8 - A Dark Intrigue of Murder: Kierion and Reconstruction, or Film Noir as Politics

Summary

This chapter discusses Dimos Theos and Theo Angelopoulos's debut feature films, Kierion (1967–74) and Anaparastasi/Reconstruction (1970) respectively, through the lens of film noir. This may seem paradoxical since the two films are typically considered as the starting points of New Greek Cinema, a politically engaged, auteur-driven and arthouse movement that turned away from the thematic, stylistic and genre conventions of the mainstream Old Greek Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Kovács, however, argues for the transitional character of film noir, which prepared the way for modernist film narration, drawing attention to the phenomenon that many great auteurs such as Visconti, Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut, at the beginning of their careers, ‘constructed their films on film noir structure’ (2007: 246). ‘The investigation pattern’, according to Kovács, ‘may dominate even the most esoteric European modernist art films’ (2007: 245). Moreover, film noir and other classical genres became central to modernist cinema as ‘forms to be interrogated, rewritten, subjectivised and transformed, from films of genre to films of auteurs’ (Rohdie 2015: 28). The main aim of the chapter is thus to examine how Kierion and Reconstruction, made by two major auteurs of New Greek Cinema from left-wing perspectives and in a turbulent era – on the verge of and during the military junta of the Colonels (1967–74) – while being comfortably placed within the modernist film tradition, employ ‘noir’ patterns in order to deal with authoritarianism and the bleak sociopolitical reality in Greece.

Kierion: Political Conspiracy and the Dark Side of the Urban

Theos in the 1960s was a highly politicised filmmaker as he was committed to the left-wing party EDA. His interest in politics and film noir aesthetics can be traced back to 1963–64 when he co-directed with Fotos Lambrinos the short Ekato ores tou Mai/100 Hours of May about the assassination of the EDA deputy Grigoris Lambrakis by parastate extremists in May 1963. This radical documentary uses iconographic, thematic and narrative tropes derived from the film noir: it opens with a crime announced by the press; it adopts a journalistic investigative format and a complex flashback structure to reveal hidden truths; its dark and violent plot exposes the links between common crime and the deep state;