A city’s development on DVD
A great idea has come to enrich our knowledge of the city of Athens. With the support of the Greek Film Center and Greek Radio and Television (ERT), the Benaki Museum has produced an innovative documentary showcasing the transformation of Athens from a quiet, Mediterranean city in the 1920s to an uncontrollable urban-planning complex by the beginning of the 21st century. The ambitious project owes its existence to Greek cinema. This is because in order to realize this unique record of the city’s architectural and social development, more than 530 frames were extracted from no fewer than 184 Greek films. Overall, local cinema proved to be an invaluable source of archival material, ultimately safeguarding long-lost images of the Greek capital. Dimitris Damaskos, in charge of the film’s production, pointed out recently that a strictly architectural version of Athenian history taking advantage of cinema’s entertainment qualities was consciously avoided. Architecture, however, does takes on a leading role here: Co-signing the film’s script along with director Yiannis Skopeteas is architect Dimitris Phillipidis. Acting as a guide for gathering the wealth of material was Dimitris Koliodimou’s «Dictionary of Greek Film From 1914 to 2000.» Editing Overall, more than 511 films were screened, while a first «draft» came down to no less than 18 hours of film. In the end, the archive material was reduced to 90 minutes. Added to this were 20 minutes of new scenes, featuring four defining personalities of Greek cinema, all acting as hosts on this journey of Athenian history and life. Thus Nikos Xanthopoulos guides viewers through a tour of popular, working-class Athenian neighborhoods; Xenia Kalogeropoulous takes a look at a bourgeois city which endlessly replaced old constructions with new ones; Nikos Kalogeropoulos focuses on the post-junta Athens of New Greek Cinema, while Myrto Alikaki presents the new, metropolitan Athens which has emerged in the last two decades. While all of Greek cinema’s «schools» are represented in the film, special attention was given to achieving a realistic approach to Athenian reality. Fortunately, however, there is room for plenty of directorial vision: Alongside Grigoriou, Georgiadis, Tzavellas, Cacoyannis, Koundouros, and Tatasopoulos are Dalianidis and Sakellarios, without discarding representatives of the New Greek Cinema movement. Five sections The film is divided into five main sections, including the introduction, which traces the city’s identity. There are the «Childhood Years,» from 1944 to the dawn of the 1960s, the «fiery adolescence» during the 1960s and 1970s, «adulthood» featuring the city’s new face, ending with the «post-city» version of contemporary Athens. The film is available in DVD form and is on sale at the Benaki Museum.
