On Nikos Koudouros’ 1922

When in 1978, Nikos Koundouros released his visual meditation on the events of 1922 in what Greeks call the Asia Minor catastrophe, the country was going through a profound historical transition. The 1967 dictatorship had collapsed several years earlier, Cyprus was invaded and divided by Turkey, the political system was trying to re-assert its authority and re-articulate its hegemony. The period between 1974 and 1984 was a time of immense fluidity and revision in the conceptual frameworks that defined identity, history and memory in the country. The new conservative government subsumed all social imaginary under one powerful slogan: Greece belongs to the West. The left responded that Greece belongs to Greeks. The political debate and social division on the issue lasted well into the new millennium, until the recent collapse and bankruptcy of 2012.

The period also marked the end of the so-called Old Commercial Cinema, a process completed by the death of its most important producer Filopimin Finos and the closure of the most important studio in the country. For almost eight years, most films were independent productions which either faced the hostility of the Greek state or remained marginalised within the new context of film production. The boldest director of the period, Theo Angelopoulos, gave a new direction to the question of funding his films by internationalising Greek cinema. For the first time after Michalis Cacoyannis’ Alexis Zorbas (Zorba the Greek, 1964), Greek cinema started becoming known outside of the country or its global diasporas. Angelopoulos’ O Thiasos (The Travelling Players, 1975) ignited a new perception of Greek cinema as mostly political, dealing with conflict between left and right, the consequences of German Occupation and the trauma of the Civil War (1947-49).

In a strange way, Nikos Koundouros was one of the most important representatives of the old cinema. His previous films, despite their spectacular commercial failure, were amongst the most important visual investigations into post-war Greek realities, when state persecution, social panic and collective fear had constructed a suffocating atmosphere of oppression and repression. In Magiki polis (The Magic City, 1954), O Drakos (The Ogre of Athens, 1956) and Mikres Afrodites (Young Aphrodites, 1963), Koundouros experimented with formal space and the aesthetics of dislocation.¹

In his first films, German expressionism, film noir techniques and the legacies of both Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Wells converge through an uneasy and somehow unsettling manipulation of human form. In order to visualise post-war oppression and anxiety, he re-imagined spatial representation through an ingenious interplay of shadow and light, reminiscent of Fitz Lang’s M (1931) and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949)² a radical departure from the visual regimes that dominated prevailing iconographies about social experience and individual psyche in Greek cinema. 

However, the films that followed showed a remarkable exploration of the sculptural qualities of human forms, which led to the gradual abandonment of the experimental and what I have termed “the oppositional aesthetics” of his early films.³ His Young Aphrodites stands as a superb articulation of his minimalistic aesthetics, with sparse dialogue and haunting chthonic music. With his next film To prosopo tis Medousas (Vortex or the face of Medusa, partially made in 1967 and released in 1977), his minimalism reconfigured narrative and recalibrated human emotion. Unfortunately, this film is not well known and Koundouros deals there explicitly with the intricate link between sexuality, violence and cruelty.

After these films, 1922 came as a big shock and unpleasant surprise for both the left and the right in the highly politicised climate of the period. Until then, the great story and foundational mythos of all New Greek Cinema were the events of December 1944 and the Civil War that followed. Even the great migration of the ’50s and ’60s hadn’t found its visual representation with the exception of a few popular melodramas. Koundouros’ film addressed the great and unrepresented trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe for the first time in a way that made both critics and audiences uneasy and uncomfortable.

The film is loosely based on the autobiographical novel of the events by the writer Ilias Venezis, Number 31328 (1924/1931), a record of profound lyrical beauty mixed with the savage horrors of war. As Koundouros said, “I threw out its lyricism and kept only the horror.”⁴ The events described in the book tell the story of a well-to-do Greek bourgeois family in Smyrna and what happened after the collapse of the Greek Campaign in Asia Minor. Turkish irregulars and Mustafa Kemal’s army wanted to eradicate the existence of the so-called “Smyrna of the Infidels” and expelled the Christian population that remained behind by sending them on long marches into the Anatolian inland. Many people died during the forced movement of populations until an agreement was reached between Greece and Turkey. The book starts with the victorious Greek army in Smyrna and ends with absolute catastrophe for the city’s Greek inhabitants. The film starts with ostentatious theatrical performances and ends with an inarticulate scream.

Despite their consequences, these events were completely erased from public discussion or the official history books. Although almost one third of contemporary Greeks are descendants of the refugees who were expelled from Asia Minor, the event itself was never allowed to be discussed in public along with the work of mourning required to find closure and catharsis.⁵ Koundouros’ 1922 addressed singlehandedly both the trauma and the official amnesia in a way that the caused considerable trouble for the conservative Greek government, which worked actively towards a rapprochement with Turkey. The film was effectively banned as its exclusive producer, The Greek Film Centre, withdrew from distribution, until 1982 when the new socialist government allowed its screening in selected venues.

Venezis’ book focuses on the predicament of three characters, all of them from his own family. The wife of a merchant, a teacher and 17-year-old boy, partly based on the experience of the writer himself. During the long marches and the forced labour camps deep in Anatolia, the wife goes mad, the teacher is murdered and only the young boy lives to tell the tale. Around them, other characters, Greek and Turk alike, offer a wide panorama on human tragedy, cruelty and despair. The representational codes of the film are intricate and subtle. The colour in the superb photography by Nikos Kavoukidis is almost monochromatic, muffled and close to ochre like the funeral dye of antiquity. Long shots and fast jump-cuts alternate while on many occasions the image is silent, with sparse dialogue and prolonged dead time. Koundouros wanted to avoid a Hollywood-like identification with characters: both colour and silence function as effective strategies to keep the viewer out of what happens on screen. Together with Angelopoulos’ Oi kynigoi (The Hunters, 1977), the film is one of the coldest and most detached films produced during the ’70s, an era when Bertolt Brecht’s techniques were heavily tested in cinematic representation.

In his attempt to avoid nationalistic feelings, Koundouros removed extra-diegetic elements like music. Almost all music is diegetic, heard by the people in the film. The sounds of nature, of machines and human movement dominate the aural landscape of the film. The acting of the main characters, played by Antigoni Amanatidou, Zaharias Rohas, Vasilis Langis, Vasilis Kolovias, Betty Valasi and Olia Lazaridou (to name just a few), is theatrical, stylised and self-reflexive. The actors try to understand the predicament of their character and present their reality of existential panic and emotional numbness. They also turn to the camera and talk directly to the audience in an attempt to offer a personal commentary as a meta-diegetic element to the narrative.

The unfolding of the film (following the script by Koundouros himself and Startis Karras) is slow and relentless. From the first scene, we understand that something is going wrong. The main characters do not know what is happening and, in disbelief, become prisoners of their personal demise. It is also interesting that Koundouros avoids the demonisation of the Turkish soldiers, presenting them as victims of unrepresented events in their own life with most  harboring a profound ressentiment against wealthy Greeks. The emotional conflicts remain underground and without visible manifestations throughout the film; they erupt suddenly and vanish without a trace. 

In the film’s second half, tragedy takes over. Death, torture and violence become dominant until the final scene. Sadistic violence is depicted not in a realistic manner but through the disfiguring of the human face as recorded by the camera: what they see is inscribed on each character’s face, leading to madness or dehumanisation. 

Furthermore, Koundouros proposed some interesting strategies to represent or indeed reconstruct actual historical events through cinematic images. Avoiding all forms of sensationalism and psychologism, he stripped his characters of all emotional reactions. Sometimes, he uses official documents in the dialogue as well as newspaper articles of the period. He emphasises the disconnect between two historical moments: the multicultural and multifaith Smyrna had to be destroyed for the new Turkish city to be built. In a sense the film is an essay on historical inevitability, with the Greeks being the romantics who want to maintain the past and the Turks being the catalysts for a violent modernisation.

The trauma of modernity in the process of establishing a homogenous nation-state is the main concern of this underestimated film. Someone’s dream is someone else’s nightmare. This was the unfortunate reality of changing borders and establishing nation states after World War I at a collective level. People were removed from their ancestral lands and became refugees as “the iron performed its duty and the dead remain dead forever,” as the French poem underlines in crucial moments of the film. The Turkish soldiers sing that they are buried alive in a grave while burying alive their defenseless captives. Koundouros stresses the irrationalism of war and the absurdity of thinking that there are winners and losers in any form of homicide. They are all brutalised in one way or another while the trauma in their personal psyche becomes a collective reality through memory and inter-generational transmission, like the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust or the Palestinian Nakba.

1922 is an underrated film which deserves to be seen multiple times in order to reveal the intricate strategies it employs for a de-romanticised representation of history. It stands as the polar opposite to the circular temporalities of Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players, but is in a strange way quite close to Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), exploring the fall of humanity into the chaos of its own actions. Some of Koundouros’ later films explore the same determinism of evil (Byron or Ballad for a Demon, 1991), but none reach the clarity and the power of 1922.

1922 (1978 Greece 135 mins)

Prod: Ross M Dinerstein Dir: Nikos Koundouros Scr: Stratis Karras and Nikos Koundouros, based on the novel by Ilias Venezis Ed: Merlin Eden, Panos Papakyriakopoulos Phot: Nikos Kavoukidis Prod Des: Page Buckner Set Dec: Mikes Karapiperis, Jacqueline Miller Cos Des: Claudia Da Ponte , Dionysis Fotopoulos Mus: Mike Patton

Cast: Antigoni Amanatidou, Zaharias Rohas, Vasilis Langis, Vasilis Kolovias, Betty Valasi, Olia Lazaridou

Endnotes