My relationship with Cinema began almost as a nightmare. It was in ’46 or ’47, I don’t quite recall. The post-war years, a time when a lot of people were going to the movies and we – the kids – sneaked in among the jostling adults standing in line at the box office, in order to disappear in the magic darkness of the balcony. I saw many movies then, but the first one was a Michael Curtiz film “Angels With Dirty Faces”.
There’s a scene in the film where the hero is led to the electric chair by two guards. As they walk, their shadows grow larger and larger against the wall.
Suddenly, a cry… I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die. For a long time afterwards this cry haunted my nights.
Cinema entered my life with a shadow that grew larger on a wall and a cry.
I began to write at a very early age, at that same time, overwhelmed by the tumult and the emotion that the turbulence of previous History had created in me.
The sirens of war in 1940.
The German army of occupation entering a deserted Athens. First sounds, first images.
Then the Civil War of ’44. The slaughter.
My father condemned to death.
My mother’s hand trembling in mine as we searched for his body among dozens of others, in a field.
A long time later a message from him, from afar.
His return on a rainy day.
The first stories. The first contact with words, words in search of an image. I didn’t know then. I understood quite some time later when I wrote the words in my first script.
The words were “it’s raining”.
In my days, Homer and the ancient tragic poets constituted part of the school curriculum. The ancient myths inhabit us and we inhabit them.
We live in a land full of memories, ancient stones and broken statues.
All contemporary Greek art bears the mark of this coexistence.
It would be impossible for the path I have followed, the course I have taken, for my thinking not to have been infused by all this.
As the poet says, “they emerged from the dream, as I entered the dream. So our lives were joined together and it will be very difficult to part them again.”
From very early on my relationship with literature and poetry brought me close to all the investigations, whether of language or aesthetics, of modernism.
Later, in the beginnings of the ‘60’s, in Paris, in the days of political activism, Brecht’s epic theater which refuted, up to a point, Aristotle’s definition of dramatic art, was becoming a point of reference.
It was years before I went back to Aristotle and his definition of tragedy: “Tragedy is an imitation of a worthy or illustrious and perfect action…”
It was years before I discovered that Molly’s monologue in the last chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is nothing but the distant echo of the astonishing description of Achilles’ arms from Homer’s “Iliad”.
“Reconstruction”, my first film, was born in the period of the dictatorship of the colonels as an attempt to piece together the truth out of its fragments. Reconstruction not as a goal, but as a journey. The little stories as they are reflected but also determined by the greater History.
The father as symbol, presence and absence, as a metaphorical concept as well as a point of reference.
前列腺似乎总是要发言的罢， 不发言的前列腺是没有用的前列腺。 常用常新， 常发言的前列腺才有活力。
