Oloi Ena, Fila me, with Stamatis Kraounakis

Oloi Ena, Fila Me (All for One, Kiss Me), Stamatis Kraounakis

at the Michalis Cacoyannis Foundation.

The non-profit foundation was set up by Cakoyannis himself in 2003 with the aim of supporting, preserving and promoting the arts of theatre and cinema.

A Greek Cypriot filmmaker, Cacoyannis is best known for his 1964 film Zorba the Greek, a film that celebrated joie de vivre and which had an underlying pessimism and the echo of a Greek tragedy.





He made 15 feature films which included Trojan women with Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Irini Papas. He was however primarily interested in the theatre where he not only directed, but also wrote, designed costumes, produced and translated dozens of plays.  He also directed opera productions in many of the world's great opera houses. He was devoted to Greek classical drama and directed many of Euripides' plays for the cinema and theatre.

During the six years of the military junta in Greece he went into voluntary exile: 'I could not have stayed in Greece, I would have ended up in prison because I speak up', he explained.

He died at the age of 90 in a non-cemetery burial, in the courtyard of the Foundation

his grave is behind this sculpture.

 

Stamatis Kraounakis is a music composer, music producer, lyricist, writer and director.

 



 

 

We thoroughly enjoyed the concert which featured a lot of Kraounakis' songs. The performance also incorporated his innovative technique of using songs as theatrical dialogue and the singers as heroes of fictional tales.

The backdrop to the stage was a series of paper carrier bags suspended from the ceiling which looked fantastic as the lighting changed and the shadows flickered on the wall.

 

 

The male gaze - the female gaze

I went to this Symposium last week, mainly to hear Laura Mulvey speak, but as it was very interesting, I stayed on.


The Male Gaze

With her 1975 essay, 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema', Mulvey used psychoanalytic theory to identify the influence of patriarchal ideology in relation to film. She developed the theory of the Male Gaze, describing how the audience, or viewer, is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male. Using Freud's concept of scopophilia which involves taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze, she showed how women are displayed as sexual objects in film: 'in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly'. The woman in this scenario is displayed as an erotic object for the characters within the screen story, as well as for the spectator within the auditorium. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance, she is an icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, as opposed to the man who is the active one in the narrative, making things happen. She calls for the freeing of the look of the camera to set women, 'whose image has continually been stolen and used', free.

Men then look at women as sexual objects, the camera focusing on their physical appearance and sexuality, on their breasts, suggestions of or actual nudity, reducing them to objects. This is a result of the necessity to reproduce patriarchy and patriarchal ideology.

Mulvey's theory has been extremely influential and has moved beyond the analysis of film as a mechanism of viewing art and the mass media as a whole, in the way they represent women.


The Female Gaze or The Female I/Eye

Mulvey is currently working on a paper on the work of filmmaker Alina Marazzi who was present at the Symposium as she is on a three week visiting fellowship at the University. By using the concept of Female Gaze the organisers were not thinking of a straight reversal where women look at and use men as objects, but as a retrieval of lost female experience, of looking at history afresh to bring to the fore what has been hidden, ignored and suppressed.

Marazzi's work involves an investigation of women's history, a history that has been silenced and suppressed. The past is always appropriated and re-written by the powers that be, in this case patriarchy, to justify the present. Women's lives and experiences have always been inscribed within fictions of one kind or another. A feminist aesthetic would involve the re-writing of those fictions, giving them new meaning, displacing the old patriarchal myths and rewriting their narratives in order to break the silencing of female voices. Mulvey talked about gleaning - the gleaning of footage in film. Gleaning in the sense of collecting the discarded, what was seen as valueless and what was actively suppressed. A word that takes on a metaphorical meaning referring to the marginal in culture, the sphere of women's history and women's position in that culture as well as in language, and how this could relate to a feminist aesthetic.







In Un'ora ti vorrei, Alina Marazzi used home-made movies of her family taken by her grandfather and through editing and using scrapbooks, family photographs and diary entries she created a new film in which she explored the life and death of her mother who committed suicide when Marazzi was seven. Using existing footage but also looking at the gaps that had been left in the original footage she was able to reveal what had not been recorded, what had been left unsaid, forgotten or hidden.

Even though this film is autobiographical Marazzi has created a pattern of how to tell stories in a different way, using gleaning of old footage to reveal hidden or implied power relations, so that her mother's story is not just that woman's individual story but a record of women's cultural marginalisation - a transformation of individual suffering into a political and social issue.







A trailer of Tutto Parla di Te Marazzi's latest feature film by Marazzi with Charlotte Rampling, where the relationship between two women is explored.

Kyriakos Katzourakis - A Retrospective

 

 

 

Kyriakos Katzourakis, at the Benaki Museum, Pireos Street Annexe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An extremely thought-provoking exhibition. Katzourakis is a prolific artist who has experimented with all kinds of styles and genres, not just in painting, but also photography, film, video art and theatre stage sets. The publication of his latest book, 'Order into Chaos', coincides with the exhibition, and his latest film 'Small Revolts' was screened at the Benaki while we were there.

 

He lived and worked under the dark shadow of the junta in the 1960s and then moved to London in 1972 where his work took a different direction and led to an attempt to combine the two different worlds that he inhabited.

 

 

 

 

 

Part of the New Greek realist group, his work is imbued with a very strong political flavour. His art is a mixture of painful, almost clinical recording of reality but also an anarchist explosion of unordered images emanating from the land of dreams, instinctive association and nightmare. An able, critical reader of the narrative of the Hellenic 1930s generation, he entered into dialogue with those artists, as well as others that have influenced his work such as Bacon, Velasquez, Picasso. His greatest influences have been Tsarouchis and Caravaggio's chiaroscuro.

 

'Everything starts with painting', he says. 'People drew before they spoke. Our visual experience of the world comes first before everything else'.

 

 

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Instead of recording this exhibition in chronological order, I felt I had to make my own categories, ones that made sense to me. This is the first of three posts on his work.

Polaroid with my Shadow, 1972 (acrylic on canvas)

401 Hospital, 1975 (acrylic on canvas)

Three Mirrors, 1990, (oil on canvas)

Ippokrateio Hospital, 1990, (oil on canvas)

Menidi, 2001, (acrylic on canvas)

A Story, 1993, (acrylic on canvas)

 

A closer look at one of the panels

 



 

 

 

 

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Dialogue with Other Artists:

Bacon, 1966 (oil on canvas)

Café Velasquez, 1976 (acrylic on canvas)

Yvonne Poussin, 1976 (oil on canvas)

Les Mademoiselles d'Avignon, 2012 (oil on canvas)

Bacon's Entrance, 2010, (oil on canvas)

The Massacre of the Innocents, 2012, (oil on canvas)

Las Meninas, 1976 (oil on canvas) - this painting was not part of the exhibition but is in the National Gallery in Athens.



An exploration of, and dialogue with, the 1930s Greek School of Painting:

Hydra, 1966 (oil on canvas)

Mirror, 1965 (acrylic on canvas)

The Mountain, 1976 (oil on canvas)

A re-working of Tsarouchis

Chrysanthi, 1980, (oil on wood)

A conversation with Tsarouchis, again.

Katia with Mirror, 1987 (oil on canvas)

Penelope, 2013 (oil on canvas)

Alexander in Veria, 2012 (oil on canvas)

Giorgione - Portrait, 1980 (oil on wood)



Faiyum:

Gypsy, 1973 (oil on wood) on the left,  and Myrto, 1973 (oil on wood) on the right


Stage Sets:

Iphigenia at Aulis, 1990

Women of Troy, 1992

Alcestis, 1992

Happy End, 1997.




Sketches and Prints:

A print about Rigas Ferraios, one of the Greek freedom fighters during the 1821 Revolution which led to the liberation of Greece from the Turks.



Feature Films:

Katzourakis has made three feature films. 'Small Revolts' (2009) , the last of the trilogy whose theme is 'how much can women bear' was showing while we were in the gallery. In the first film of the trilogy 'The Way West' , Irina, the protagonist commits suicide. Things are equally grim for the second Irina, the protagonist of the second film. 'Small Revolts'  is about Anna, who was abused by her father and who then marries a man who is into trafficking and who abuses her. She manages to escape from him, so this film has a more optimistic ending.