Chaotic beginnings
Greek cinema has almost always had to deal with an unstable political situation. A few years after the appearance of the seventh art, the Balkan and then Greco-Turkish wars and the expulsion of the Greeks from Asia gave the scene to a stormy century. The first Greek feature film, Golfo (Konstantinos Bachatoris, 1915), was a failure. It is also the first-born of a genre dear to Greek cinema, fustanelle films, named after a traditional costume: they are bucolic melodramas that idealize country life and a pre-modern form of innocence. The creation of Dag Films, the first of the truly professional production companies, in 1927 under the leadership of the Gaziádis brothers, marked a first turning point. But the advent of talking pictures added to the weight of foreign competition and dealt a further blow to a production that had already been bled dry and strangled by censorship. Some survivors resist: attempts at Greco-Turkish productions suggesting a timid rapprochement that does not really take, or Daphnis and Chloé (Orestis Laskos, 1931), a masterpiece of Greek silent cinema. History has it that this is the first film to present a nude scene, which is not surprising in relation to ancient sculpture. Finos Film, which was to become one of the largest production companies, founded in 1942, began a new change when Greek releases had become almost non-existent. We owe him The Voice from the Heart (Dimitris Ioannopoulos, 1943), a moving melodrama that is usually considered the true birth certificate of Greek cinema, but it was not until the end of the Civil War that the studio really took off. Yórgos Tzavéllas, another pioneer, signs the first film - already considered a masterpiece - Applause (1944) of a work that will be crowned with success.
A golden parenthesis (1950-1960)
The relative political stability of the 1950s and 1960s corresponds to one of the most fertile periods in Greek cinema. Michael Cacoyannis is its emblematic director. The tragic accents of Stella (1955) come from the depths of the ages, but her heroine, who is reluctant to marry, is eminently modern. The film immediately makes Melina Mercouri - for whom she was then the lead in the film - a star. For her role in Jamais le dimanche (1960), directed by Jules Dassin, with whom she was married, she received the acting prize at Cannes. The film is Stella's joyful side, bringing together and opposing a prostitute with a big heart and an American, a lover of ancient culture, who would like to reform her. The elements of folklore played in the film are becoming clichés: the tavern as the central setting, the dance and the bouzouki tunes, a volcanic temperament. Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964), filmed in Crete on the Cranea and the Akrotíri peninsula, became the international showcase for this folklore, and the music of Míkis Theodorákis, which illustrates a famous sirtaki scene (a popular Greek dance made famous by Zorba the Greek), went around the world. Meanwhile, Níkos Koúndouros signed Magic City (1954), with neo-realist influences, which contrasts the poor but worthy inhabitants of the Dourgouti district with the depraved world of the underworld, assimilated with modernity, and especially The Ogre of Athens (1956), which continues the theme but turns more black. Director Tákis Kanellópoulos(Ciel in 1962, L'Excursion in 1966 and Parenthèse in 1968), who has made his mark with documentaries, has made films that represent quite separate attempts at lyrical cinema, detached from any literary reference (they are almost devoid of dialogue for the last two).
Strong in the storm
The dictatorship of the colonels (1967-1974) was accompanied by strong repression: many filmmakers, whose creativity was multiplied tenfold, found themselves behind bars or forced into exile. Among the successes, miraculous given the context, is Evdokia (Alexis Daminos, 1971), shot in the outskirts of Athens, where we find the archetype of the prostitute raised to the rank of tragic heroine. The film contains a famous scene from zeibekiko, a traditional dance. Anna's Engagement (Pandélis Voulgaris, 1972) is a double critique of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship through the story of a maid in bondage. A series of historical films, which take the liberties of rigour with history, are produced with the blessing of the regime. What did you do in the war, Thanassis? (Dínos Katsourídis, 1971) is a satire, and its success heralds a political awareness on the part of the spectators, while indiscriminate comedies and erotic films dominate the commercial circuit. At the same time, Theo Angelopoulos, now considered one of Greece's greatest filmmakers, made his debut. A certain hermeticism allowed him to escape the censorship of the dictatorship. There is no doubt that his slow, contemplative and austere cinema can also keep the viewer at a distance who, in a hurry, risks missing out on his melancholy and meditative force. As in Le Voyage des comédiens (1975), which follows the peregrinations of a theatre troupe performing Golfo, a Greek and bucolic play, across the country, his work multiplies references to ancient tragedy. His river films collect awards, including a Palme d'or for L'Eternité and one day in 1998, which takes place on the Greek-Albanian border. Local cinema struggled to recover from the dictatorship, but foreign productions rushed to follow the path open to them: Une femme à sa fenêtre (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1976) with Romy Schneider, who portrays a decadent bourgeoisie (which is also the subject of Nikos Panayotopoulos' Fainéants de la vallée fertile in 1978), an episode of James Bond of course(Rien que pour vos yeux, John Glen, 1981) in which the monastery of Meteors and Corfu are given pride of place, etc. The English director Clare People shot a delightful and little-known summer comedy, Soleil Grec (1987), in Lindos, on the island of Rhodes. Her theme? The inconvenience caused by the tourist invasion to the permanent inhabitants. The most famous film of the 1980s is also the most expensive: Rebétiko (Costa Ferris, 1983) is named after a traditional Greek music. The life of the singer Markia Ninou is both the source of inspiration and the pretext for celebrating the resilience of the Greek people through forty years of history. Greek cinema seems momentarily stuck like Ulysses at Circé's, perhaps taking advantage of a regained tranquillity. Still, with the exception of Angelopoulos, the production of the 1980s and 1990s is singularly poor or undervalued. A very marginal exception are the films of Nikos Nikolaïdis, which prefigure twenty years in advance the "bizarre wave" of Greek cinema: Singapore Sling (1990) is a sadistic variation on Preminger's Laura, with a frenetic or forced weirdness. Safe Sex (Thanasis Papathanasiou, Michalis Reppas, 1999) celebrates the end of the century by temporarily becoming the greatest success of Greek cinema. The place will be grabbed by A Spicy Sky (Tassos Boulmetis, 2003), which returns to the pogrom of Istanbul in 1965.
The 2000s
In general, as the crisis looms, Greek cinema is showing increasing signs of vitality. First of all, an in camera film, Matchbox (Yannis Economides, 2002), about an imploding family in the suburbs of Athens. More conventional films: the forced marriages that prevailed at the beginning of the previous century provide the subject of two fine melodramas by Pantelís Voúlgaris, Les Mariées (2004), then Little England (2013) shot in Andros. Hardcore (2004) evokes the life of two young girls in the brothel where they have failed. Its director, Dennis Iliasdis, moved to the United States to devote himself to horror cinema. 100% Greek (Filippos Tsito, 2009), whose French title is not very faithful to the original, L'Académie de Platon (Plato's Academy ) ironizes three tobacconists who spend their days gossiping, and their latent racism. At the time, there was little sign of the "weird wave" of Greek cinema launched by Yorgos Lanthimos' Canine in 2009, just as the country was sinking into crisis. The film received an unusual response abroad for a Greek film, and was followed by L (Babis Makridis, 2011), Attenberg (2012) and Chevalier (2015) by Athina Rachel Tsangari. In 2016, his seventh film, The Lobster, boasted an international cast, from Colin Farrell to Léa Seydoux, and was also a resounding success, reaching beyond the Hellenic borders. He returned to competition at Cannes again in 2017 with TheKilling of a Sacred Deer, a perverse, violent, closed-door thriller starring (again) Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. Yorgos Lanthimos studied at the Stavrakos film school in Athens. He married French actress Ariane Labed, whom he met on the set of Athina-Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg. He returns in 2019 with La Favorite (The Favourite) starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, and Pauvres créatures in 2023 again starring Emma Stone. Absurdity, cruelty, abstraction and more or less icy zaniness characterize this movement, which takes a malicious pleasure in breaking with verisimilitude. Miss Violence (Alexandros Avranas, 2013) opens with the suicide of a child, before putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Shot on the island of Antiparos, Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos 2017) is a dark variation on the theme of the midday demon. Meanwhile, Hollywood has given the impression of rediscovering Greece, with Captain Corelli (John Madden, 2001) worth seeing mainly for its visions of Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian islands, Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008), shot on the islands of Skiathos and Skopelos in the coastal village of Damouchari, or The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini 2014), which peregrines from the Acropolis, among the ruins of the agora to Crete, the Minoan city of Knossos and the port of Chania.
Greek scenery, too, for the third instalment of a romantic trilogy, Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013), which sees its two characters walking in the Magne, in the Peloponnese. And finally, Costa Gavras' latest film Adults in the Room (2019), a political thriller set in Greece after the first six years of the economic crisis, when the radical left came to power for the first time in Greek history, and the behind-the-scenes power of the European Union. Considered by its director to be "an ancient Greek tragedy for modern times", the film was inspired by Finance Minister G. Varoufakis' book Invincibles vaincus.
