotent and large historical movements. A

migrant from the United States returns to Athens where he discovers that his ex-fiancé has become a prostitute while her daughter is planning her wedding to a wealthy man. He tries to blackmail them but the burden of the double betrayal destroys him. The film was a box-office failure and Tzavellas himself considered it his worst movie. Yet it prefigured his mature works of the next decade, while showcasing his eye for detail in composition, lighting and set design.

Marina (1947) by Alekos Sakellarios is also worth mentioning for its fusion of music and action in a strange musical melodrama with loose script and minimal action. It also introduced the new form of female star, in the mould of Katharine Hepburn, with the singer Stella Greca (1925–?), who sang more than acted, thus linking contemporary production to prewar film traditions and practices in an attempt to produce the first Greek film musical. This was also the first Greek movie in which a long and passionate kiss was recorded to the extreme consternation of moralists—from both left and right. Mihalis Gaziadis and Ioannis Philippou’s Anna Rodite (1948) was another interesting film set on the island of Rhodes (which had just been annexed to Greece) and which explored the tortuous relationship between Greeks and Italians. “Mussolini struggled for 20 years but Greeks remained Greeks. Now that fascism is dead, Greeks and Italians will be friends,” is the line that ends the film. The movie was a box office success and demonstrated the ability of the second brother of the Gaziadis family to make a good movie with a quick pace and decent script.

Another good film was Nikos Tsiforos’ Last Mission (Teleutaia Apostoli, 1948), the first film to represent Greece at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1949. It was produced during the Civil War and with the Cold War emerging over the political horizon. No political references were made in the film nor were there any reflections on the recent past; only idealized representations of the ethical virtues displayed by army officers.

Thematically, such war dramas that dealt with the resistance were compelled by censorship or indeed self-censorship never to mention anything about the “anti-nationally thinking” Left. Left-wing resistance fighters or rebels were represented as sinister shadows, reckless trouble- makers or faceless Soviet agents. As the advertisement announced: “Watch this film: it contains magnificent stories of self-sacrifice and patriotism!” Stylistically, Tsiforos’ film introduced flashback as a technical device of narrative re-enactment, a device which was to remain dominant in many movies referring to the historical events of the 1940s. Flashback was an effective device with which to present the invisible survival of the past in the present. Only Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players (1975), however, succeeded in making present and past contemporaneous, intertwining them in a continuous simultaneity.

Tzavellas’ next film, Marinos Kondaras: the Corsair of the Aegean (Marinos Kontaras—o Koursaros tou Aigaiou, 1948) became the first Greek

film to appear at an international festival, in Belgium. It was a historical drama filmed on the islands of Santorini and Paros. The script by Tzavellas himself was based on a short story and was effectively written with fast- paced action and expressive dialogue. The mise-en-scène was meticulously executed, with effective lighting and space arrangements in internal and external shootings through Jason Novak’s superb cinematography.

Nikos Tsiforos’ Lost Angels (Hamenoi Angeloi, 1948), an urban drama about love and betrayal, depicted the unscrupulous domination of the social reality of the country by the nouveaux riches. Josef Hepp’s photography reached its artistic peak in this film, through well-structured interior settings and geometric architectural perceptions of spatial arrangements. On the basis of the filming of this movie we can clearly understand the technical progress that Finos Studios had made, especially in the synchronization of image and sound, an achievement that accelerated the production of films after the Civil War. Yet two films, made as the Civil War was still raging, presented a completely different take on recent history: Alekos Sakellarios’ The Germans Strike Back (Oi Germanoi Xanarhontai, 1948) and Yorgos Tzavellas’ The Drunkard (O Methistakas, 1948).

nikos tsiforos, Lost Angels (1948). Courtesy, Finos Films.

In both films we can admire the sculptural elegance of Hepp’s camera: the veteran of Greek cinematography explored, as the technology had by then become available, symmetrical frames and geometric arrangements of space in an ingenious manner that should be studied more closely. Within the “completely new studios of Finos Film,” the director and the director of photography were in control of the mise-en-scène, the lighting and ultimately of the acting itself. Hepp managed to control the lighting and arranged each shot in a way that framed specific angles; meanwhile, the camera easily followed the action through tracking shots or medium to long takes. The synchronization of sound and image was perfect both inside and outside the studio. Hepp’s camera explored both long shots and discreet close-ups in an imaginative and dynamic manner, employing double exposures, jump cuts, and dissolves that gave (especially in the first film) the nightmarish yet quirky atmosphere of the terrifying possibility of a German comeback.

The Germans Strike Back was initially a play and Alekos Sakellarios made a functional adaptation to the new medium. It can be safely regarded as one of the best movies of Greek cinema. Its story was about the confusion of the common man in the face of the incomprehensible magnitude of history. The film had the subtitle “satiric nightmare” (satirikos efialtis) and was an unexpected, almost paradoxical movie for its time. It was based on a dream that the common man has that Hitler and the Nazis, having rearmed themselves, counterattack and conquer Europe and Greece again, at the moment when Greeks are fighting each other. Suddenly, the divided Greeks reunite against their conquerors. A group of them find refuge in a mental hospital and although they pretend to be inmates, are eventually arrested by the Germans. As they are about to be executed, the nightmare ends.3

Some lines from the dialogue still haunt Greek collective memory to this day: “Humans, humans, what is the purpose of so much hatred and mutual slaughtering? We are all humans. There is land for all, there is sun for all. We are all parts of a great universe . . .” and “The foundation of happiness is justice and love.” However, as the main protagonist discovers, superbly performed by Vassilis Logothetidis, these are the words of a madman and not of a “good” patriot!

The shot of the Gestapo informer through an enormous keyhole was one of the most effective technical innovations of the film. The camera reconstructed a period of conflict and fratricide that could be expressed only through a mixture of comedy and tragedy, through an in-between confusion regarding the future of the country and an optimism about the possibilities of the medium.

Sakellarios’ story was effectively translated into a unified metaphor, which synthesized codes and signs into a delightful black comedy which the audience liked but which infuriated state censorship, despite the very

conservative ideology of its director. Nevertheless, it was extremely brave, in the middle of the Civil War, to preach unity, peace, and reconciliation, as though asking to fraternize with the enemy. After this, Sakellarios avoided “controversial” works and despite the fact that he was to direct some hilarious films, he squandered his shrewdness for comedies of manners on burlesque caricatures and eventually bad taste.

Yorgos Tzavellas’ The Drunkard remained for a long time the most commercially successful movie of postwar Greek cinema (selling 300,000 tickets in its first week and thus proving the growing confidence of the audience towards local production). It depicted the consequences of war on individual psychology by presenting the ruined optimism of the generation which had fought against Italy only to find itself excluded and persecuted afterwards by the Greek state it had freed. Sombre colors, dark backgrounds, half-finished sentences: all markers of the atmosphere of fear and oppression that dominated the surrounding society—the human ruin was the epitome of a society in which there was no trust, gratitude, or recognition. Orestes Makris (1898–1975) gave the most accomplished performance of his career, acting with unassuming sensitivity and restrained dramatic intensity.

Alekos Sakellarios, Germans Strike Back (1948). Courtesy,

Hepp’s photography constructed almost a third dimension of deep perspective by exploring the external landscape in a passionate and intrusive manner, zooming in and out and creating through effective lighting an atmosphere of urgency, confusion, and anxiety. In this film, the camera did not depict simple portraits in juxtaposition or collision, but complete and unified actions, and integrated narratives, an achievement that was to become Tzavellas’ major contribution to film-making. His style was on a par with Roberto Rossellini’s Umberto D. (1952) in its subversive depiction of social relations and class differences through the foregrounding of individual adventure and personal drama. With this film, Greek cinema moved towards exploring individual characters and psychological specificities, leaving behind its long tradition of presenting general types and stock images. Gregoris Gregoriou’s (1919–2005) directorial debuts with The Red Rock (O Kokkinos Vrahos, 1949) and Storm at the Lighthouse (Thiella sto Faro, 1950) were notable for his sustained efforts to construct a complete mise-en-scène using still inadequate technology. (Gregoriou didn’t work for Finos Films and produced his first films independently.) He observed that films were “dominated by technicians and not by directors,” and in his memoirs described his countless conflicts with the director of photography, the legendary Dimitris Gaziadis, who thought he was filming political events and not works of the imagination.4 _{Gaziadis wanted the camera to remain}

still while actors simply came and went in front of it. Yet the film was an excellent achievement of well-timed action and extremely “dark” individual psychology. The editing, which was done with ingenuity and feeling for tense drama, was probably its most important contribution to the renaissance of the film industry. Gregoriou superimposed shots and images in a “collage of collisions,” depicting psychological conflict and anxiety. External shots on the island of Zakynthos recorded the last years of an organic community and a traditional lifestyle. In 1953 a terrible earthquake totally destroyed the old

Yorgos tzavellas, The Drunkard (1948). Courtesy, Finos

architecture and this film became one of the few records of how Zakynthos used to be.

In his second film, Gregoriou collaborated with Jason Novak and went completely in the opposite direction: the camera moved fast and without plan, in a frantic way that, as Gregoriou himself admitted, made viewers dizzy:

I tried to juxtapose many diverse and heterogeneous elements, as a result of a thematic and visual greed which had taken me over during the shooting of the film. That was due to the complete freedom I had to film whatever I wanted, without self-control and a third critical eye. As a result, the film became a mosaic of different elements of Italian neorealism, American thriller, and French psychological drama or detective story.5

Gregoriou’s statements were emblematic of a period when the lack of technical expertise was still defining the grammar of visual language, with gaps in script, continuity, and style. At that time, Jean Cocteau happened to be in Athens and attended the shooting of the film; after watching all of these technical efforts he told Gregoriou with amazement, “But you are reinventing cinema from the beginning! Are you not wasting your energy?”6 _{Until his death,}

Gregoriou explored cinematic language in many genres and made some of the most important films of Greek cinema, and, despite his many concessions to ephemeral circumstances, he must be considered one of the seminal directors who constructed the mainstream idiom of Greek cinema after the war.