“A voice that shouts”: Nikos Koundouros’ The Magic City

In 1953 in Athens, a group of friends – acquainted either through their past membership with leftist militant groups or their imprisonment together during the aftermath of the 1946-49 Greek Civil War – decided to make a film. The result, Magiki polis (The Magic City, 1954), is a true artistic act of political resistance, a major turning point in the aesthetic development of Greek cinema, and the debut of one of its most important voices, its 28-year old producer and director, Nikos Koundouros.

As a generally sidelined European national cinema, some background about Greece’s filmmaking history seems necessary. In the first half of the 20th century, the nation’s film production had struggled to define and establish itself amidst the consistent civil destabilisation of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the ’30s’ political unrest and ensuring Metaxas military regime, Nazi occupation during World War II, and the Civil War. While feature films were still produced around these interruptions, local films, like those of many other small nations, struggled against the popularity of imports; particularly from Hollywood, but also from larger European cinemas.

For most of its history Greece’s local cinematic product was, according to Vrasidas Karalis, “made for the immediate consumption of local audiences and with commercial success in mind… slapstick comedies, boulevard skits, dramas of passion, sentimental war movies…”.¹ Despite the proliferation of significant production companies after WWII, including the iconic Finos Film Studios, and a burgeoning subtlety and authenticity seen in the work of directors like Grigori Grigoriou and Stelion Tatasopoulos,² the industry was still “unorganised”.³ It also was suffocating under heavy taxation, including Queen Federica’s special tax on “public spectacles” intended to help build her school for war orphans.⁴ By most accounts, it was the work of both directors Koundouros and Michael Cocoyannis in the mid-50s that “brought Greek cinema to maturity”⁵ and defined an artistic language.

Typically, this development was caused by an outsider. Koundouros was the son of wealthy Cretian lawyer and politician Iosif Koundouros, Minister of Justice in the government of prominent Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. The young Koundouros rejected his father’s expectation that he’d succeed him in politics,⁶ and instead studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts. During WWII and Greece’s Nazi occupation, he joined the ranks of leftist resistance army EAM-ELAS, and subsequently fought in the internal Dekemvriana conflict after Germany’s exit, leading to his eventual imprisonment in the Makronisos island concentration camp.⁷

Despite being “tortured” and cursing off “the whole world”,⁸ Koudouros later reflected that he was “lucky – and I’m not saying this accidentally – to live in Makronisos for four years”.⁹ It was there that he “discovered the power of the human voice”¹⁰ and decided to pursue filmmaking. Most appealing to him seemed to be the form’s popularity and reach, as he later reflected that, after being released in 1953, he wanted “A voice that shouts… a voice that will be present, in the hoods, in the roads, in the houses. So I said, I’ll do cinema.”¹¹ Produced independently from the rest of the Greek film industry,¹² the film was financed privately with help from Koudouros’ close friend, composer Manos Hatzidakis,¹³ who also scored the film, and was himself a former EAM member. The script was written by another close friend, avant-garde playwright Margarita Lymberaki, and Koudouros’ fellow Makronisos inmate Thanasis Vengos plays one of the main roles,¹⁴ along with being credited for props. The making of the film itself was an act of triumph for this co-op of leftists, who had been heavily persecuted and disenfranchised by the Greek state in the years prior.

Fittingly their subject was the country’s overlooked urban working class. The Magic City takes place in the real-life shanty houses of Dourgouti, within the Neos Kosmos area. Originally settled by Armenian immigrants in the 1920s, and then victims of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, it eventually homed many internal migrants from rural Greece, developing into a “full blown labyrinth of slums”. ¹⁵

Despite Koundouros’ lack of formal cinematic training, several moments of The Magic City impressively construct cinematic space and themes through gestures of movement and montage. Early in the film, the protagonist Kosmos (Giorgos Foundas) is introduced when he opens a window, knocking a cat into a bucket, causing a flock of birds to fly onto the roof of a nearby shanty house; communicating in only a few seconds the desolation and density of the characters’ living conditions. Slightly earlier, a pan away from Athens’ Acropolis constructs the marginalisation of the characters’ world, while also commenting on the “ruinous” nature of post-war Athens as a whole.

The film’s key influences will be immediately recognisable to modern-day cinephiles. The Soviet Union’s socialist realist films were a popular import in Greece, before their banning by the right-wing government during the Civil War. These included Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) and Mark Donskoy’s Raduga (Rainbow, 1944), with an advertisement for the latter declaring “The enthusiastic embracing of the Soviet movies certifies…that Greek audience recognised in them what their psychological world longed for.”¹⁶ While Stalin offered no help to Greece’s Communist rebels, he likely would have approved both of how The Magic City extrapolates its web of social malaise from Kosmos’ simple material struggle to pay off his truck, and the representation of solidarity in its conclusion. 

There is also a resemblance to film noir, particularly in the underworld plot and in moments of Kostas Theodoridis’ high contrast black-and-white cinematography, as it captures reflective puddles of rain in the slum’s muddy streets. While Mirella Georgiadou writes that Koundouros’ early films “reveal [his] obsession with the American B-picture,”¹⁷ Karalis finds that The Magic City’s underlying ideology separates Koudouros’ work, noting that the director avoids “excessive individualism leading to despair, which dominated American noir films,” and instead his film “culminates in a manifestation of empowering communitarian solidarity and mutual aid.”¹⁸

Greek filmmakers and audiences also found affinity with Italian neorealism, as these films “[portrayed] situations, events, feelings and behaviour very similar to those experienced by the Greek people during the German occupation and the liberation.”¹⁹ In particular, the Dourgouti slums echo those in Vittorio de Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), and the respective acts of resistance in each film’s climax have their own sense of unreality.

For de Sica, the disjuncture of his characters escaping their troubles with magic broomsticks is clearly deliberate. For Koundouros, it’s more problematic. Despite repeating shots of the community standing defiantly together in the face of the bureaucrat attempting to repossess Kosmos’ truck, other moments in the film do not give a sense of the characters’ class consciousness. For instance, Kosmo’s discussions around debt are directed at his own limitations for earning money, rather than towards any political figures or economic systems. Similarly, he and his friends seem basically naive towards the drug smuggling job the local gangsters have roped them into, exemplified when he asks a sailor at the hand-over “Are there drugs in there?”, and the old man replies “What did you expect? Lollipops?” Similarly, the film’s overarching structure and visual language is not constructed towards transcending viewers’ standard expectations of a protagonist-led plot. As a result, the finale falls short of feeling truly revolutionary.

Instead, the dual utopian acts of the slum’s residents chasing out the local gangsters, and then lending money to help pay off Kosmos’ truck, is presented as the right, decent thing to do. It’s a narrative leap that expects the viewer shares Koundouros’ optimism that the inherent good of people is enough to overcome systems of oppression. Regardless, his realistic depiction of modern Athens was enough for Greece to ban the film from officially representing the country at the Venice Film Festival,²⁰ beginning Koudouros’ career-long battles with censors. With The Magic City, the young director’s technique was still forming, but the ferocity of his anger at the inequality of post-war Greece was heard, and still reverberates. Loud and clear.

Magiki polis/The Magic City (1954 Greece 80 mins)

Prod: Nikos Koundouros Dir: Nikos Koundouros Scr: Margarita Lymberaki Ed: Giorgos Tsaoulis Phot: Kostas Theodoridis Mus: Manos Hatzidakis 

Cast: Giorgos Foundas, Margarita Papageorgiou, Stefanos Stratigos, Thanasis Vengos, Eva Brika

Endnotes