Realism in Greek Cinema

From the Post-War Period to the Present

Vrasidas Karalis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781780767291
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European History

The history of Greek cinema post-1945 is best understood through the stories of its most internationally celebrated and influential directors. Focusing on the works of six major filmmakers active from just after WWII to the present day, with added consideration of many others, this book examines the development of cinema as an art form in the social and political contexts of Greece. Insights on gender in film, minority cinemas, stylistic richness and the representation of historical trauma are afforded by close readings of the work and life of such luminaries as Michael Cacoyannis, Nikos Koundouros, Yannis Dalianidis, Theo Angelopoulos, Antouanetta Angelidi, Yorgos Lanthimos, Athena-Rachel Tsangari and Costas Zapas. Throughout, the book examines how directors visually transmute reality to represent unstable societies, disrupted collective memories and national identity.

1

Realisms and the Question of Form in Greek Cinema

Some preliminary questions

Cinema is a vast subject, and there are more ways than one to enter it.

Christian Metz¹

Everything in cinema is an enormous deception, an impeccably organised deception which indiscriminately serves either realism or imagination. By its nature, cinema is anti-realistic and what we call ‘cinematic realism’ is nothing more than the illusory employment of tricks, simple or complex.

Vassilis Rafailides²

The latter quote is how Vasilis Rafailides (1934–2000), the most influential Greek film critic, addressed the question of realism as a project and an autonomous language of cinematic representation. According to him, the filmic text itself becomes the space where visual inventiveness can restore the fractured continuity between experience and imagination and thus establish the ground for an experiential convergence between filmmakers and their audiences. ‘Modern cinema,’ he added, ‘is closer to reality than any other form of expression. Realism finally gained its true meaning, as filmmakers learned to respect the value of facts in themselves.’³ (Emphasis added.)

Rafailides’ attempt to articulate a theoretical conceptualisation of cinematic realism raises many questions without providing any concrete answers. According to him, the paradox in cinema is that through imagination ‘modern cinema indicates a method which can incite us to acquire a total awareness of our historicity’.⁴ Thus he links the historical self-awareness of the spectator to the representation of facts in themselves, and simultaneously emphasises the illusory character of all cinematic representations. In his approach this paradoxical, self-contradictory character of images, which depicts the real by perceiving it through imaginative processes, is the dominant constitutive element of the cinematic as an experience distinct from other arts. Rafailides, like many other critics and theorists, tried repeatedly to address the question of cinematic realism, only to conclude that it has always been a profoundly elusive, contested and unstable category. An optimistic formulation, expressed by André Bazin as ‘a re-creation of the world in its image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time’,⁵ can be considered restrictive, or indeed partial, in capturing the multiplicity of ideas and practices designated by the term ‘realism’. All attempts to define realism in cinema have only intensified its conceptual vagueness, while at the same time foregrounding the ideological function of the term.

In this book, I use the term ‘realism’ to indicate specific sets of visual devices framing formal arrangements in open space, linked through specific narrative codes. Narrative links the subjective world to its objective contexts through images; ultimately, filmic composition is more than the total sum of its parts, as it is more than a rapid succession of photographs. For the realist, what happens on-screen and off-screen are inextricably connected; this link makes realism an unstable and self-questioning mode of conceptualising and visualising, of indeed imagining, social experience. Filmmakers have understood realism in different and incongruous ways; experimental filmmakers, for example, strongly suggested that what they were doing was ‘pure realism’, whereas others stressed that ‘realism’ was a fallacy fragmenting the unity and the autonomy of the cinematic experience. Consequently realism is more a project in continuous reinvention and less a clearly recognisable genre defined by its historical development or the declarations of various theorists.

For this reason, I talk about realisms and explore their various formations and transformations in the work of different cinematographers. Self-proclaimed realists always foreground empathic union between image and viewer, not simply because they want to bridge the gap between the real and the imaginary, but also because they believe that such union can abolish all distance between them, though only for the duration of the film. Fredric Jameson, exploring ‘the antinomies of realism’, provided a complex yet apt definition:

What we call realism will thus come into being in the symbiosis of this pure form of storytelling with impulses of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment, which allow it to develop towards a scenic present which in reality, but secretly, abhors the other temporalities which constitute the force of the tale or the récit in the first place.⁶

Storytelling and scenic setting are thus crucial in appreciating the ‘affective investment’ that makes realism, in all its varieties, the dominant mode of representation in cinema. It is true, of course, that most European directors have used realism differently from American filmmakers, despite their constant interactions. As Shohini Chaudhuri observed, ‘in European cinema, realism is often conceived as an appeal to national or cultural “authenticity,” offering an alternative to Hollywood by addressing cultural specificities unavailable in Hollywood’.⁷ Yet the perception of such cultural authenticity has changed over time, and so the meanings of ‘realism’ have changed as well. Realism, according to Edward Lucie-Smith, is ‘not … an absolute but … an elaborate and ever-shifting interplay between content, means of expression and context’.⁸

Obviously, the term has nothing to do with a presumed correspondence between reality and image or with the quest for verisimilitude. Furthermore, despite its generality as a concept, it can be seen only through the specificity of its use by distinct individuals – which perhaps constitutes its very paradoxical nature. The unfolding of cinematic space is also connected with specific forms of narrative. In classical cinema, space becomes the actual focus of the narrative itself: where something happens is as important as what happens. Filmic space also defines not only the specific genres that are possible but also the limits of representation for each filmmaker. As Eleftheria Thanouli stated: ‘The classical spatial system offers the filmmakers an unsparing range of options for manipulating the space “in” and “out” of frame and for generating the illusion of reality in the classical realist sense.’⁹

In this exploration of postwar Greek cinema the concept of realism and its various modes – or options, according to Thanouli – will be investigated through the work of a number of significant filmmakers as it evolved in different socio-political circumstances, industry pressures and aesthetic pursuits. Its manifestations indicate its problematic character: it circumscribes the instability of ‘morphoplastic visuality’ in the Greek cultural imaginary as it evolved out of the actual instability of its historical experience. The instability of ‘morphoplastic visuality’ refers to the distinct local visual culture and its confrontation with the new modes of representation framed through the camera after the rise of modernity in the early twentieth century. It took at least thirty years (from 1914 until 1945) to learn how to use the camera cinematically rather than to capture one-dimensional photographic stills. The first director in our exploration, Michael Cacoyannis, was the first to use the camera to incorporate kinetic human presence. Only after this did the experimentation with the potentialities of cinematic representation begin.

Furthermore, historical experience itself was extremely volatile and traumatic over a long period of time. Most directors I examine struggled to imagine the pictorial schemata that could visually depict the rapidly changing character of lived experience; at the same time they were in a constant dialogue with forms of exploration occurring worldwide – German expressionism, poetic realism, Hollywood and Bollywood, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, independent American cinema and Dogma 95. The flow of such cinematic dialogues, and the interplay between industry, tourism, transnational fantasy and globalised economies, led to hybrid forms of representation that synthesised and blended sometimes incongruous genres, thus creating the puzzling multiplicity of realisms I want to explore here.

In brief, Greek filmmakers, like all others, appropriated global technology and ideas to represent the codes of local epistemic regimes and the horizons they defined. The investigation of such plurality of realisms is connected directly to David Bordwell’s suggestion that ‘realism as a standard of value … raises several problems. Notions of realism vary across cultures, over time and even among individuals … It is best then to examine the functions of mise-en-scène.’¹⁰ Indeed, realistic representation is about composition in space and the constructivist principles that define what and how things can be framed in the cinematic visual field. As Brendan Prendeville pointed out about painting, ‘all twentieth century realisms were partial and hybrid’.¹¹ Different camera angles do not simply indicate different perspectives, they indicate different experiences and ultimately different meanings. Without the mediation of form we cannot understand the actual meaning and effect of films on their audiences synchronically or their relevance diachronically. As John Gibbs aptly concluded, ‘an understanding of mise-en-scène is a prerequisite for making other kinds of claims about film’.¹² A film is political if it is made politically, and not as another form of political pamphlet, as Theo Angelopoulos has observed.¹³

In Greek cinema, after cinematic visuality was formed, the specific character of its narrativity was also crystallised – only then can we talk about ‘Greek national cinema’ proper. Noël Burch, who has explored persistently, through the Japanese and French cinemas, what he called ‘the problem of the film subject’, aptly observed:

When film-makers finally become fully conscious of the cinematic means at their disposal, when the possibility of creating organically coherent films in which every element works with every other is within sight, surely the subject matter of a film, the element that is almost always the starting point of the process of making a film, must be conceived in terms of its ultimate form and texture.¹⁴

Together with Burch, Donald Richie has explored the narrative patterns in Japanese cinema and suggested a useful distinction between a ‘presentational’ and a ‘representational’ ethos:

The representational intends to do just that, represent: It is realist and assumes that ‘reality’ itself is being shown. The presentational, on the other hand, presents. This it does through various stylisations, with no assumption that raw reality is being displayed. The West is familiar with some of these stylisations (impressionism/expressionism), and the Japanese cinema will introduce us to more. Film ‘realism’ is itself, to be sure, just another stylisation but its position is in the West privileged. It is not traditionally privileged in the East.¹⁵

The distinction is also pertinent for Greek cinema. Theo Angelopoulos, one of the central figures in this exploration, pointed out that modern Greeks and their culture find themselves between such divides: ‘We do not belong to the West,’ he stated, ‘[and] we are not part of Eastern Europe – we live at the crossroads of modern civilization.’¹⁶ Indeed the dichotomy between representanialism and presentationalism was one of the central structural and cultural parameters in the development of Greek cinema, and in fact of all dominant Greek visual regimes. When the legacy of the Byzantine visual tradition with its ‘reverse perspective’ was abandoned, traditional Greek visual practices entered the continuum of modern visuality, just at the time of its fragmentation by radical modernism. Greek cinema gained its distinct self-awareness only after it solved such questions of form during the 1950s, when this exploration begins. At the moment when Greek artists confronted mainly the question of perspective, or adopted the radical re-forming of seeing through montage, Greek cinematic production gained its specificity.

As Pavel Florensky had observed, ‘realism in art has as its necessary prerequisite the realism of an entire world-understanding’.¹⁷ During the Russian Revolution, Florensky was one of the first theorists of visual perception who pointed out this ‘question’ and ultimately the ‘impossibility’ of realism in all pictorial imaginary. Realism, according to him, presupposed:

a kind of tendency that affirms some kind of realia or realities … If one accepts that such realities do exist, then all human endeavour and consequently art can be a cognitive schema for the understanding and the representation of the real. However, when formal schematisation takes place then cognition may be expressed by means of art; works of art unite us with realities that are inaccessible to our senses – such are the formal prerequisites for any artistic realism, and a tendency that rejects even one of them thereby forfeits its right to be called realism.¹⁸

This means that there are many relationships between the cinematic image and the world it stands for. This multiplicity of relationships determines the multiplicity of formal schemata and in many cases the changes in cinematic form we detect in the life of a filmmaker or over a period of time.

The answer to the question of cinematic form is crucial, because as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson suggested, ‘subject matter and abstract ideas all enter in the total system of the artwork … subject matter is shaped by the films’ formal context and our perceptions of it’.¹⁹ By dialectically connecting form and subject, we can clearly follow the emergence of specific yet diverse cinematic imaginaries in various historical situations. By analysing them we can see how specific films become meaningful cultural activities, through which ideological formations, aesthetic structures and political practices are legitimised, or delegitimised. It is true that they are not the only ones and that a completely different interpretation and articulation is possible. As in all cases, this historical contextualisation belongs to the contested field of situated readings and elicits a distinct discourse around dominant cultural assumptions.

Furthermore, drawing from Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinèma, I assert that cinematic visuality prevailed at the moment that new techniques were introduced, allowing new ways of seeing. The use of montage was probably the most significant turning point in this process: it first appeared with Gregoris Gregoriou in the early 1950s but it achieved its artistic completeness with Michael Cacoyannis. Montage not only destabilised the narrative linearity of a story but de-structured the world that made it possible, by reassembling its constituent forms and reconfiguring its perceptual regimes. Christopher Phillips pointed out that ‘montage served not only as an innovative artistic technique but functioned, too, as a kind of symbolic form, providing a shared visual idiom that more than any other expressed the tumultuous arrival of a fully urbanised, industrialised culture’.²⁰ Cacoyannis, in the last scenes of Stella, created the ‘designative specificity’ of cinema by juxtaposing images in collision and therefore representing the interacting multiplicities and contradictory ambiguities of modernity. As Godard observed, it was at that ‘particular moment [that] the visual took over’ and cinema as collective experience became ‘popular … because people saw and there was montage and the association of ideas. There was no need to say “I’ve seen that”; one understood through seeing.’²¹

At the moment this was achieved a distinct schematisation of cinematic images was crystallised and general styles with their individual variations began to develop. This is exactly what Mark Cousins meant when he talked about ‘schema plus variation’ and observed that all innovat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author bio
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Realisms and the Question of Form in Greek Cinema
• 2 The Construction and Deconstruction of Cinematic Realism in Michael Cacoyannis’ Films
• 3 Nikos Koundouros and the Cinema of Cruel Realism
• 4 Yannis Dalianidis and the Cryptonymies of Visuality
• 5 An Essay on the Ocular Poetics of Theo Angelopoulos
• 6 The Feminine Gaze in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Cinema of Imaginative Cathedrals
• 7 Greek Cinema in the Age of the Spectacle
• Optimistic Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography