5 - Dark Cinema, Dark Sounds: Mimis Plessas and the Integration of Jazz into Greek Film Noir

Summary

Music is placed where it's needed in the film for only one reason: to make the viewer believe and at the same time let him dream!

Mimis Plessas (2005)

Music of the so-called ‘Old Greek Cinema’ of the 1950s to the early 1970s plays a fundamental role not only in the construction of the films’ narrative milieu, but also in the formation of a distinctive, hybrid cinematic soundscape, which is characteristic of Greek film and popular music production of the period, and crucial for their perception and reception by the audience (Poulakis 2017). Particularly, in line with neo-noir film music of the post-classical era, Greek film noir depends heavily on the incorporation of jazz music styles, textures and practices. Mimis Plessas has been acknowledged as a remarkably prolific composer for mainstream cinema, having scored more than sixty films during the 1960s (Papadimitriou 2006: 177). Furthermore, he has been widely acclaimed as the composer who integrated a jazz feeling into Greek film music of the aforementioned period (Stavrinides 2011: 63; Baskozos 2014; Troussas 2019; Tziritas 2019). Bearing in mind that the relationship between jazz and cinema has not been investigated with regard to Greek film noir, my goal is to highlight diverse aspects of Plessas's music for this genre. The score for Eglima sta paraskinia/Murder Backstage (dir. Katsouridis, 1960) was the first of his three noir soundtracks of the 1960s – along with those for Efialtis/ Nightmare (dir. Andreou, 1961) and Pyretos stin asfalto/The Asphalt Fever (dir. Dimopoulos, 1967) – as well as one of his first challenges in scoring films for Greek genre cinema and offering a characteristic mood of noir music contrary to other Greek film composers. By providing a critical examination of Murder Backstage, this chapter draws attention to the performative practices of audiovisual representation in early Greek film noir and the ambiguous qualities of Plessas's scores as a means to explore mixed cultural identities, collective memories, personal emotional situations, and the osmosis between everyday life and the social imaginary during the early 1960s in Greece.4

Music in Film Noir

Drawing from German Expressionism and using pulp crime novels as its literary basis, film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s is still the subject of academic debate: should it be considered a special film genre or is it just a particular cinematic style?