A GREEK FILM WORKSHOP
THE POETICS OF GREEK AVANT-GARDE CINEMA
In this workshop I will present some of the most important Greek Avant-Gardist films. Films to be shown will include: Demos Theos’ Progression (Diadikasia) and Kaptain Meitanos, Stavros Tornes’ Good Buy My East (Antio Anatoli) and Danilo Treles, N. Alevras A Haze of Bullets (Peftoun oi Sfaires san to Halazi), K. Sfekas’ Allegory – The Sequence (Alligoria I-III), Th. Rentzis’ Fiction, Nico Papatakis’ The Shepherds of Anarchy, Theo Angelopoulos’ Representation (Anaparastasi) and Broadcasting (Ekpompi), and Gregory Markopoulos’ Serenity (Galini). Some archival material can be added too, especially Pavlos Kyriakopoulos’ historic 1930s movie The Dream of the Sculpture (To Oneiro tou Glyptou). Special honour will be attributed to Greek American Avant-Gardist film-makers, such as Pavlos Kyriacopoulos, John Kristian, John Kassavetes and Gregory Markopoulos.
Films will be shown with a video projector in a DVD or a BETA format. A 20 minute presentation of the Greek Modernist and Avant-Gardist filmmaking will open the workshop. The main purpose of this workshop is to present for first time important films of the Greek Avant-Garde to an audience of American and Canadian scholars and to the local Canadian artistic and film community. Further negotiations will be made with local artistic people to attend the workshop and watch these rare Greek movies.
The idea and the composition of this workshop is really original as Greek Avant-Garde film has never been shown and discussed before either in Greece, US or Canada. Also, the workshop will document for first time the existence of a Greek American filmmaking and especially a radical conception of filmmaking as shown in Kassavetes’ and Markopoulos’ movies and Kristian’s masterful screen-directing and script-writing experimenting with popular Greeek émigré stories. Theoretically speaking, Greek Avant-Garde film has never been presented in a coherent and scholarly manner and in a relevant way with Modern Greek literary Avant-Garde studies. Very briefly, these films can be categorized as follows:
a) Films that subvert filmic structures of narration, myth, thematics, and concepts of Greekness, and the “western eye” (D. Theos, K. Ferris Sfekas etc)
b) Films relevant to ideas and filmic conceptions of Western Avant-Garde (Th. Rentzis, A. Angellides, Gr. Markopoulos, Th. Angelopoulos)
c) Films that aggressively undermine notions of popupar Greek cinema or follow other personalized directions (Giarimoustas, Alevras, Kristian etc.)
Avant-Garde films can be contrasted to Modernist ones. Modernism originates from neorealist postwar movies (N. Koundouros’ The Monster – O Drakos, A. Damianos’ To the Boat- Mechri to Ploio and Kanellopoulos’ Heaven – Ouranos represent excellent Modernist attempts). Some basic differences include:
a) The Modernist use of tradition, history, myth is linear and sometimes allegorical- but in Avant-Garde films they are subversively presented (see Theos’ Progression)
b) The aesthetics and experience of Greekness is commonly central in many Modernist films – but in Avant-Garde films Greekness is philosophically disputed (see Theos’ Kapitan Meitanos and Tornes’ Exopragmaticus)
c) Literary poetics and literariness is coupled with cinepoetics and vision aesthetics (most Koundouros’ films are excellent examples) – in Avant-Garde films poetics and literariness become central to filmic progressive experience itself (most Tornes’ movies are filmic poems, see, for example, Koatti and Good Buy my East).
To conclude, this workshop will present original material with a new scholarly insight into something that is to the interest not only to film scholars but also to Modern Greek literature specialists and the Greek American studies colleagues.
