Film Screenings
Episode 2: History and Archive
German-Greek Filmic Dialogues on the Past and Future
HISTORY PROJECTED
Film screenings program in collaboration with Ethnofest
Through a series of screenings that unfold over the course of 2024, Greek and German short and feature films introduce their own dialects and dialectics, assembling different approaches to a common historical past. Micro-narratives and off-beat, soft testimonies in the plural form; studies on mythology and role-plays with masks of national identity; jigsaw puzzles with fragments from the archive; loud and invisible gestures and artifacts break the distance from historical sources and prompt surprising readings on different sides of the border. In the end, history is brought to the present and projected into the future, whereas the language of cinema renders history a sensation, an instinct, and a collective experience.
EPISODE 2
15.05.2024 Episode 2: History and the Archive
100 Hours in May, Demos Theos & Fotos Lamprinos, 1963, 28΄
Une Jeunesse Allemande – Eine deutsche Jugend [A German Youth], Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2015, 93΄
The notion of the archive might be considered identical to the repository of “official” History, the word of authority, the legacy of memory, the guardianship of knowledge, the tool for institutional organization and perpetuation. However, the language of audiovisual artefacts can provide new elliptical formations of fragmented poetics, dissolving the mythology that human experience can fit into a single vault. Two films about the polyphonic, essential present of every archival construction.
18:30
100 Hours in May
100 Hours in May, Demos Theos & Fotos Lamprinos, 1963
19:15
Une Jeunesse Allemande – Eine deutsche Jugend [A German Youth]
Une Jeunesse Allemande – Eine deutsche Jugend [A German Youth], Jean-Gabriel Périot ©Local Films_Alina Film_Blinker Filmproduktion
Demos Theos (1935–2018) was born in Agrafa, Greece. One of the most emblematic filmmakers of Greek Cinema after the Regime change, he originally worked as an assistant director in many films and later directed for the stage. From the late fifties, he was already directing plays by Beckett and Ionesco. His film Kierion was screened with official permission from the Greek State in the 1968 Venice Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention, while it remained banned for the entire seven years in his country; it was screened for the first time in Greece at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1974, winning the first prize for Best Film and the award for Best Director for a debut director. He has directed documentaries for television and has written many theoretical texts on art and cinema. His filmography comprises four feature films: Kierion (1968), Proceedings (1976), Captain Meintanos (1987), and Eleatis Xenos (1996).
Fotos Lamprinos studied Film in Moscow (1965–1970). From 1970 to 1973, he thoroughly researched twenty-two governmental and private film archives in Europe and the United States, in search of newsreel material referring to Greece between 1911–1971. In 1973, he collaborated with Theo Angelopoulos on the scenario for Angelopoulos’s film The Traveling Players. From 1975 to 1997, he directed over 50 documentaries for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). In 1981, Lamprinos filmed a feature-length documentary for the screen entitled Aris Velouchiotis: The Dilemma, about the Resistance during the German occupation. His fiction film Doxobus (1987) referred to the 14th-century Byzantine province by the same name and the civil war of that period. His films have received awards in Greece and abroad. Lamprinos created the first Greek user-friendly archive of old newsreels (1997–2000), which is housed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1993 to 2003, he taught about the Relationship between History and Cinema at various universities in Greece.
Born in France in 1974, Jean-Gabriel Périot has made many short films on the edge of documentary, experimental, and fiction. He has developed his own editing style that questions violence and history, based on film and photographic archives material. His films, including Dies Irae, Even If She Had Been a Criminal..., Nijuman no borei (200,000 Phantoms), and The Devil, have won awards at numerous festivals throughout the world. His first feature film, A German Youth opened the Panorama section at the 2015 Berlinale, before being released in German, Swiss and French cinemas and honored with several awards. Summer Lights, his first feature-length fiction film, premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It was released in France in the summer of 2017 and Our Defeats, a feature-length documentary, was presented at the Forum of the 2019 Berlinale. His latest feature film, Returning to Reims, a documentary adapted from Didier Eribon’s book, and starring Adèle Haenel, was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and released in 2021. The film won a César for Best Documentary in 2023.
Details
Goethe-Institut Athen
Omirou 14-16
106 72 Athens
Language: German, English, Greek
Price: Free admission
+30 210 366 1014
kultur.athen@goethe.de
Part of series History Projected
Amphitheater