Film Screenings Episode 2: History and Archive

German-Greek Filmic Dialogues on the Past and Future

HISTORY PROJECTED

Film screenings program in collaboration with Ethnofest

Through a series of screenings that unfold over the course of 2024, Greek and German short and feature films introduce their own dialects and dialectics, assembling different approaches to a common historical past. Micro-narratives and off-beat, soft testimonies in the plural form; studies on mythology and role-plays with masks of national identity; jigsaw puzzles with fragments from the archive; loud and invisible gestures and artifacts break the distance from historical sources and prompt surprising readings on different sides of the border. In the end, history is brought to the present and projected into the future, whereas the language of cinema renders history a sensation, an instinct, and a collective experience.    


EPISODE 2
15.05.2024 Episode 2: History and the Archive
100 Hours in May, Demos Theos & Fotos Lamprinos, 1963, 28΄
Une Jeunesse Allemande – Eine deutsche Jugend [A German Youth], Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2015, 93΄

The notion of the archive might be considered identical to the repository of “official” History, the word of authority, the legacy of memory, the guardianship of knowledge, the tool for institutional organization and perpetuation. However, the language of audiovisual artefacts can provide new elliptical formations of fragmented poetics, dissolving the mythology that human experience can fit into a single vault. Two films about the polyphonic, essential present of every archival construction.

18:30
100 Hours in May  The assassination story of the left-wing MP Grigoris Lambrakis that was organized by paramilitary groups along with Karamanlis’s government, with the complicity and guidance of the Royal Gendarmerie, is told through authentic images and unknown evidence. For the very first time, irrefutable evidence comes to light elucidating the horror of this political assassination and captures the surroundings and the socioeconomic status of the para-state organization’s members, whose main goal was to organize attacks against members of the left-wing parties. One of the highlights is the left-wing parliamentarian’s grand funeral. 100 Hours in May is a legendary documentary that paves the way for a new, purely political genre and is at the heart of the 1970s film scene. It heralds Kieron by Dimos Theos, who alongside Fotis Lambrinos, was among the leading political film creators at the time. Giving heed to political turmoil, filmmakers started shooting and capturing the reactions from the Lambrakis attack to his burial that was attended by the whole nation. To go even further, through extensive research, they examine the conditions and the reality of the political assassination which was about to change the face of Greece. The film, which was completed in 1964 but faced a screening ban by the then government of Giorgos Papandreou’s Centre Union, was never broadcasted on state television and was not shown publicly in Greece until 1974.

19:15
Une Jeunesse Allemande – Eine deutsche Jugend [A German Youth] In the 1960s, the young democracy of West Germany was embarrassed by its Nazi past, and ingrown in its role as imperialist and capitalist outpost faced by its communist double. The postwar generation, in direct conflict with their fathers, was trying to find its place. The student movement exploded in 1966 and radicalized those involved in a gradual escalation of violence. From this seething youth emerged the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, filmmaker Holger Meins, students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the lawyer Horst Mahler. When the student movement collapsed at the end of ’68, they desperately sought ways to continue the revolutionary struggle. The film chronicles the political radicalization of some German youth in the late 1960s that gave birth to the Red Army Faction (RAF), gathering its sources from three irreconcilable sides – the West German government, the RAF, and the moviemakers of the time (including Jean-Luc Godard, Reiner Werner Fassbinder, and Michelangelo Antonioni) – the film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society. Confronting ‘opaque’ documents with ‘transparent,’ hypervisible media representations, the filmmaker delivers a precious, fragile archive – a kaleidoscope of contradictions.



Demos Theos (1935–2018) was born in Agrafa, Greece. One of the most emblematic filmmakers of Greek Cinema after the Regime change, he originally worked as an assistant director in many films and later directed for the stage. From the late fifties, he was already directing plays by Beckett and Ionesco. His film Kierion was screened with official permission from the Greek State in the 1968 Venice Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention, while it remained banned for the entire seven years in his country; it was screened for the first time in Greece at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1974, winning the first prize for Best Film and the award for Best Director for a debut director. He has directed documentaries for television and has written many theoretical texts on art and cinema. His filmography comprises four feature films: Kierion (1968), Proceedings (1976), Captain Meintanos (1987), and Eleatis Xenos (1996). 

Fotos Lamprinos studied Film in Moscow (1965–1970). From 1970 to 1973, he thoroughly researched twenty-two governmental and private film archives in Europe and the United States, in search of newsreel material referring to Greece between 1911–1971. In 1973, he collaborated with Theo Angelopoulos on the scenario for Angelopoulos’s film The Traveling Players. From 1975 to 1997, he directed over 50 documentaries for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). In 1981, Lamprinos filmed a feature-length documentary for the screen entitled Aris Velouchiotis: The Dilemma, about the Resistance during the German occupation. His fiction film Doxobus (1987) referred to the 14th-century Byzantine province by the same name and the civil war of that period. His films have received awards in Greece and abroad. Lamprinos created the first Greek user-friendly archive of old newsreels (1997–2000), which is housed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1993 to 2003, he taught about the Relationship between History and Cinema at various universities in Greece.

Born in France in 1974, Jean-Gabriel Périot has made many short films on the edge of documentary, experimental, and fiction. He has developed his own editing style that questions violence and history, based on film and photographic archives material. His films, including Dies Irae, Even If She Had Been a Criminal..., Nijuman no borei (200,000 Phantoms), and The Devil, have won awards at numerous festivals throughout the world. His first feature film, A German Youth opened the Panorama section at the 2015 Berlinale, before being released in German, Swiss and French cinemas and honored with several awards. Summer Lights, his first feature-length fiction film, premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It was released in France in the summer of 2017 and Our Defeats, a feature-length documentary, was presented at the Forum of the 2019 Berlinale. His latest feature film, Returning to Reims, a documentary adapted from Didier Eribon’s book, and starring Adèle Haenel, was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and released in 2021. The film won a César for Best Documentary in 2023.
 

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