Classics reloaded - The Best from Greece

Posted on: 17/Oct/2011 Katina Paxinou is best remembered for starring in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ alongside Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper .

ALTHOUGH some would argue that the Panorama of European Cinema, handcrafted by film critic Ninos-Fenek Mikelidis and his team 23 years ago, is slowly losing its hold on reality - along with its funds - the team continues to persevere with a number of tributes that do justice to its perennial billing.

Let’s take things from the top: shedding three days and a considerable number of movies, the Panorama will be spanning a little over a week, from October 26 to November 3.

Screenings have migrated to the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation (206 Pireos St) and Athens’ Apollon Cinemax Class theatre (19 Stadiou St), which is only fitting as the most intriguing of the festival’s retrospectives honours is none other than Greek stage legend Katina Paxinou.

Although preceding the recently deceased Cacoyannis by a good two decades, they both belonged to this rare breed of Greek talent that made a unique impact abroad, as Paxinou worked with everyone from Sam Wood to Orson Welles and Luchino Visconti.

Trained as a singer in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin, Paxinou was destined to be a stage actress although she didn’t discover her true calling until 1929. From then on it was drama all the way, on screen and on stage, although she will mostly be remembered as Spanish revolutionary Pilar in Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), alongside Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, a part that won her both a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and a Golden Globe in the same year.

As of this writing, the Panorama of European Cinema has chosen to keep the retrospective titles under wraps, but with Paxinou having appeared in 14 features, your chances of catching some of her best work are high. If there’s one thing you should be worried about it’s the prints, as the festival has been known to supplement hard-to-find films with lesser-quality DVDs, greatly undermining the silver screen experience.

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Celebrating 101 years since the birth of Akira Kurosawa, Mikelidis has selected three representative works from the director’s long career, including the one film that managed to plunge this great master of Japanese cinema in deep despair. I am of course talking about Dodes’ka-den (1970), his first colour feature, which paints an unusually whimsical portrait of inner city poverty.

Chasing after a little boy who pretends to drive an imaginary streetcar in the city dump surrounded by all manners of low-life schemers, Dodes’ka-den didn’t do well with local audiences, turning it into Kurosawa’s biggest box office failure. Already 60 years old, the director took five years to recover, but eventually bounced back with foreign funding (Russia, USA, France) to make some of the best films of his later period - Kagemusha, Dreams and Ran, among others. The two other films making up this triple nod to Kurosawa’s greatness are Red Beard and the classic Seven Samurai.


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One year short of Samuel Fuller’s 100th birthday, the Panorama picks up where it left off, serving up a welcome followup to its 2010 tribute on the director. Although some would argue the programming committee is fresh out of ideas, if there’s one director you shouldn’t mind watching on repeat, that’s definitely Fuller.

Starting out as the youngest reporter ever to be in charge of the events section of the New York Journal, aged 17, he later moved on to crime reporting, which left a heavy influence on his filmwork from beginning to end. “I hate violence. But that has never prevented me from using it in my films,” said the idiosyncratic filmmaker, who made a name for himself with Pickup on South Street (1953), a tale of subway conspiracies starring a young pickpocket who mistakenly lifts a microfilm from a pretty girl’s purse.

Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, the most controversial entries in his cult oeuvre, are topped off with the less-known House of Bamboo, a colour film noir (Fuller worked extensively in B&W) considered too brutal for its time, and The Crimson Kimono, one of his more obscure efforts about a love triangle in the Japanese quarter of Los Angeles. The fact that two of the people involved are detectives only serves to make things more intriguing.

The opening gala

The opening night comes courtesy of Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose latest offering, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, was decorated with the Grand Jury Prize at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Taking a long hard look at the real face of Turkey - which doesn’t of course include westernised Istanbul - Ceylan follows a team of policemen as they drag a criminal through the mystical Anatolian countryside in search of the dead body of his victim.

The retrospective will also include a selection of Greek films from the 90s. Details for all events can be found on www.panoramafest.com.

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