Trabajo de campo

The great antagonist of the New Greek Cinema was not the totalitarian state but something closer to the experience of the cinema mystique. Sexuality was always forbidden in Greek cinema, as in most countries after the 1950s. Hollywood had already introduced in 1934 the famous Hays Code, which hindered cinema as a whole from dealing overtly with the question of sexuality. General Metaxas’ laws prohibited sex scenes as much as they prohibited political themes.

Of course, Greek cinema had had its nude moments since Laskos’ Daphnes and Chloe (1931), while Tzavellas’ Counterfeit Pound (1955) also had a scene with full female nudity. As we have seen, Greek male audiences were intimidated by female nudity yet attracted to it, since women were nearly always represented either in a sublimated fashion, as angels who suffered in purity and dignity, or as fallen angels, who in depravity and squalor longed for a male redeemer, to domesticate them in the kitchen. However, some films from the late 1950s and early 1960s started questioning this state of affairs. Tallas’ Ayoupa (1958) confronted the audience with explicit sexual provocations; yet his attempt to depict female sexuality as part of personal identity was too far ahead of the standards of a society in which women could only be perceived as victims. So the repre- sentation of a woman taking sexual initiatives was soon relegated to the depiction of sexually active women as whores, whose bodies were the easy prey of the male gaze. Yorgos Zervos’ The Lake of Desires (1958) contained bold and violent sex scenes that caused considerable problems to its distri- bution. Both films inaugurated a long tradition of low-budget movies with very explicit content which caused many intellectual headaches for left-wing ideologists, and just as many problems for the censors.

The system that was implicitly accepted was that of limited release in selected venues, which in the long run screened only “sexually explicit” movies under the rating “Strictly Inappropriate.” Such labels functioned as a further stimulus to the male population to watch such “inappropriate” films, especially in suburban areas. During the 1960s, prestigious luxury cinemas, like Rosi-Clair—which was one of the first cinemas built in Athens— gradually screened only porn films in order to compete with the rising dominance of television, while porn cinemas existed in specific suburbs, submerged in the anonymity of populous cities.

Another undercover system was concocted by producers and cinema owners in order to “enhance” the sexual content of the films but avoid the restrictions of the censors. Soft porn films, or skin flicks, were screened as rated by state censorship; but, during the screening itself, some extra scenes were added with more explicit material, with different actors and in different settings. This addition (tsonta in the vernacular) became the main characteristic of these films and as an extension of the cinema venues themselves.16

From 1970 until the early 80s, when the industry itself evolved to hard-core porn, with violent sex scenes, rape, incest, bestiality, and more; around 180 movies were made which became legendary for their titles, their actors, and their dialogue. Lust and Passion (Kiriakos Mauropanos, 1960), The House of Lust (Yorgos Zervoulakos, 1960), The Perverts (Kostas Stratzalis, 1963), The Nets of Shame (Errikos Andreou, 1965), The Sinful Women of the Night (Dimitris Galatis, 1966), Gabriela the Whore of Athens (Yorgos Papakostas, 1966), and Sinful Gypsy Women (Lakis Kazan, 1969) paved the way for an unexpected proliferation of sexually explicit movies which thrived under the stern and strict supervision of the dictatorship. From 1969, an average of 20 to 30 films were made each year, some of them box office successes. For example, in the most political year of 1975, Angelopoulos’ and Koundouros’ groundbreaking films were selling fewer tickets than the venerable Women Lusting for Sex, Honey on Her Body, My Body on Your Body and Her Lustful Body!

In these films, the script was more or less nonexistent and the acting was appalling. They were usually filmed on an island in order to be sold internationally, and their cost was extremely low. The actors were of diverse origin, background, color, and sexual orientation; some, like the voluptuous Gizela Dali, the carnivorous Tina Spathi, the demanding Anna Fonsou, and the insatiable Kaiti Gini were professional actors or singers. (Some of them later became fanatical Christian nuns to atone for the sins of their careers.)

Among the studs ruled the semi-divine Kostas Gousgounis who became a household name for two generations. His shaved Telly Savalas-like head (though he was presented as the Greek Yul Brynner), his famous surreal (and totally unrelated to the action) punchlines, his abysmally bad acting, and

his animalistic sexuality transformed him into a legendary figure, a peculiar “subcultural” personality, with style of his own and a distinct performance of vernacular humor. His famous movies Sex at Thirteen Knots (Sex 13 Mpofor, 1974) and The Pervert (O Anomalos, 1975) have been elevated to cult status and are screened today at special festivals or conferences as examples of authentic popular culture. Other men worked under pseudonyms like Tely Stalone (the “biggest” Greek ever recorded, the Athenian John Holmes), Kostas Bokolis (the local Ron Jeremy), Pavlos Karanikolas (the “longest Greek” ever), or were imported like the African-American Jimmy Belarike, a black stud whom no one ever saw naked; the French stallion Georges Christof, with a predilection for anal pleasures; and the elusive Bob Belling who made cinematic history with his lustful penetration of a little goat!

The main director was Omeros Efstratiadis, who had produced some heartbreaking melodramas in the previous decades. Efstratiadis’ soft porn films were made for the international market and were released in two versions. One was for local consumption, without explicit sex, but with lots of titillation, and sometimes starring important mainstream actors. Another version, with explicit sex scenes, was made for markets like Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, and the Greek cinemas in Astoria, New York. (Of course, most of them were reimported, sometimes dubbed in other languages.) His famous film Diamonds on Her Naked Body (Diamantia sto Gymno kormi tis, 1972) has been elevated to cult status, if not for its silly script, for the famous actors from classical theatre taking part.

Efstratiadis’ films offered what the tourist industry had named “the three Ss” (summer, sex, souvlaki), and were made on Greek islands with international casts from Germany, Denmark, the United States, Canada, and Brazil, thereby establishing the market of sex tourism that was to flourish throughout the 1970s until the arrival of HIV/AIDS.

Costas Gousgounis in In the Trap of Crime (1972) Credit:

The actors were mainly heterosexual, but after the mid-70s, male homosexuality became fashionable, as men were “experimenting” more, while lesbian stories seemed to be the ultimate aphrodisiac for some hetero- sexual men. In homosexual porn films the “passive” partner was depicted as an effeminate screaming queen with an insatiable thirst for rough sex with hairy, oily, and foulmouthed Mediterranean men.

Another characteristic of these soft porn films is that they never depicted full male nudity; with the penis penetrating everything and everyone, but without ever being seen. Only in the early 1980s did such nudity become acceptable and desirable for the mainly heterosexual audience, especially after the import of films of John Holmes, Ron Jeremy, Lexington Steele, and other legends of the genre. At that point, a strange figure appeared as the key director, producer, distributor, and pimp, who remained not only anonymous but totally unknown, using the nickname Berto, as homage to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.17 _{His obscure personality (nobody}

has been able to identify him with certainty to this day), is in itself material for cinema. “The Great Berto” made most of his commercially successful films with his own production company, Elite Films, for the home-video market and as such it was impossible to rate them officially or even to measure their success. As they were made for private consumption, they became more hard-core, lacking in the sparkling humor that had made them acceptable as “cult” pleasures until then. This change led to the death of the skin flicks and the popular culture surrounding them.

Certainly we must see the proliferation of porn films within the wider context of sexual liberation that engulfed the industrialized world from the 1960s. Greek porn films belong to the golden age of the genre worldwide and were “inspired” by the success of films like Boys in the Sand (1971), Deep Throat (1972), Emmanuelle (1974), and later the cult classic Debbie Does Dallas (1978). Their titles have become proverbial: I Accuse My Body (1969), The Circle of Viciousness (1971), Mirella, the Flesh of Pleasure (1973), Perverts Since Their Birth (1974), Lesbian August (1974), Naked Sting (1975), Playing in Two Beds (1975), Mikaella, the Sweet Temptation (1975), Six Pervert Women Ask for a Murderer (1976), and more. Some of these films deserve attention with regard to the “cultural encasement” of sexuality they encode and for what appears incidentally in them. The financial success of some of the films is rumored to have funded the production of the good films of the period, thus indicating the indirect ways the margins can assist mainstream culture.

Together with their provocative depictions of homosexuality, trans- sexuality, and lesbian sex, some also had a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and self irony. On other occasions, explicit sex disguised an implicit social message or ridiculed specific government policies. The funniest parts in these films were parodies of mainstream movies or actors. The first explicitly

soft porn film made by the respected director Vangelis Serdaris, The Girl and the Horse (1973) with Anna Fonsou, is considered the most “artistic” film of the genre, with lots of psychological conflicts and an attempt to connect it to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus. On the other hand, many venerable and artistic actors and actresses of mainstream cinema and theatre seem to have been involved in soft porn films—it is rumored that even the epitome of sexual innocence, Aliki Vouyouklaki had taken part in a film that has never been found.

The Greek soft porn industry was also an attempt to deceive censorship and to entertain the sexually repressed male population. The allure of transgressive sexuality is always present in the psychodynamic horizon of patriarchal societies. The representation of the female body as an open field for the aggression of the male gaze was the ultimate outcome of the unwanted realization that women could be sexually proactive. As such, the commercial success of the porn industry should be seen as the anxious male reaction to the female emancipation movement and the rise of new ethical codes of soft masculinity. It also must be seen as satisfying the phallic curiosity of hetero- sexual men, the hidden desire to see another penis, as a personal affirmation of masculinity and virility. Dimitris Koliodimos observes that”

Many porn films foreground “pure sex” and present a “repressed” sexuality by the bourgeois patriarchal society . . . that is a sexual act which is considered as “perversion,” “irregular,” or “unhealthy.” In these cases such representations take on, without being necessarily “positive,” a special character for the viewers who enjoy such pleasures and express similar sexual behaviors in their lives.18

The phallocentric aesthetics of these films and the absence of a feminist critique of their consumption are some of the contextual parameters for understanding the code of practice of this industry. Yet no one can deny the extremely funny, ironic, and sarcastic, almost carnivalesque celebration of sexual pleasures that some of these films encoded, in a society that struggled officially to regulate sexuality and control desire. The religious sensibility of Orthodoxy avoided demonizing the body or condemning sensuality; but it did its best to disguise and conceal its nudity. These films exposed the body and revealed its allure. They situated the private in the public realm of illicit consumption and underground enjoyment. Overall, we could suggest that these films are more or less irreverent Aristophanic comedies structured around the subcultural use of language rather than porn films.

Nico Mastorakis’ Island of Death (or Cruel Destination, or The Devil’s Children, 1975) must be mentioned here because it highlights another trend in the sexual psychodynamics of the period. In it, male and female perverts from Western Europe visit pristine Greek islands, exterminate all other intruders, and meet with retarded local shepherds, realizing their inner

fantasies of being ravaged by a modern Satyr. The film was notorious for the scene in which the English pervert, painfully performed by Bob Belling, penetrated a goat, in order to commune with the elemental purity of natural life. The movie demonstrated the androcentric character and sexist ideology of pornography, and especially of the enfant terrible of Greek television Nico Mastorakis.19 _{Whereas the camera stripped naked and raped the female}

body, the penis was never exposed. (Perhaps because the actors were very shy!) As with most Greek porn films of that early period, the film fetishizes the female but de-eroticizes the male body and retains its phallic mystery and narcissistic self-satisfaction.

Overall, early soft porn films exude a kind of strange innocence, and the actors seemed to really enjoy what they were doing on screen. Behind the sexual buffoonery and the verbal absurdity, viewers can see a certain jouissance, a mixture of pleasure and pain, as, through their sexual excess, these films acted out the guilt and joy of transgression. It was a rebellion not only against the “system,” or religion, or tradition, but against themselves, manifested through a sense of the guilty pleasure offered by a freedom privately won in the dark. In the cult classic The Voyeur (O Idonoblepsias, 1984) we see two macho males—one of them the deity called Gousgounis— greeting each other before their shared sexual escapades begin: “Master,” the younger man says, “you taught me everything . . . In my glorious sexual career I learnt everything through your films which I watched at Rosi-Clair!” The master with cool, gusto, and pride responds, “Oh yes, those were the days; pure and ethical, when all porn films were based on Christian tradition and patriotic Greek ideals!” In a sense, his pronouncements were a worthy farewell to an industry that had served the motherland well in more than one way . . .