Yiannis Economides’ vision is of spiritual, moral and cultural destitution and degraded human relations but you’ll have to ask him if he’s making a point about contemporary Greek reality or whether he’s saying something about the state of European civilisation or civilisation generally and so on. Whatever, the Cypriot film-maker’s third release, Knifer (Μαχαιροβγάλτης) – above, in full, with English subtitles – is a brilliant and deeply uncomfortable film noir.
And here is a piece in English on Economides, in which he describes himself as a ‘a peasant’ and ‘a bit of a punk’.
‘The water calls. It's a long time since anyone drowned.’
(Woyzeck)
Above is YiannisEconomides’ second film, made in 2005, Η Ψυχή στο Στόμα (I Psychisto Stoma – known in English as Soul Kicking).
Soul Kicking is even bleaker than the Cypriot film-maker’s debut Spirtokouto, depicting a world in which human relations have broken down and all that's left is violence, brutality, selfishness and loathing.
The film opens with a line from Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836) – 'The water calls. It's a long time since anyone drowned' – and indeed Economides' film is a reworking of the play, which follows the tragic demise of an abused and harried man made insane by the obscene society in which he lives and is driven towards a sacrificial murder.
The very talented ErikkosLitsis, who had the lead role in Spirtokouto, stars again in Soul Kicking. In the clip from Soul Kicking above, Takis (Litsis) is called round to deal with a family dispute, but it's too much for him.
Above is Spirtokouto (2002) by Yiannis Economides.
Spirtokouto (Matchbox) is an emotionally uncompromising and brutal film depicting family – and by extension societal – breakdown and disintegration, in which Greek family and Greek society is no longer a realm of solidarity, love, self-realisation, trust, honesty and mutual support, but of tension, cruelty, loathing, self-loathing, alienation, conflict, mental torture, frustration, selfishness, repression, disappointment, lies, where there are no boundaries or rules, where we cannot make others conform to our desires, see our reason or pay attention to the flawed choices we know they are making.
An uncomfortable film about how life is and not how it should be, Spirtokouto rebukes the prevailing fatuous, sentimental trend in Greek film, fascinated by sex, lifestyle, hedonism and romance and the imitation of American formulas; and asserts that the most interesting thing about Greece remains the Greeks themselves.
Spirtokouto also suggests a way out of the lyrical tradition that has defined serious Greek film since the 1970s.
Spirtokouto is the antithesis of an Angelopoulos film. Spirtokouto takes place indoors, in a confined space, over a short space of time, with protagonists who aren’t afforded the luxury of an Odyssean journey to escape or work out their alienation but are forced to deal with it in the place where it was created and continues to exist, whose language and emotions are naturalistic, confrontational and raw, functioning on the borders of sanity. Unlike Angelopoulos, in Spirtokouto there are no visionary moments, no imaginative indulgences, no poetic, philosophical or political ideals to be considered or which can be said to shape or motivate consciousness, no poetic reveries, no time for contemplation; silence is not a period of peace or epiphany but tension and danger, and life is inevitably a social condition and event in which solitary experiences, where they exist, are not opportunities for self-becoming but extreme states of alienation.
In the clip, brothers-in-law Dimitris and Giorgos fall out over a proposed business venture and Dimitris’ tardiness in fixing the air-conditioning.
I hope by now you’ve all watched Yiannis Economides’ Knifer and maybe even Spirtoukouto, available here in full with English subtitles. In my post on Knifer, I wondered whether Economides, whose films are characterised by moral and cultural decay, was trying to make a point about Greece or about Europe or civilisation in general. Well, in the above clip, we get the answer; because Economides says he is only interested in Greece and Greeks, or the modern face of Greece, as he puts it. Indeed, in this excellent ERT interview (in Greek) with the Cypriot film-maker, Economides, expands on this and describes himself as a ‘patriot’, in the sense that he had opportunities to study and work abroad but consciously decided to stay in Greece because he says, from a young age, and almost driven by fate, he wanted to understand Greece and then speak about what he had found out.
