Major Dundee: 'He is corrupt, but I will save him'

Sam Peckinpah is the most Homeric of American filmmakers. There’s a great line in the film when Dundee (Charlton Heston) says of ‘confederate renegade’ Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris): ‘He is corrupt; but I will save him.’

The Balcony: Jean Genet and the spirit of Aristophanes

There is nothing more ridiculous than the nation – except, of course, when that nation is your own, in which case it is the repository of all that is virtuous and progressive. But when it comes to other nations, it is clear to us that their claims, myths, institutions and practises are absurd, embarrassing and pathetic. If they could see what we can see then they would be ashamed of themselves. Never mind. The absurdity of the nation is the theme of the hilarious excerpt above from the 1963 filmed version of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony, in which Peter Falk is the chief of police plotting from an S&M brothel to put down a rebellion that has broken out and restore ‘authority’. The play has been lauded for recapturing the spirit of Aristophanes and classical Athenian comedy.

Val Lewton's horror films

Above is a clip from Isle of the Dead, one of the nine extraordinary horror films made by Val Lewton (Vladimir Ivan Leventon) in the 1940s. The best of the nine are Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Seventh Victim. Lewton, a Russian émigré, was fascinated by Slavic and Greek supernatural folklore, which informed many of his films. In Cat People, the tragic heroine is Irena Dubrovna, who is convinced she is from a tribe of devil worshippers in Serbia; while in Isle of the Dead, the action is set in Greece during the Balkan wars and involves the obsessively austere, tyrannical, hubristic General Nikolas Pherides (played by Boris Karloff) preventing a group of travellers from leaving a small island hit by septicemic plague, which Pherides fears will reach his troops on the mainland. As Pherides' stringent measures to contain the plague fail and his charges die one by one, the general loses his mind and begins to persecute a beautiful young woman, Thea, who he believes is responsible for the deaths, asserting she is a vrykolokas (vorvolakas), an undead creature that haunts the living world and murders and drinks the blood of its victims.

Isle of the Dead isn't the best in the Lewton series – Seventh Victim is his masterpiece, I believe – but it contains many of the doom-laden elements that characterise his films – loneliness, obsession, madness, the liminal state between life and death, catalepsy, premature burial, sexual desire, repression and repulsion, the potency of the supernatural and the irrational and, above all, the supremacy of thanatos.

g Read more about the vrykolokas in Greek folklore here and here.

g You can watch Isle of the Dead in its entirety at youtube, where you can also see all of I Walked with a Zombie, Body Snatcher, Seventh Victim, Leopard Man, Ghost Ship and Bedlam.g The Greek island in the film is inspired by Pontikonissi, off Kerkyra, which Lewton visited and extensively photographed, having become mesmerised by the depiction of the island in Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead.

Nikos Papatakis: The Shepherds and The Photograph

Nikos Papatakis is an interesting character (1918-2010). Born in Addis Ababa, he lived in Ethiopia, Lebanon, Greece and France – where, after the Second World War, he moved in Parisian avant guarde circles and became most notably associated with Jean Genet. In 1957, he went to New York, where he befriended John Cassavetes and was financier/producer on Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows. Also, in the 1960s and still in New York, Papatakis got to know the singer/model Christa Päffgen –  aka Nico, of ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ fame – who, indeed, was nicknamed after Papatakis.

Anyway, in between all this, Papatakis was a film-maker in his own right, starting off in 1963 with Les Abysses, an adaptation of Genet’s The Maids. Papatakis then, in 1967, made a film in Greek, Οι Βοσκοί  – aka The Shepherd’s Calamity or Thanos and Despina. It’s very difficult to get hold of Papatakis’ films, I’ve not seen Les Abysses and only managed to find Οι Βοσκοί the other day and I have to say it’s one of the most remarkable films I’ve ever seen, heavily influenced by Genet, with themes of outcasts, social repression and rebellion and the ineluctable road to catastrophe. Papatakis followed in 1976 with a French film, Gloria Mundi, which I haven’t seen, and then in 1986 he made The Photograph, another brilliant Greek-language film, set in Paris and Kastoria, and the Papatakis work I’ve known about and seen the most.

Papatakis’ last film was Les Equilibristes, from 1992, which is about Genet’s doomed relationship with an Algerian circus performer. I saw this film a while ago in Athens and, again, thought it was superb.

Now, I’ve uploaded both Papatakis’ strange, disturbing and occasionally hilarious Greek films – The Shepherds and The Photograph, and even managed to get English subtitles for The Photograph. No subs, unfortunately, for The Shepherds.

The Wire – the US TV crime series set in Baltimore – is a brilliant piece of drama, superbly written, acted and so on. Its creator, David Simon, insists that Greek tragedy is the inspiration for the show:

'Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct – the Greeks –lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind – particularly those of us in the West – finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

'But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.'
In fact, to make Simon's point about The Wire as Greek tragedy, the second series features a powerful, impregnable Greek crime organisation, which runs Baltimore's drugs and prostitution rackets, as one of those postmodern Olympian forces that play with, torment and control humans and their destiny. In the clip above, Baltimore docks union boss Frank Sobotka and his nephew Nick have got in too deep with the Greeks and are going to have to pay the price – to the musical backdrop of Stelios Kazantzidis! Indeed, the second series is liberally laced with Greek music.

Also worth mentioning is that one of the writers/producers for The Wire is George Pelecanos, the Greek-American crime writer. Pelecanos' novels – which include a trilogy featuring PI Nick Stefanos, and another three with Dimitris Karras as the main protagonist – are based in Washington DC and are similar to The Wire in many respects.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish: 'a sickening exhibition of brutality and perversion'

‘The most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.’

Antigone: death-obsessed heroine of gloom

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With the backing of the king of Argos, Polynices attacks Thebes and attempts to seize the throne from his brother, Eteocles. Thebes repels the invasion, but in the process Polynices and his brother are killed. Their uncle Creon ascends to the throne and proclaims that Eteocles is to be buried with full honours deserving of a patriot and a hero; while Polynices will remain unmourned and unburied, exposed to the birds and dogs, a fitting punishment for a traitor. Defiance of Creon’s order will be judged an act of treason punishable by death. Antigone cannot accept Creon’s decree and secretly performs burial and mourning rituals over her beloved brother’s corpse. The devoted sister is caught, brought before Creon and makes no effort to disguise her guilt or contempt for the king and his ‘laws’, claiming she acted according to ‘higher’ laws, on the correct treatment of family dead as defined by Hades and Zeus…

Sophocles’ Antigone is probably the most popular Greek tragedy in contemporary times. Moderns have liked to interpret Antigone as a rebel who defies a tyrant and the state; a proto-feminist protesting patriarchy; or a dissident youth who refuses to accept the strictures of her elders. This famous BBC version of the play, with Juliet Stevenson as Antigone, depicts Creon as a cruel dictator, who has usurped the law in the service of his rule and deploys it as part of a cult of the ‘state’. (Throughout Don Taylor’s otherwise powerful translation, polis is translated not as ‘city’ but as ‘state’ – to emphasise, for Taylor, Creon’s totalitarian disposition).

However, this insistence on interpreting Antigone as a drama of the individual against the state is facile. A Greek-filmed version of Antigone (above), with Irene Papas in the lead role, has a more complex portrayal of Creon who, rather than an implacable tyrant, is shown to be a weak and vacillating ruler. Having made his decree against Polynices’ burial and stipulated the death penalty for anyone who should defy it, Creon is inclined not to invoke the law now that Antigone – his niece, member of the Theban royal family and betrothed to his son, Haemon – and not Argive sympathisers or traitors, has been revealed as the party guilty of tending Polynices’ corpse. However, it is the gloomy, death-obsessed Antigone’s almost deranged defiance of her uncle and king that force Creon into a corner, and compel him to assert his authority and insist on the defence of the polis and its laws.

O Drakos (The Dragon)

O Drakos (The Dragon) is a strange, surreal Greek film from 1956, which is part film noir, part Kafka, part Ionescu, part Ealing Comedy, part Gogol. The film, which I’ve attached English subtitles to, is directed by Nikos Kountouros, was written by Iakovos Kambanellis, stars Dinos Iliopoulos and has a great soundtrack by Manos Hadjidakis. The Greek Film Critics Association once voted O Drakos the best Greek film of all time.

Ben Gazzara talking Killing of a Chinese Bookie

My favourite interpretation of John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie is that Cosmo Vitelli and the strip-club he presides over, as father-figure, lover, director, producer and all round life and soul, is a metaphor for Cassavetes the artist and his films; his metaphorical depiction of all the rubbish an artist has to put up with in order to assert his vision. Poor Cosmo has to deal with gangsters and money men trying to take his club away from him; recalcitrant performers who don’t understand his vision or insist on bringing their personal problems to work: a public indifferent or even contemptuous of his art; and so on.

This interpretation of Killing of a Chinese Bookie always made a lot of sense to me, and it’s one Ben Gazzara, who played Cosmo, gives credence to: ‘I remember when we shot the scene in the limo, where I’m alone without the girls, and John was on the floor, holding the camera. Between takes, he explained what the film meant to him: “All these people who destroy art, who persecute you, who make you do things and never leave you alone.” He began to cry. I thought: My God, it’s really a personal thing for him. The gangsters were a metaphor, Cosmo was John. The club was where Vitelli created beauty, with its girls, music, jokes and spectacle… and the gangsters were the system, which was so hard on John.’

Above is a clip of Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and below he – and producer Al Ruban – discuss the hostile reaction the film received from audiences and critics on opening, causing it to be withdrawn after a week.

Laurel and Hardy and the Greek exaltation of poverty

‘Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight… I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.’  (Albert Camus)

Poverty (Penia) is a goddess with two sisters, Amykhania (helplessness) and Ptokheia (beggary). In Plato’s Republic,  poverty is a terrible evil, a source of meanness, viciousness and discontent. Similarly, Aristotle, in the Politics, regards poverty as a social ill, the parent of revolution and crime. In Wealth (Plutus) – read an excellent, Australian-dialect translation here, by George Theodoridis) – Aristophanes asks what would happen to society if everyone suddenly became rich and answers, paradoxically, that inequalities, conflict and misery would increase. In the play, the goddess Penia appears as an old hag, who warns those who think bestowing wealth on all Athenians will be an unmitigated blessing that:

‘[Poverty] is the very fountain of all joy! Of all life, even!… If Wealth were to… spread himself around to everyone, who’d be doing any of the work then or even any of the thinking?'’

The goddess then goes on to suggest that the poor are in fact more virtuous than the rich:

’And let me tell you another thing about the poor. They are modest and civil, whereas the rich are all arrogant.’

The virtues – or otherwise – of poverty become of increasing interest in Greek ethics. Although never endorsing the alleged moral advantages of penury, Socrates does make clear, in the Apology, that he is indifferent to wealth and that a preoccupation with wisdom is far more important than, and perhaps even incompatible with, any pursuit of money or luxury.

The belief that neither wealth or poverty have much to contribute to virtue is shared by the Stoics and Epicureans – who regard poverty as just one of life’s many misfortunes, fear of which should be confronted and overcome. (Seneca advocated living rough from time to time, for a period of three to four days, to get used to poverty in case we should fall victim to it).

The Cynics, however, didn’t just denounce wealth as a prohibition to virtue, they went one stage further and developed a cult of poverty, embracing indigence as a positive way of life, ‘an unending task in which one strives for a more and more complete renunciation of possessions and the desire for material possession’.* Previous Greek virtues of beauty, honour and independence were turned on their head by the Cynics, who valorised, instead, ugliness, humiliation, dishonour (adoxia) and dependence – begging and, more radically, slavery, were positively accepted.**

Finally, we note that it was not a big leap from Cynic humiliation to Christian humility, from Cynic destitution to Christian asceticism, and from the Cynic exaltation of poverty to Christian love of the poor.

 *E. McGushin: Foucault’s Askesis.
**M. Foucault: The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II).