Talk and Film on Friday

[Syrimis, George]

Modernizing: Political, Social, and Cultural Change in Greece after 1974: A speaker series based on the films of Nikos Perakis.

Alexander Kitroeff,
Professor of History, Haverford College

"Politics and Ideology in post-1974 Greece"

Followed by a screening of the film Arpa Colla, directed  by Nikos Perakis.

"Arpa" means "grab", "Colla" means "put together" and "Arpa-Colla" in modern Greek means: grabbing anything that comes to hand and putting it together haphazardly, or doing a job hastily and irresponsibly in order to make a fast buck, as is often the case in the film industry. After losing quite a lot of money on unpopular films, two young directors find themselves obliged to work on commercials. But they always hope to go back to real film-making. They visit producers or try to persuade rich friends to invest money in their talents. Although they face the same problems, the two friends have different aspirations: one is a conformist, voting for the socialists (now in power in Greece) while the other is a radical, voting for the communists. The first wants to make conventional films while the second dreams of politically committed films. ARPA-COLLA, is the visualization of their common unrealized projects. A surrealistic amalgam of fragments deliberately recalling well-known film genres: it starts as a romantic melodrama, turns to ideological neorealist drama, and after a cosmopolitan intermezzo, develops into a transvestite farce on a feministic subject. Then it suddenly becomes a modern epic, changing in the middle of a long one-shot sequence into a Greek western. A psychopathological family drama emerges, just before the film plunges deep into the violent nocturnal world of second-rate, suburban Mad Max scenes. Thematically, this imaginary film- within-a-film starts from the theme "rich-boy-meets-poor-girl", faces the problem of unemployment, makes a flash-back to narrate a new version of Sophocles' "Antigone" set against the background of the Greek civil war in the late 40s and ...well, there's no way to summarize a script as inventive and original as this. After all, ARPA-COLLA is not an ordinary film with a real "story". It is a comedy about the way films are made and the way they reproduce reality by transforming it, although there are times when it is reality that imitates art.

Friday, November 13,  4:30 PM
212 York Street, Room 106, New Haven
Please consult the linked map if you are unfamiliar with the venue: http://www.yale.edu/seas/York212

 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The series is funded by the The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund. The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University