Chronicles of modern Greece: an interview with Pantelis Voulgaris.

Last fall, when the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) hosted a mid-career retrospective of films by Pantelis Voulgaris, New Yorkers had a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the most accomplished directors of Greek cinema. The seven features and three shorts screened provided convincing evidence that Voulgaris's work deserves more attention in the United States. None of his films have been commercially released here.

Voulgaris's films are informed by strong emotions, and a heartfelt rendering of his characters and their deceptively simple stories. Deliberate and understated, Voulgaris's cinematic style is at once intimate and distant. His acute observations of small gestures in everyday life - a lover's glance, an unexpected encounter, a solitary figure in an empty street - are intensely humanistic, yet his preference for long shots rather than close-ups keeps them just beyond our reach. His work echoes with themes of loneliness, a longing for untasted freedoms, and the recognition of time lost.

Voulgaris is also a passionate portrayer of the often volatile social, historical, and political landscape of modern Greece, and he documents with sensitivity and lucidity the struggle of ordinary citizens coping with extraordinary circumstances.

Born in 1940, Voulgaris studied film at the Stavrakou Film School in Athens, graduating in 1961. From 1961 to 1965 he worked as an assistant director on over thirty films before making two neo-realist shorts, The Thief (1965) and Jimmy the Tiger (1966). These shorts were soon followed by a documentary, The Goat Dance (1971), a feature film, The Engagement of Anna (1972), and an experimental work inspired by the Greek composer Manes Hadjidakis's song cycle, The Great Love Songs (1973).

In February 1974, Voulgaris was arrested by the military dictatorship that had ruled Greece since 1967. He was sent to the island prison camp of Gyaros, but was released when the dictatorship fell in August of that year. Voulgaris has since made another six feature films: Happy Day (1976); Elefterios Venizelos (1980); Stone Years (1985); The Striker with the No. 9 (1988); Quiet Days in August (1991); and Acropole (1995).

A number of the feature films presented at the MOMA retrospective rank among Voulgaris's finest achievements. His first feature, The Engagement of Anna, helped to usher in the New Greek Cinema, a movement that included Thee Angelopoulos, Nikos Panayotopoulos, and Pavlos Tassios, among others. Voulgaris's film is a lyrical portrait of a young woman from a poor village who works as a domestic for a middle-class Athenian family. When her boss notices Anna is of marrying age, a date is arranged with a prospective bridegroom. The night out with the young man awakens in Anna feelings that she never knew - the pleasure of talk, a love of music. But her joy quickly turns to anger and despair when she realizes she is trapped in the realities era class society. This low-key study of a life deprived is ultimately a critique of the decay and hypocrisy of the Greek bourgeoisie.

The director's second feature, Happy Day, is a powerful allegory of the relationship between oppressors and oppressed. Filmed on the windswept island of Makronissos, an infamous prison camp during the Greek civil war, this stark drama transcends historical events and reveals the danger and brutality of arbitrary and unchecked power.

Voulgaris revisits Greece's turbulent political landscape in Stone Years. Based in part on a true story, the film chronicles a couple's struggle to survive years of political persecution and imprisonment by a succession of right-wing governments which ruled Greece from 1949 to 1974. This elegiac tale is extraordinary for its tenderness and sensitivity for a life stolen (see review in Cineaste, Vol. XV, No. 1).

Less overtly political is Quiet Days of August, in which Voulgaris explores the loneliness and isolation of urban life in Athens during the month of August, when almost everyone has gone on vacation and only solitary individuals remain. Gentle and moving, the film more explicitly deals with the themes that are implicit in all of Voulgaris's work: alienation, love, the loss of time, and the resilience of the human spirit.

I interviewed Pantelis Voulgaris in October 1995. Relaxed and unassuming, Voulgaris graciously shared his thoughts about his life and work. Thanks to Elly Petrides for her excellent translation, and to Manes Efstratiadis, vice president of the Greek Film Center, and Marines Demetriou and Simeon Hutner for their assistance. - Cleo Cacoulidis

Cineaste: Your work is best known for its portrayal of the fragility of the human condition, concentrating on the small gestures and intimate moments in daily life. In some ways, your work is reminiscent of Italian neo-realist cinema. What are the ideas you wish to express in your work, and what kinds of filmmaking inspired your choices?

Pantelis Voulgaris: When I was young and studied film, what Greek cinema represented was cheap comedy or melodrama. There were very few films that were different from these two general categories. When I first saw Italian films, they spoke to me of Greek daily life, and I thought, 'Why can't we make this sort of film ourselves?' The neo-realist Italian cinema was like a school for me. Greeks have a common culture with Italians, and I felt a relationship with the Italian cinema that I did not feel with American, French, or British cinema, although I like these cinemas, too.

On the other hand, I enjoy watching ordinary people and observing moments from everyday life, whether in the cinema, on the train, or walking down the street. I belong to a large family, and during my childhood and teenage years we would all gather together and it would resemble a performance. I saw my large family as a company of actors because there were the jokers in the party, there were the funny moments, the sad moments, etc. It was just like a theater company; that's how I saw them. All of these experiences are related to my films and how I envision them, it is what I try to express.

Cineaste: Your work achieves an intimacy without using a lot of heavy-handed close-up shots or narrative conventions. Instead, you rely on long shots and slow, deliberate camera movements. What are the reasons for your esthetic approach?

Voulgaris: Each film presents its own esthetic problems. For example, Happy Day poses totally different esthetic problems than The Engagement of Anna. In Happy Day, the choice to do long panning shots is related to the pace I wanted to set up in the film. On the other hand, in The Engagement of Anna, where the whole story takes place on a Sunday afternoon, I felt that a hand-held camera style was more appropriate for creating a fluidity of movement, and would help give the film an intimacy and immediacy. The esthetic element of a film always presents itself after I finish the script. I never think of the esthetics of a film before I write the script. For me, each film is a different experience of various esthetic properties.

Cineaste: There is also a political dimension to your work, from the obvious references to Greek history in Happy Day and Stone Years to the more oblique expressions in The Engagement of Anna. Your method of filtering specific historical events through individual experiences makes your films both specific to Greece and universal in their portrayal of human suffering.

Voulgaris: Politics plays a very important role in the life of Greeks - our interest doesn't end with voting; we don't just cast our ballots and then forget about it. The newspapers in Greece cover Greek politics and international political situations extensively, which is an indication of how much Greeks are interested in politics, particularly people of my generation. I was born during the war, and the events that took place after WWII and the civil war have deeply marked my generation. Until 1974, one could not mention politics or specific political events because of censorship. The films that are more openly political were made after the fall of the Junta. In other films, I tried to portray the echoes of politics in everyday life.

Cineaste: Your film Happy Day is actually shot on Makronissos, a notorious island prison camp for political prisoners during the Greek civil war. It is a very subtle film which focuses on the banality of evil. You yourself were imprisoned on the island of Gyaros during the military dictatorship. Is the film a reflection of your direct experience?

Voulgaris: Happy Day is not my personal experience. The film was made in 1976 after the return to democracy. At that time, I felt that I wasn't absolutely just, or fair, or sufficiently removed enough from events to be able to portray my own experiences. This film is a result of a great deal of research I did during the years of the dictatorship, with most of the material for the film being based on Andreas Frangas's book, The Famine. The only thing I added to the film from my personal experience of imprisonment on Gyaros is the portrayal of the threat of time: all the torment of time that doesn't go by, doesn't pass, especially on days when there is no sun, so that you could not even mark the time by the passage of the sun. These days were particularly sad and oppressive.

Cineaste: The island's bleak landscape in Happy Day serves as the protagonist of the film. The barren terrain echoes the desolation of the prisoners, and the film's almost total reliance on wide-angle long shots perpetuates the feeling of distance and solitude, creating an eerie calmness.

Voulgaris: Yes, that's exactly right. When I was doing my research on concentration camps, I discovered that a great number of suicide attempts or suicides took place in the camps when the people in charge, the jailers or camp commanders, were not particularly strict. It was during these calm periods in the camps that more people would commit suicide. This is the atmosphere that I tried to re-create in the film, this type of strange calm or lull period where people go mad.

Cineaste: What were some of the difficulties you and other filmmakers faced working during the military dictatorship, and how did you get around the problem of censorship?

Voulgaris: After quite a long interval of time, in which it was sort of a wait-and-see period wondering whether or not we should make films under the dictatorship, part of the company of filmmakers that had already started making films prior to the dictatorship, and had remained in Greece, slowly began to try to make films that didn't appear directly political. For example, Thee Angelopoulos's Reconstruction or The Engagement of Anna and other such films would pass the censors because they were written in such a way that there was no direct sign in the script that they concerned the political situation in Greece.

Cineaste: Did you ever consider leaving Greece to avoid censorship?

Voulgaris: No. It was not just about work. I felt that I should remain in Greece and join my fellow countrymen in presenting a negative refusal, or even passive refusal, to accept the situation of the dictatorship. I left only for a brief period during the events of the Polytechnic because they were after me, but I came back again. I had an opportunity to leave, I believe it was in 1968, when I received a Ford Foundation scholarship to study in Los Angeles for two years, but I turned it down because I felt it was more important to remain in Greece.

Cineaste: One of the consistent themes in your work is the exploration of modern Greek history, especially the extremely repressive years during and after the civil war, and its effects on the ordinary citizen.

Voulgaris: Yes. I, and other filmmakers of my generation, felt that we bore a special burden on our backs to depict this historical material on film, which was also expressed in other art forms as well, including poetry and literature. For us, it wasn't just dry political events. These events were things that you experienced and lived; you had friends or family who were directly involved, who suffered torture either from the left or the right wing. You couldn't get a job unless you had a clearance from the police, which meant that, although the events of the civil war were long past, they still played a direct role in your life.

For example, my name is Voulgaris, which in Greek means Bulgarian, pronounced Bulgari. At that time, in the 1960s, Bulgaria was a country with a different political system. Because of my name I had very serious problems in the army. The humor demonstrated by the officers toward me, saying things like, "Where are you from?," and "What does your name mean?," contained a subtle threat. I might go so far as to say that I was afraid to mention my name. To be associated with communism at that time was a very dangerous thing.

Cineaste: Angelopoulos's Reconstruction and The Engagement of Anna are among the first films to be credited with ushering in the New Greek Cinema in the early 1970s. This new cinema turned away from the sentimental melodramas and Hollywood imitations toward an exploration of the reality of the Greek experience. How was this new style received by audiences and critics?

Voulgaris: I remember that both films did well at the box office and were reviewed favorably. The statement made by my generation came at the end of what we call the old commercial films, and by that I mean films that imitated one another. I believe that if the seven years of dictatorship hadn't come in between the years when the first short films created by my generation started appearing in 1965, I think that the image of Greek cinema would be totally different today.

Cineaste: What are your thoughts on the state of Greek cinema today, and what are the difficulties of raising production monies for projects in Greece? What about coproductions with other European countries?

Voulgaris: We are talking about an art that is expensive and is becoming even more expensive with the passing of time. So our problem is the same one faced by American or European filmmakers. The way I see it, Greek filmmakers are continuing to make films that are interesting despite the financial burdens. In the past few years, with special thanks to the Greek Film Center in Athens, there has been an emphasis on promoting the work of young filmmakers, and there are three or four remarkably talented people who are now making their first and second feature films.

Cineaste: In discussions about Greek cinema there is the inevitable reference to the work of Thee Angelopoulos, one of the few internationally known Greek filmmakers. Do you feel young Greek filmmakers are often unfairly burdened with this comparison to Angelopoulos?

Voulgaris: It's true that the generation of filmmakers immediately after Angelopoulos tried to imitate his style. But I think that the younger filmmakers don't have this problem. [Panos] Karkanevatos's film Borderline and [Sotiris] Goritsas's film From the Snow do not remind one of Angelopoulos's films, nor do they try to imitate him. it's just the fact that Angelopoulos is very well known outside of Greece - this creates a climate where critics and audiences expect that all filmmakers from Greece make films like him, or they expect to see something that resembles his style. This can be positive, but it is also negative because Greece is truly a small country. For most of the international film festivals and film critics, it seems, one filmmaker from Greece is enough.

Cleo Cacoulidis is a free-lance writer and filmmaker living in New York City.