The book A History of Greek Cinema by Dr Vrasidas Karalis was launched by Australian film critic David Stratton on Wednesday 18 April in conjunction with the 30th Greek Festival of Sydney.

Many members of the Greek community and Australian cinema goers attended the event. This first full-length book focuses on the attempts to establish a ‘national’ cinema furthering social cohesion and national identity, from the first Greek film in 1912 until the social crisis of 2011. It analyses the problems and dilemmas that many Greek directors faced in establishing a distinct Greek cinematic language, and presents the development of Greek cinema against the background of Greece’s turbulent political history. The book combines historical analysis with discussion of cinematic form in order to construct a narrative history of Greek cinematic successes and failures.

Dr Vrasidas Karalis gives Neos Kosmos his account of the book and the launch:

The book is a tribute to the great, and to a degree, unrecognised achievements of many Greek film-makers who taught five generations of Greeks the power of myth making and the liberating strength of seeing. By writing its story, I also narrated the personal histories of many people who struggled to explore the fascinating mystery of constructing images within an unstable social and political reality which suffocated their creative abilities.
Within my examination of four hundred and twenty films of the many more made in Greece during the period, I talked both about well-known names as much as those less known. I also talked about the first and greatest Greek cinematographers.

I discussed the presence of actors, good and bad, or actors who were good and bad at the same time; I talked about popular directors who sold their soul to the devil in order to make money, and about some heroic loners who preferred to die forgotten, ignored and penniless.
I found strange the fact that nobody tried to do it in the past. Greeks are good in producing culture but very bad in explaining what they have achieved. In most occasions they firmly believe that what looks good to them must be good for the rest of the world; as a consequence they don’t understand why many domestically successful Greek films cannot transcend cultural barriers.

I always thought that it should be the duty and the privilege of the Greek diaspora to look critically and emphatically at the metropolitan culture. Not to flatter an established taste but to explain its limits, not to beautify the banal, the insipid and the reassuring but to explain its encoded conflicts, anxieties and phobias. Many artistic failures are more fertile and useful than many artistic successes. I would even claim that “bad” Greek films are the films that created the distinct atmosphere of Greek cinematic production and for this reason they must be studied closely and with more curiosity.
Greek cinema represents the triumph of creativity over the stifling domination of institutional structures.

My main conclusion that its permeating element was and still is what might be called “oppositional aesthetics” because even in its most conservative expression the depiction of reality was in itself an act of resistance and an reaffirmation of the humanity of the common people.
What I have tried to do in this book is a synthesis of film studies, sociology, history, politics and cultural studies.

It is also a personal story almost with an autobiographical subtext: In the middle of political instability of the sixties in Greece, only one place retained its undisputed centrality: the cinema. Growing up in the small village of Krestena close to Olympia in the Peloponnese, I remember the only cinema theatre located at a huge warehouse.
It changed films every two days; Monday-Tuesday, European movies. Wednesday and Thursday, American. Friday to Sunday, Greek.

For the children it was paradise on earth-the peak moment of each day after six hours of boring learning by sadistic and indifferent teachers. We didn’t escape in the movies: we were revived, silently discovering our humanity, baptising ourselves in the feeling of awe and wonderment that energised all our senses and shaped our personal identity.
We didn’t even care about the language and many a time we didn’t manage to read the subtitles. All movies were enchantingly appealing and each unknown language was music to our ears. Everything American was particularly good. It was the accent, the clothes, the beautiful stars, the landscape that made them so hypnotic. The cityscape of New York, the magnificent externalities of the great city, made us for the first time experience the power of cinema, the power of seeing. When later I visited the city, it seemed that I had been there before.

Cinema had created a deja vu of psychological order which navigated me through reality: I had never been before in the city and yet I knew it all too well; it belonged to my growing up, my childhood, my own exploration of the world.
Together with the music of language we were captivated by the primordial ritual of colours, their spell-binding anthropology. Cinemascope, Cinerama and Panavision were our hallucinogenics. We were all transfixed by the Cinemascope colours, the sound of foreign languages and the self confidence that these movies exuded.

How one can describe the emotions generated by Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments with their solar colours, prehistoric costumes and the incredibly beautiful skies? Artificial, dazzling and hypnotic, “much better than the real colours” as my grandmother used to say.
What was that breathtaking amazement we all felt when we heard Rita Hayworth singing in Gilda?

And how quickly time passed when we watched long and grand movies like George Steven’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba, or Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire? Nobody could get to sleep afterwards: we were dreaming of being part of the film itself, each one of us according to their nature. As long as we were in the film, all roles were fine. I haven’t forgotten to this day the sizzling colours of Duel in the Sun: or the artificial colours of Written in the Wind. That was the world I wanted to live in and not the drab, vapid and faded reality we inhabited.
In that village I experienced the whole history of cinema unfolding for me every week. For some unknown reasons, silent films were still screened, such as Cecil de Mille’s The Life of Christ, Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Dreyer’s Joan of Arc and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

No sound but we were all silent, following action with intensity and curiosity. It was so random, as we would say today. Unexpectedly so many strange and somehow forgotten films were screened in a village movie theatre in a natural almost organic way. Nobody ever complained about them being either “foreign” or “incomprehensible.”
The whole village was profoundly shaken by Mehbood Khan’s Mother India (1957); my grandmother and mother were talking for weeks about Nargis as if she was their long lost sister. Without knowing anything about India, the ordinary people felt it as part of their life and deep memory; my grandmother continued till the end of her life to talk about Nargis.

This ability of the cinema to connect fascinated me more than the actual story itself.
I still vividly recall the moment of a loud and poignant sigh coming out of the full cinema at the end of The Bicycle Thieves; my stern and emotionless grandfather hiding his tears and with his voice broken said: “In front of his child! They should have given him the bicycle!” And when we watched Disney’s Fantasia with my grandmother, she turned to me totally hypnotised by music and colours: “You see, fairies do exist….” after we watched the entrancing dance of sugar plum fairy.
The screening itself was a quasi-religious ritual: the reels in their round metallic canisters were taken from village to village on bikes. We knew when the new movie had arrived when the bike entered the village. We ran immediately for tickets: ‘the movie has arrived’, the whisper was spread like an infectious smile throughout the village.

The ritual was consummated during the weekend. Almost always Greek melodramas, war heroism movies, or musicals were on and that was the best occasion for a family get together. There were two screenings on Saturdays and Sundays, 2-4 and 6-8pm-a great communal experience of bonding and connection, a vertical society where the well-fed and the starving co-existed side by side. Most poor from the outskirts of the village were allowed to come in for free, five minutes after the movie had begun. But when they were in, they would try to find the best seat available-demanding, confident and full of self-importance, transformed by their entrance into to movie theatre.
For the children, it was a profound experience of social solidarity and togetherness: on Sunday morning, we were at church.

But nobody understood the language of the liturgy or paid attention to what the priest was saying. But in the cinema, we understood everything; everything was clear, lucid and inviting; we could cry and laugh, we could look around and gossip, we could look at our parents’ eyes and gain their approval that we liked what they liked or finally absorb with our senses the mysterious mixture of strange odours, made of sweat, cheap perfumes and warm popcorn.
We usually took food with us, meatballs, boiled eggs, cheese and bread. And when that magical word appeared on the screen – “Intermission” – we rushed out to the bar screaming and shouting, fighting over an ice cream, or a bottle of lemonade, or just anything that was on offer.
Greek melodramas had the uncanny ability to depict what we experienced everyday as if they were events of legend, fairy tale and myth.

In most cases we were more interested in the locations and less in the action. “This is where we spent our honeymoon with your father,” my mother said as we were watching a Greek comedy set on the island of Corfu. I hated that place viscerally ever since.
Greek melodramas made us proud and happy. Cinematic colours, the actors – Aliki Vouyouklaki in particular – and the music transformed such insignificance into something moving, interesting, grand. Our reality had to be seen on the cinematic screen in order to become meaningful to us.
Especially between 1967 and 1974 when the cinema culture collapsed under the onslaught of television, these were the first narratives that made us aware of the big history around us.

The dictatorship was the time when history was suspended and we had regressed to a magical atmosphere of epic tales and glorious heroes – the patriotic films about World War II, the defeat of the communists in the Civil War and the Greek revolution showed everything we had to know in order to feel better about ourselves and confident about our history. I still recall the ending of the film No! about the occupation of the motherland by the Germans: the actor, the athletic swimmer Kostas Prekas, was shouting frantically, as he was shooting the invaders with a machine gun, “Nooooooo… Come and get it…” We were all ecstatic. It was sublime: Leonidas and the three hundred were alive again and we were very happy to have them so close to us… When the actor visited our village later the same year, we all admired his manliness and composure…My grandmother again: “He is like those ancient Greek giants…”

In my nostalgic mind still such patriotic voices resonate with the screaming and yelling of the school children when we watched Christopher Lee as the Dracula! Some of them asked the priest to exorcise the theatre and expel the evil spirit! It was really magnificent. Or when I watched The Exorcist (1974) – I couldn’t sleep for months, reading long books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Zola, in order not to switch off the light and the bed would start shaking in the dark.
Years later I tried to find out who was responsible for bringing these films to our village. I never learned anything about them; except some vague information about two sisters from Patras who later returned to their town. After 1979 the cinema simply closed down unable to deal with the competition of television.

After the Cyprus events in 1974, when Turkish movies were banned, history came flooding in, disastrous and incomprehensible, unlike the cosy, one-dimensional and self-sufficient visual narratives of the previous years. And together with history came the noisy and petty politicians – and with them also came Theo Angelopoulos, the film-maker who wanted us to develop a new way of seeing and being in history, the visual myth maker who made us look at history as if it concerned us directly and we were part of it.