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Stavros Niarchos Lecture

Hellenic Studies in New York City Series

December 1st, 2009

A Time of Hope and Stagnation: Greece in the Late 1980s

Part of the series: Modernizing: Political, Social, and Cultural Change in Greece after 1974. A speaker series based on the films of Nicos Perakis. Following its transition to democracy in 1974, Greece entered a process of rapid and uneven change that has transformed society, politics, and culture. The Hellenic Studies Program proposes a reappraisal of the last four decades with a series of talks on post-1974 Greece, which address the turning points and formative transitions of the country with an eye on the cultural representations of the specific periods. The springboard for each talk will be a film by director Nicos Perakis whose films address and record the wider transformation of Greek society. The lecture will be followed by film screening of "Living Dangerously," directed by Nicos Perakis

Speaker: Stathis Kalyvas, Yale University

November 13th, 2009

Politics & Ideology in post-1974 Greece

Speaker: Alexander Kitroeff, Haverford College

September 24th, 2009

The Inadvertent Subversion of Traditional Values by Their Self-Appointed Guardians

Speaker: George Mavrogoradatos, Constantine Karamanlis Professor of Hellenic and Southeastern European Studies, Tufts University

April 8th, 2009

Towards the Temenos: Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios

Conceivably the most demanding and intransigent of all twentieth-century film projects, Eniaios was a monumental re-editing of the nearly one hundred films that Gregory Markopoulos had made over the course of his five-decade career. Completed just before Markopoulos’ death in 1992, the film was divided into twenty-two cycles running for three to five hours each, with a total estimated projection time of nearly eighty hours. Even more remarkable than its length was its dependence on the particular characteristics of its screening environment, the “Temenos,” located in Lyssaraia, a small hilly area on the western side of the Peloponnese. By choosing the mythic birthplace of lyric poetry and the home to ancient houses of healing as the site for his Temenos, Markopoulos acknowledged that one of its functions was to isolate the viewer from the vagaries of ordinary time, allowing one to reconnect with the rhythms of the natural world. In form and scale, Eniaios could not be more ambitious, and its utopian aspirations are linked to both its radical reworking of film aesthetics and the unique harmonization of viewing space and image made possible at the Temenos. This special event will provide an extremely rare chance for members of the Yale community to see parts of this project alongside some of Markopoulos’ earlier films

Speaker: Richard Suchenski, GRD ‘11, Film Studies, Yale University

November 10th, 2008

Film Screening "Hidden in the Sand"

"Hidden in the Sand" chronicles the story of Famagusta, a city in the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus that was evacuated during the 1974 invasion. Since then, a large portion of Famagusta has been encircled by barbed wire and kept under strict surveillance by the Turkish military, which uses the territory as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Cyprus government. Over the last 34 years, Famagusta has become a deteriorating ghost city; its former inhabitants watch their houses decay from outside the barricades, waiting for the day when they can return. As both the maker and a participant, the filmmaker examines the fate of this "city in captivity" and her family's connection to it. Ultimately though, the film tackles the ugly effects of nationalism, militarism, and propaganda in the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities.

Speaker: Vasia Markides, Director/Cinematographer/Editor

April 15th, 2008

Film: Silicon Tears (To Klama Vgike apo ton Paradiso), by Papathanassiou and Reppas.

If you have not seen any Greek film in your life, have no worry. This film will cover it all. A parody of the most important genres of Greek cinema, the film is a post-modern tour-de-force that transports us to pristine Greek islands (Mykonos, of course!), to bucolic fields and hills, and to the patriotic battlefields of War World II. Filmed with the explicit intent to ridicule everything and everyone in the Greek film industry of the 1950s and 60s, the film is also a tender homage to everything we have come to hate and love about Greek movies. View film series.

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March 25th, 2008

Film: From the Edge of the City, by Constantine Giannaris

A powerful and provocative film about a group of outcast teenagers living in Menidi, a predominately Greek-Russian suburb on the periphery of Athens, and who prostitute themselves in search of an easy but costly gain. Filmed with a pseudo-documentary style--the actors gathered together by Giannaris had no prior acting experience—the film exposes the hard edges of post-Soviet migration and the complex, and often tragic, process of assimilation and its failures. View film series.

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March 4th, 2008

Film: Hostage, by Constantine Giannaris

One morning, a young man boards an intercity bus on its daily route to Thessaloniki in northern Greece. He hijacks the bus at gunpoint and takes seven of the passengers hostage. In his left hand he holds a grenade. He turns out to be a 25-year-old Albanian immigrant by the name of Elion Senia. His central demands include a ransom of 50 million Greek drachmas and safe passage back to his homeland. The hijacking is transmitted live on national television. For the next twenty hours, a wild and at times bleakly comic chase ensues through northern Greece, with the hijacked bus at the head of a convoy of police cars, television crews, desperate relatives, and bystanders... all the while heading towards the Albanian border... View film series.

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February 28th, 2008

Film: Phaedra

Inspired by Euripides' tragedy Hippolytus and set in modern times, this allegorical tale centers on the love triangle between a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping magnate, his lonely second wife, and his first-born son. Jules Dassin has updated the tale to modern times, finding apt counterparts for ancient royalty in the world of wealthy shipping tycoons, and giving the proceedings a contemporary feel that doesn't negate the tragic aspects of the story. Melina Mercouri exudes sensuality and bring a spontaneous complexity to the role that is refreshing. Anthony Perkins is appropriately tortured; his neurotic quality is expected, of course, but there's an intensity to it here that is beautiful, and his mad scene is nothing short of exceptional. View film series.

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February 19th, 2008

Film: Loafing and Camouflage, by Nikos Perakis

This cult film about group of soldiers, assigned to the Greek armed forces television station, is a hilarious comedy about the ingenious and wily machinations that individual characters resort to as they weather the dire straits of political oppression during their compulsory military service before and immediately after the Greek junta of 1967. Though their responsibilities require them to produce mostly propaganda films and newsreels, the soldiers have more creative ambitions so they ‘borrow’ the station’s cameras to produce a…porno movie, a cinematic genre which was, not so coincidentally, rather flourishing in the decade prior to the film’s own making in 1984. View film series.

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February 18th, 2008

Reception & Film Screening of "The Journey: The Greek American Dream"

Reception for the program and film screening of "The Journey: The Greek American Dream." View poster.

Speaker: Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and President Richard Levin, Yale Univeristy

February 5th, 2008

Touch of Spice

The historical conflicts between Greece and Turkey and the lives of those caught in between are explored in Tassos Boulmetis' debut feature, the autobiographical drama A Touch of Spice. A box-office smash in Greece, the film won the Audience Award at the 2003 Thessaloniki Film Festival, and had its U.S. premiere in competition at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival.

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January 24th, 2008

Stella

Screening of Michael Cacoyiannis's film starring Melina Mercouri

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November 27th, 2007

Medea

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Maria Callas. A film showing to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the great diva. FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC