The Greece of rebetiko, folk music, and a world of dog-eat-dog society exists right next to us and lives to its own intense and often primitive rhythms in the Greek countryside, on the plains, on the national highways, and on the unlit dirt roads. The film Yiannis Oikonomidis has the most nominations at the 2021 Iris Awards in all fifteen major categories, and we await the results.
Folk urban songs and heavy zeibekiko, the solitary male dance, soon replaced the traditional group singing of folk songs with the historical dimension present until the Revolution in the songs of the Klephts, a mainly lyrical song that the new generation now tends to return to as a rock element of Greekness, That is the dynamic in folk music again today.
From the aman cafés of Asia Minor and the rebetiko songs in the provincial taverns
Modern Greek traditional music boasts of its Byzantine past, without ever losing the Balkan identity of an outdated orchestra, the music of the diaspora and the distinctive phonetics of the Greek language, thanks to which it has survived through the ages. The café aman of Asia Minor and the Greek refugees introduced left-wing rebetiko and Eastern melodies in the 1950s and 1960s, giving birth to authentic folk entertainment, all of which lasted until 1967.
The cultural dualism of the underdog in the Metapolitefsi appears to be united with the Western tradition of modernity, but After PASOK's second rise to power, the two-party system is holding Greece back from progress.. The rise of the skyladiko during the same period, in order to fill basic gaps in Greek discography, brought to the stage the forgotten tambourine and clarinet from our post-war municipal past. The authorship of the meaning of «skyladiko» must be attributed to the writer and folklorist Ilias Petropoulos.
Subsequently, the Greek doghouse with scenes of piles of broken plates, later raining carnations, with microphones of every untuned note and unseen ballet dancing skills on the plate, the wild dance hall made its aggressive appearance to break up into Greek taverns and clubs, without clear dividing lines, Since the 1990s, Greeks have learned to operate in terms of commerce, publicly promoted and recognizable as a lifestyle.
The mass media, especially the impressive magazines that made us more European, and the small screen as a medium of neorealism, the pages of some unknown publisher and private television reproduced the mass-marketable as superior quality entertainment, exchanging a front table for an interview in the lounge of a low-rated morning show, necessary, however, to fill the station's schedule or the monthly and daily newspaper, as the case may be.
The fire started from the «matchbox» and «Balanta» turned everything to ashes.
Twenty years after the legendary «Spirtokouto,» the first film that initially shook us by showing us our socially excluded selves, Yannis Economides' new film aims to make us better people.
Manos Zafeiropoulos – the central character played by Vasilis Bisbikis – is a former famous singer and now a failed nightclub owner in Lamia who enters into a fateful relationship with the wife of a prominent businessman in the city. The female lead, played by Vicky Papadopoulou, familiar from Oikonomidis' previous film, Vicky Papadopoulou as Olga, when she finally leaves her wealthy husband, Heracles Skylogiannis (this is the only hint at the provincial code of the doghouse), – in the role of the cuckolded husband, the excellent Giannis Tsortakis – his wife Olga steals a million euros from their home safe, a mythical amount, whether they are in crisis or not. Of course, the wealthy businessman pursues them, not to save the relationship, but to get the money back.
The Greek family, holy and united
This is the melody of a provincial night and true love amid professional difficulties and crisis. Apart from the economic stranglehold, the screenwriters of the excellent film, Haris Lagousis, Giannis Economidis, and Dimosthenis Papamarkos, touch on the major issue of the Greek family. Mothers who condone crimes, daughters who never listen to their fathers, and wives who betray a stereotypical perception of Greece, the one below the furrow (Olga is from Patras). The focus is on the lack of trust within the postmodern structure of the family.
Hellenism may have been preserved for centuries on stable foundations (homeland, religion, family), but the triad has now changed: The homeland has become inhospitable, religion is often transformed into a professional condition, and the family is simply traditional! The state is sinking not only because of continuous foreign borrowing, but also because of internal corruption, as shown in the film. And as is usually the case, the thief never gets caught. The creators do not simply transcribe the myth of ’Sleeping Beauty,« nor do they draw on European chivalric novels of the Middle Ages, because we do not have a fantasy fairy tale after all, but raw realism. The film does not end with a wedding, as it is a black comedy..
Whoever Walks at Night: the folk muse in literature and cinema
First place goes to Thanos Alexandris with his iconic book «This Night Remains» (Peripolos 20172, Panos 1994) produced the first pure work on dog breeding in Greek social anthropology from within, but now, returning with his new book, Thanos Alexandris «On the feast day of Saint Almodovar» (Kedros 2021) closes the cycle of nightlife and variety shows in popular programs at the most popular venues in the countryside. In the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean, Liopi Abatzis« thesis »Drink for Company" (Kedros 2009) highlights consomation as the sexual entertainment of the new era in bars.
With the Metapolitefsi, political content is found in concerts and bouzoukia clubs in Plaka., while the communicative tsifteteli is making a strong comeback to stage its own counter-revolution on the big dance floors, according to Dionysis Haritopoulos in his recent book «Erotes sti Metapolitefsi» (Loves in the Metapolitefsi) (Topos 2019).
However, the film that marked the popular consciousness as the ultimate symbol of unbridled provincialism in a screenplay by writer Thanos Alexandris and director Nikos Panagiotopoulos, «This Night Remains» (1999), remains the landmark of the last cinematic period from 1995 to the pandemic year of 2020. Nikos Panagiotopoulos, returning to the raging night with the excellent film «I'm Tired of Killing Your Lovers» (2002), emphasizes that Athens is not inferior to the Greek countryside in matters of nightlife and that the backdrop is always song.
Alexis Kardaras develops the artistic appearance of every form in nighttime Athens in an illustrated version, together with the mass media, becoming a group of rising star singers in the excellent film «Fantasy» (2019), where song became the vehicle for the creator to narrate an era, that of the 1990s, when social glamour meant magazine covers, recognition, and illicit or at least secret love affairs.
In all films the problem behind the curtain is the broken family or the struggle for a happy family structure. Four books and an equal number of Greek films, along with «The Ballad of the Broken Heart,» the creators highlight what we as modern Greeks know from experience: that in folk dance halls, dark bars, and provincial bouzouki clubs lost in the plains, the triptych of night, sex, and passion go hand in hand in a Greece that is struggling to get back on its feet and at the same time convince Europe of this.
When Elias dropped the «Vietnam» bomb»
Previously, in Greek cinema, the important film «Everything is a Road» by Pantelis Voulgaris (1998), analyzes contemporary Greece in three sections: ancient monuments and Greek history, precarious borders and natural landscape, family and infidelity, with a focus on music, dance, and, of course, song. In each section of the film «Everything is a Road,» folk songs unite the three stories, in the first with the traditional folk dance at Easter, in the second the hero dances with the traditional Gaida and in the spectacular third story, the provincial dog pound becomes «Vietnam.».
Pantelis Voulgaris highlights the therapeutic qualities of the Greek countryside in the last story, when the wealthy, abandoned husband mourns the absence of his children from his daily life. goes to bouzouki clubs of dubious quality. The same person in any European country would probably just go see their local psychologist.
The awards dance to the rhythms of «Balladas»
The film «The Ballad of the Broken Heart» was shot entirely in Lamia, although Thessaloniki, a city with a tradition of rebetiko and later folk urban music, had initially been chosen. However, the choice of a more southern location successfully conveys the morbidity of the night in contrast to the calm of the day. The beautiful shots of the Spercheios River contrasted with the barrenness of the plain reflect the dual problems of this particular region of the country: the rural life that was lost with European subsidies, which brought an end to all cultivation in the once densely planted plain with cotton and tobacco, and later the overinvestment of desperate residents in the easily accessible nightlife, not only in the city of Lamia, but also in the neighboring towns (Makrakomi, etc.). Singers, like farmers, became entrepreneurs overnight without the necessary knowledge, and therefore without success.
The hero Manos Zafeiropoulos distances the viewer from the ideal of the music industry by revealing the inner workings of a systematic pathology. The tradition of the Greek countryside's nighttime economy has worn down the locals, and now the countryside is at a crossroads. This is the most forgotten Greek countryside, with almost no influx of tourists, so the traditional forms of support for the local economy are no longer sufficient in a capitalist, united Europe.
«The Ballad of the Broken Heart» is the most mature moment of a great director. and, we believe, the most interesting. The film confronts Greek Trash head-on and uses all of its opponent's weapons in this battle. The creators resort to violence, tension, deep sexism, and inappropriate language, this time without exaggeration, with scenes full of dialogue, while at the same time criticizing the misguided values of the sacred Greek family and the claustrophobic lifestyle of the petty bourgeois province in live stages, such as «Krokodilos,» full of false promises.
The main structure is based on a two-part social critique of nightlife subculture, while the black comedy begins halfway through and continues until the end of the film. As with all of the Cypriot director's films, the beautiful art produced by anarchist cinema became an archetypal norm. With the most nominations this year at the 2021 IRIS Awards in all fifteen major categories, including Best Fiction Film, Directing, Screenplay, Leading and Supporting Female and Male Roles, Cinematography, Editing, Music, Production Design, Costume Design, Sound, Makeup, and Special/Visual Effects, the experienced filmmakers at the Greek Film Academy prove that with so many nominations, Yannis Economides is the ultimate Greek auteur of the 21st century.
The film will be available online until May 18 on ERTflix.
By Georgia Tsatsani
