Quiet Figures in an Arid Landscape – Young Aphrodites

Realism in cinema seems to me today both boring and insufficient.
Nikos Koundouros¹

“This picture has won awards at both Berlin and Salonika for best director and best film, but ordinary viewers may wonder why” was the verdict of London’s Kinematograph Weekly² when reviewing Mikres Afrodites (Young Aphrodites, 1963), concluding that the only “points of appeal” are “Festival awards, sex and title.”  A few years earlier, after insisting that the film is a collection of erotic shots, Cahiers du Cinéma concluded that “the (Berlin) jury awarded a prize to justify some of its desires.”³ There wasn’t much enthusiasm on the other side of the Atlantic either: The New York Times, for instance, thought the film “has no more vitality and excitement than a layout of stills in a photography magazine.”⁴ And the examples can continue. Why did this seminal film seem to provoke the ire, incomprehension and derision of so many critics, from varying ideological and aesthetic positions?

Much of the resistance to it was probably due to its refusal of conventions that seemed to dominate the representation of the ancient Greek world on film (and continue to do so even today). On the one hand, the peplum, or sword-and-sandal genre – typified by Le fatiche di Ercole  (Hercules, Pietro Francisci, 1958) and its sequels – was offering the viewers grand spectacle, heroes, battles, exoticism and popular reinterpretations (one can argue misinterpretations) of myths and ancient tales. On the other hand, the elevated genre of Greek tragedy on screen – such as Antigone (Giorgos Tzavellas, 1961) or Electra (Michael Cacoyannis, 1962) – was offering higher art, with the lines of the Greek tragic poets proving their relevance millennia later and often used to reflect on contemporary situations and mores.

In contrast, Young Aphrodites is populated by shepherds and peasants dressed in rags in an austere, arid landscape. The dialogue is sparse and the action minimal. This refusal to follow conventions and insistence on challenging viewer expectations is a constant in Nikos Koundouros’ filmography, as Vrasidas Karalis observes: “From his first to his last film, Koundouros articulated, elaborated and renegotiated a visual language that provoked and challenged popular codes of representation and their ideological underpinnings.”⁵ Set in 200 BC, the film draws loosely on material from the Idylls of Theocritus and Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. However, the differences from the literary material are substantial. We are far from the idyllic landscape of the Classical Greek narrative, which “had mountains abounding in game, plains fertile in wheat, gentle slopes with vineyards, pastures with flocks, and a long stretch of shore where the sea broke on the softest of sand”.⁶ The opening sequence shows a group of shepherds driving their flocks through dust and parched land, where fountains are dry and water has become a precious commodity. It is once they find water that the action – sparse as it may be – seems to begin.

The tired men have arrived in the vicinity of a village populated by women, whom they first see as mirages. Only later do we find out that their husbands are fishermen who are at sea as it is the fishing season before the rains come. There is a segregation between sexes, which the women indicate not through words but through signs and by erecting a symbolic wooden barrier, signalling that the men should not cross the river and trespass on their territory. Only two of them – one a young and sensual woman, the other an androgynous teenage girl – will ever venture into the men’s territory. The film follows their parallel but substantially different erotic dalliances with the men who arouse their curiosity – one a womanising hedonist, the other a naïve young boy. 

There is something elemental and powerful in the courtship rituals: the boy is offered clear, clean drinking water by the girl, who later informs him that men have to prove their love by lighting a fire for their beloved. While water and fire are the elements shared by the two sexes, the others are more exclusive. Air is the element of birds and dreams of flight, inhabited mostly by women. Birds are also part of the mating ritual: a living bird is offered by the older man to his beloved; a dead bird is the offering of the younger one. Earth is predominantly the element of men, who seem to care more for their animals than for other humans. The girl even says: “You only care for the beasts with four legs.” The link between men and earth is underlined by an insistence on images of legs and feet – walking, dancing, resting. Ironically the head herdsman walks on crutches, somehow inhabiting a different space from the others.

The screen universe is one that I would call “mythical realism”. All these characters move in a world that is at once familiar and foreign, realistic and fabulous, immediately recognisable and almost sensorial while also mythical and abstract. They are figures moving in a landscape of formal beauty, often reduced to the bare minimum, both materially and spiritually. They try to negotiate a way of living, of finding their place in the natural and human landscape without destroying the order of things. Their hesitations, their insecurities are maybe due to the fact that as outsiders they would like to find a place where they belong. The young boy wants to stay behind with the girl, while the young woman decides after some deliberations to leave, to go away with the man whose advances she has accepted. The choice seems to be between a sedentary or a nomadic life, neither of which is presented as being preferable to the other. 

The photography, in sumptuous black and white, discovers for us a world of rugged beauty, rocks, waves, sand, dust, scant vegetation in which it is easy to get lost and difficult to get comfortable. The mountains nearby are presented as cold, dangerous and swarming with wolves; sitting and even making love take place on arid ground or cold stones. In this world of few possibilities, few words are needed. As Koundouros himself put it: “This is a film about ideological nothingness… and its narrative is the narrative of silent films.”⁷

Mikres Afrodites/ Young Aphrodites (1963 Greece 88 min)

Prod: Daniel Bourla, Nikos Koundouros, Giorgos Zervos Dir: Nikos Koundouros Scr: Kostas Sfikas, Vassilis Vassilikos based on Idylls of Theocritus and Daphnis and Chloe by Longus Phot: Giovanni Varriano Ed: Giorgos Tsaoulis Mus: Giannis Markopoulos Prod Des: Nikos Koundouros

Cast: Eleni Prokopiou, Takis Emmanuel, Kleopatra Rota, Vangelis Ioannidis, Zannino

Endnotes