Last week’s announcement about the downsizing of this year’s Festival left us speechless and heartbroken. This year, the program won’t include our favourite categories – not because audiences lost interest (quite the opposite actually), but because the greek state has once again reduced its support for culture, leaving the Festival to operate with only a third of the funding it once received. Music & Film, Tributes, Special Screenings. For us, these are the sections that make the Festival unique and so carefully curated.
For 20 years now, the Festival has taught us how to watch films. It screened hidden treasures, unknown gems, gave voice to amazing auteurs, and allowed us to see films that we searched for endlessly but could never find in a cinema.
For us, it marks the beginning of autumn and became the reason we love September in the city. It made our return from the holidays not only bearable but, we dare say, in those last days of summer idleness, our minds would start racing with anticipation for those moments of pure bliss, the moments when we would grab the year’s program in our hands, take a pen, and start circling the movies we wanted to see. We would plan our time carefully: “maybe if we leave this film 5 minutes early, we can make it to the next with only a 10-minute delay, maybe the screening will start a little late too.”
We will always stand with progress, with culture, and with solidarity in the face of decisions that diminish them.
< It was tough to narrow it down, but here’s AN EXTREMELY CURATED set of films that hit us right in the heart and stayed there. >
MUSIC & FILM
TRAMPS!
On the other side of punk nihilism of late ‘70s Britain, there were the Blitz Kids. The 4G of an era (Grand, Glamorous, Glittery and Gay – though everyone was welcome as long as they indulged in their style), the crazy child of Bowie and Roxy Music, it served as the undercoat of the New Romantics, that dominated pop music in the early ‘80s. In reality it was much more: it was an atypical working class community, that due to extreme creativity and joie de vivre kept blossoming in art oozing inclusive hopefulness. Dancers, musicians, dj’s, make up and performance artists, fashion designers formed an oasis in London’s club culture, which was struck violently by AIDS as well as the capitalist appropriation by the mainstream. I.D.
MUTINY IN HEAVEN: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Speaking about the myth of the tormented musician, perhaps none suffered more than The Birthday Party en route of becoming the legendary The Bad Seeds. Uncanny documentary on the post-punk beginnings of Nick Cave, built upon voices from the past. Endowed with an amazing, never before seen footage, ‘Mutiny in Heaven’ shouts in the earth-shattering volume of the most recognized cave-rnous (sic) scream of Oceania, while the director presents the once destitute, hopeless band, and their love affair with drugs. Still, everything is shadowed by their live shows – with the exception maybe of Cave wearing a giant diaper in ‘Nick the Stripper’. Enter at your own risk. D.P.
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS
The Avant-garde priestess Laurie Anderson guides us through a figurative secret gallery exhibiting portraits of pioneers of electronic music. Together they tell a story dominated by women, with the vibrating dynamics of the theremin, buried deep under gigantic analogue machines and patriarchal prejudice. Through massive amounts of archival footage and imposing soundwaves, the road from Clara Lockmore to Bebe Barron and from Wendy Carlos to Suzanne Ciani becomes an exciting landmark of a documentary about the history of this genre of music and a revision of the dynamics between the two sexes in the modern day.
From Clara Rockmore to the exquisitely eloquent Delia Derybshire, to Bebe Baron of ‘Forbidden planet”, Suzanne Cianni and the (Kubrick-esque) Wendy Carlos, the documentary journeys, with a feminist eye and a wonderfully geeky tech disposition, through the story of 10 women who changed 20th century’s music. Whether ignored or silenced, the truth remains. And it was about time some new busts were put up next to those of the well-known male pioneers. I.D.
OTHER, LIKE ME
Welcome to the world of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. A world perhaps not ‘pretty’ or comfortable but definitely pioneering. From England’s industrial Hull, it was written, one may gather, that a few people would turn out and translate the industrial utopia into something nonexistent up until then: Industrial music, the musical genre that organically documents the state of things.
From the performance art, the communal living and the completely integrated contempt for the (gloomy) normalcy of COUM, to the pornography, the atonal experimentation and the avant-garde of the industrial sound of TG (an MP at the time called them ‘wreckers of civilization’), this is the story of an art revolution told by the band members. I.D.
B-MOVIE: LUST & SOUND IN WEST-BERLIN
What music junky, and British at that, would ever dream of abandoning Manchester in the late ‘70s to go looking for undiscovered gems in the West Berlin electro scene? Well Mark Reeder took the plunge, later making a name for himself as a music producer and the man who discovered Paul van Dyk. A lifelong eccentric with a penchant for military uniforms, Reeder would find a second home in Berlin, the ultimate symbol of cold war paranoia, integrating himself into a subculture that embraced everyone, from Tilda Swinton to a young Nick Cave. Having made a point of capturing his Berlin adventures on film, Reeder offered Jörg Hoppe, Heiko Lange, Klaus Maeck the opportunity to document the musical transitions and rising stars of an entire era, while composing a love letter to a city that never got the portrait it deserved. Until now.
TRIBUTES + SPECIAL SCREENINGS
LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN
From the stuff legends are made of. The first narrative feature film by Eustache or, according to Cahiers du Cinema, the “best film of the ‘70s”, the scandalous (and twice awarded) presence at Cannes. The story of Alexandre with women, life and basically himself fills 219 of the most exciting minutes of cinema. At the center -likeable and laughable at once- Jean-Pierre Leaud, the ultimate male face of nouvelle vague, and of what the movement turned into overnight because of Eustache’s film. There could be no cineaste who hasn’t been in touch and/or clashed with this one, no French idiom of the Left Bank after May ‘68 can be understood without its presence. I.D.
TWILIGHT
At a mountainous village in Hungary, a tough detective investigates a series of schoolgirl murders. While locals seem to be in denial of the horrible events, the investigator sinks gradually in the obsession over an ostensibly never-ending mystery. Made up of engraving-like images of a world where light seems to dry up, rarely screened ‘Twilight’ remained for years in obscurity. Its recent restoration reveals in all its grandeur the blackness behind the staggering aesthetic completion and arrests in its full monochromatic splendor an apocalyptic vision from innocence’s end. One of the most atmospheric and ominous films ever made. Th.K.
KATERINA GOGOU - REINSTATING THE DARK SIDE
Katerina Gοgou lived her life like a flickering candle, wrote her radical poems and shared in other people’s pain before she took a rock ‘n roll dive into death at the beginning of the ‘90s. Gogou is remembered by people whose paths crossed her own, including actors, poets, political activists, directors, singers and songwriters. Her film portrait in black and white is complemented by previously unreleased audiovisual material and dramatised sequences, featuring actress Loukia Michalopoulou. “Katerina Gοgou - Reinstating The Dark Side” is the last part of a non-fiction trilogy, which started out in 2002 with a portrait of Fleury Dadonaki and continued in 2008 with the history of Greek rock. A series of marginal personalities who lived and died in the city of Athens provides the connective tissue among these three documentaries, shedding light on an idiosyncratic urban landscape that’s forever gone.
DESIGN FOR LIVING
Easily slipping though the Hayes censorship code, founded to protect the sensibilities of ‘30s morality, Lubitsch borrows the idea of a love triangle from Noel Coward’s eponymous play and reworks it as a square testing his audience’s tolerance of libertinage. The sex cards are suffled between two American artists sharing a flat in Paris, Gilda, an American advertizer who enters their lives, and her boss, who offers her the option of a more sensible monogamous relationship. What will Gilda choose? The monogamous ethic and security of married life or the alternative polygamous model? Or is there perhaps a third path?
ON THE SILVER GLOBE
A group of cosmic explorers leaves Earth behind to find freedom and start a new civilization. When their spaceship crashes on an unknown planet and the original team dies, their children revert to a primitive native culture that will eventually evolve into a society divided into a numerous classes, waiting for the arrival of a messiah.
Βased on “The Lunar Trilogy” written by his uncle Jerzy Zulawski, Andrzej will embark on a labyrinthine allegorical saga oscillating between Andrei Tarkovsky’s philosophical science fiction and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealist iconography.
Two years later, when 80% of the film was already shot, the Polish government interrupted this overambitious production under the pretext it was covert criticism of the communist regime. A decade later, the director will complete his vision replacing the missing scenes with his own narration, delivering what is considered the most phantasmagorical film in his entire career. Th.P.
JUDEX
Enigmatic avenger Judex kidnaps a corrupt banker on a quest for justice on behalf of his victims and then takes his innocent daughter under his wing to protect her from her father’s demonic mistress.
This elaborate yet rather simplistic plot, borrowed from Louis Feuillade’s silent adventure mystery series of the same name (1917), offers Georges Franju the opportunity to orchestrate an inspired carnival of disguises and dream-like sequences that sometimes flirts with parody and consistently defies logic: characters die only to mysteriously reappear later, nuns brandish daggers and detectives narrate chapters from “Alice in Wonderland”, while black-clad silhouettes climb the walls.
Just like Judex’s magic tricks, as interpreted by real-life practical magician Channing Pollock, the entire film feels like an enchanting illusion where nothing is as it seems. Starting from an archetypal duel between good and evil, Franju resurrects the undeniable charms of a popular genre, while at the same time making the most surreal film in his entire career. Th.P.
THE DARK BACKWARD
In a mirthless alternative universe, where people eat moldy food, have sex with corpses in junkyards and never go to the doctor unless they want to feel worse, Marty Malt - the worst stand-up comedian in the world - suddenly becomes popular when a third hand grows out of his back.
“The Dark Backward” is a surprising masterpiece by one of the most ambiguous American directors working today, made at the impossibly young age of 25, obviously influenced by his early days as a cartoonist, especially evident in the way he distorts - both visually and in terms of delivery - a series of then popular actors, like Judd Nelson, Bill Paxton, Rob Lowe, Lara Flynn Boyle, Wayne Newton and James Caan.
Possibly the only film ever made, where the viewer is led to believe that suicide is the only way out, this is a highly personal, totally authentic movie and the most interesting project Adam Rifkin has ever tackled in his highly idiosyncratic career. The Boy
Carte Blanche to Yannis Bakogiannopoulos
Opening Nights in 2013 revived Yannis Bakogiannopoulos’ legendary television show, “Film Club”, that nurtured generations upon generations of movie lovers on public television. The renowned critic chooses 5+1 little-known masterpieces and then wrote and talked about them, as the program was accompanied by live presentations.
This was a double screening of Alain Resnais’ extraordinary essay-documentary about concentration camps (”Night and Fog”, 1955) followed by the tortured metaphysical existentialism of great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi (”The Illumination”, 1972).
NUIT ET BROUILLARD + ILLUMINATION
Four years before “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and 10 years after the end of WWII and the revelation of the monstrous factories of mass extinction, Alain Resnais makes a poetic essay-documentary, delivering the most devastating film on Nazi concentration camps ever made, in 31 minutes flat. With exemplary restraint, density, depth of emotion, sobriety and an overpowering sense of debt to mankind, he builds a perfect filmmaking specimen for the ages.
Going back and forth in time, alternating between color and black&white, he builds a crescendo of horror with the help of Hanns Eisler’s music score. Yet the film is neither acerbic nor pointlessly rhetorical and aggressive. On the contrary, Resnais guides the narrative with a gentle hand, sweetly and simply framing the green pastures covering the horrific remains, before proceeding to illustrate their demonic use with a rhythmic procession of devastating images. Y.B.
A highly complex film, “The Illumination” is as intricate in storytelling as it is in style. Deeply existential, it poses some serious questions throughout the young hero’s trajectory from 20 to 30 years old, using him as a role model. Why are we alive? What difference does it make if we feel fulfilled, if we actively participate in politics and society, if we feel happy?
Through the trials and tribulations of love and the sudden loss of his best friend, the young science student loses faith in the explicit truth of science and starts looking for life elsewhere. With this cinéma vérité gem, Polish-born Krzysztof Zanussi proves he’ still a relevant filmmaker, both from a philosophical and a moral standpoint.
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Tribute: Frame - Light - Motion
Tribute: Architecture + Cinema
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