Six Athanitis Films

In a few days is the premiere of the last film by Dimitri Athanitis, Three Days Happiness. Athanitis’s cinematographic work, his five feature films, can be distinguished in two periods of his evolution. The first one, his first two films, Addio Berlin (1994) and No Sympathy for the Devil (1997), are black and white, to some degree expressionistic, hard and austere films. From a narrative point of view, they are simple stories recounting a unique story that develops progressing towards the end.

With An Athens Summer Night’s Dream (1999) he passes into a fiction with many characters but with a unity of space and action: the film revolves around the getting on stage of the homonymous Shakespeare's play. In the second period of his work, in the films 2000 + 1 Shots (2000), Planet Athens (2005) and Three Days Happiness (2012), fiction is successfully split into parallel narrations that follow the paths of different characters.

In this second, distinct period of his filmography, narration is multifaced (and in third person) and follows the multiple, on the first sight parallel (in fact converging) tracks and stories of the various characters of fiction, who somewhere, usually towards the end , meet. Most of Athanitis’s films last around 80 minutes. They are short as if a bigger length could burden these films, characterized by visual density and, in the second period of his work, by narrative complexity.

Athanitis is a modernist director, an avant garde stylist. His films are generally complex, multi-faceted and, at the same time, very elliptical, quite abstract, with a trend to  minimalism. These qualities make them inaccessible to the medium, unaffected by these forms, viewer. It is a cinema peculiar, original, demanding; completely different and independent (small productions, shot on 16mm film or with a digital camera), with aesthetic, narrative and directorial standards, which - due to it’s original direction - is not transformed into an accessible commercial cinema of common interest. Because, however, our cinematographic and other worlds are to a large extent common, I have found several elements that interest me in his cinema ...


Three Days Happiness
In the director's previous film, Planet Athens (The City of Wonders), which unfolds during the Olympic Games, there is some optimism and a positive look. In 2011, the year of  "Three Days of Happiness," a somewhat ironic title, the period of progress and growth has come to an end and the era of crisis, of social decay and decadence has cometogether with a sudden loss of innocence. Three Days of Happiness follows three different stories of three young women in search of happiness and a way out of their personal crisis.

The film and the characters try to shape what they are looking for, try to give shape to  happiness, as something fluid that escapes or does not exist. Perhaps what we watch in the film is less happiness and more misery, since unhappiness and pain stamp the images we see...

The narrative structure that follows is the following: in all three stories, in the three lives, some decisive incidents, namely "primary functions", act as a catalyst in the evolution of each one's course. More specifically, the life of student Vera is disturbed when her mother commits suicide. The result is that the family is totally dissolute, as Vera abandons her  unfaithful and blameful father, who has an affair with the prostitute Irena. In the second, crucial story - because she stretches out and meets the other two - the young, trapped and blocked, Russian Irena decides to stop selling herself and leave to Canada with her boyfriend, a decision that leads to the punishment of the pimps. In the third story, Anna is going to get married, but the sudden infidelity of her beloved, tomorrow's groom in the bachelor party with the "bought" Irena shakes her and makes her falter...
 
The connecting link, the common and nodal face in these three stories is the Russian prostitute. The editing of the three stories is mostly parallel, but sometimes it returns to previous characters, the stories cross each other and so do some characters. Three Days  Happiness speaks about sorrow, alienation, violence, exploitation and injustice (especially against the woman), despair, weeping, difficulty of communication, carnal sex and love, the need to move forward and to forgive ...

At the end of the fiction, after several losses, catastrophes and deaths (the mother commits suicide, the daughter leaves the irresponsible father, the Russian gangsters kill Irena’s lover and hit her girlfriend), two new, promising erotic relations-families flourish, the one of the bookshop girl with the prostitute, and the other between the future bride with her beloved.

There is a special interest in the selection and filming of highways, air and pedestrian bridges, trains, buses and trucks, that is, images of industrial, poor areas. Their dynamic use in the visually powerful images, betrays the architectural studies of Athanitis
 
Planet Athens (The City of Wonders)
We continue from the newest to his oldest first films. The immediate precedent is, therefore, Planet Athens (the City of Wonders), which takes place during the Olympic Games in Athens in August 2004. Athanitis also adopts here, with narrative craftsmanship, the multifaceted, parallel narration of many stories and of many characters, converging and which take place at the same time as the Olympiad, affected by its events.
The main difference with his other films is his optimism and positive look, based mainly on love that supports many of the stories and gives them flesh and bone. It also differs from the other films because it is more human and, in a simple way, emotional.
 
Fiction exposes small or big dramas and love, emotional, melodramatic or harsh stories. Although it has been filmed with a simple digital camera, the film includes a rich, kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria based on the images of the great and essentially folk festival of the Olympiad and the various beautiful places and areas of Athens: Images of Athens to live, in turmoil; with visual intermedia from different facades and neighborhoods, archaeological, neoclassical or modern venues and street celebrations. An important difference between this film and the rest of Athanitis is the colorful, rich, spectacular picture and photo of it...

From time to time the characters, one after the other, talk to the cinematic lens about their desires and expectations of these festive days as if they were interviewing (possibly Melina's television reporter). The film follows the characters from the moment they arrive in the celebrating, illuminated city, by plane, train, ship or bus. These faces, which we watch in parallel editing alone or couples, sometimes meet. The two couples and the little girl finally form a pentagon whose peaks consist of the television journalist Melina (Matsangou) who presents people who came to see the Olympic Games; her lover Nikos (Hatzidakis) who does not want to have a baby; the lost in the Olympic stadium little girl with whom he meets by chance and he takes it under protection and which makes him change his mind about paternity; the mother of the lost girl (Didaskalou) who is worried and sad; and the newcomer Greek-Russian (V. Eleftheros) who returns after years proposing her to be again a couple.

Through an American journalist interviewed by Melina, we are linked to a third couple, the American daughter (E. Douma) and the Franco-Brasilian photographer, who meet each other and fall in love during the Olympics. Last couple, unconnected with the rest, that of the Japanese who came to marry in Athens, but the Greek fake agency cheated them and took their money for nothing. Olympic's Athens turns into a meeting place of different tribes, cultures and attitudes. Gradually, the complexity of the fiction and its subjects come into light...

The festive and vivid Olympic Athens is presented as a city living a renaissance, smoothly transforming into a city of miracles, where everything can happen. Mainly, a place where love can blossom. That it can also change people's view on paternity and the possibility of having a child (the five faces of the mentioned pentagon plus the photographer). Charactersthey watch a lot of what’s happening around, things they overlooked, as if they are coming out of the closed limits of their egos. They rediscover everything from the beginning, by themselves. Their stories restart when they start to feel, see and touch again. And that's why, they expect everything from life (especially women and young people)...

The film did not have the deserved reception, perhaps because of the "ideological-political" type of prejudice of many progressive Greeks against the Athens Olympics. These ideas may have measured more than some weaknesses in the film, as the somewhat fast  narration of some of the dramas, or the overly sweet interpretation of Duma.
 
The truth, however, is that the director saw the Olympics in an impartial, objective and critical way: Nikos refers to the psychosis that captured the Greeks as they wanted to put something strong into their lives that will awaken and exite them. The director describes demoralizingly the attitude of the champion who loses faith in his purpose, is occupied by fear and anxiety and resigns without taking part in the Games. The film tells us that the days are festive, but not for everyone. That life and it’s troubles together with all things we left aside,  they will not forget us after the games and will always be here ...

And yet, according to Elena (Douma), the rich, colorful images and photographs of people and their lives, as impressions of past lost moments, immortalize and outline the end of all things and are thus, connected with death...

2000 + 1 Shots
2000 + 1 moments (o.t.) is his first very remarkable film of multi-faceted, parallel narration of many mini-histories. It takes place on Christmas and the New Year of 2000, just before an important day, the change of millennium. The film follows the course of eight people in the Millennium Days. The narrative also follows the development of these paths, which sometimes intersect, and especially violently, especially towards the end, at exact moment  of the change of the century: Then the unemployed, married man, kills, on order and for money, the illegal couple of the married, extorted businessman and his pregnant mistress.

And this film of Athanitis revolves around the issues of loneliness and human alienation, especially of couples. The cool, bluish images (here the photo is more functional than the one-color blue monochromus of Three Days of Happiness) give a very good sense of frozen loneliness. Also, the views of Athens as a cold city that is prepared - with some distancing - for Millennium, avenues, cars, lights, Christmas trees, etc., are very expressive. Generally, the shots are expressive and atmospheric. The decoupage and the direction, are very elliptical. Nothing is over-emphasized or dramatized, everything is rendered without much information and detail, with few words, with pictures of austere and sparse.

Sometimes the targeting of the elipse is very effective, precise and discreet, such as when the elderly resident of a block of flats, in the New Year's Eve, hits the door of a student who stayed on his own also, to work on his diploma thesis, wishing him a happy new year  and telling him that how happy he is as there is at least someone else in the deserted apartment building... Or when, for a little bit of Christmas joy, he brings home a funny, lillipuit Christmas tree, which after a search he places on television and that is his only  company at his lonely moments.
 
The motives of loneliness, despair, and alienation penetrate all of the stories and characters of the film: the elderly and the student of the block of flats, and the deceased wife whom the student observes in the opposite house; the couple of the working wife and the chagrined unemployed husband who finally becomes a murderer for the money; the  homeless Albanian kid who, without parents, wanders in Athens for the sole purpose of seeing the celebration of fireworks in Lycabettus. The only slightly hopeful and warm relationship is that of the illegal couple who are informed that they are expecting a child, but they are murdered by the unemployed who is executing a death contract...
 
Another expression of violence and unhappiness is the exploitation and misery experienced by the Albanian boy, whose image closes the film ambiguously, balancing between hope (the kid looks at the sky) and danger and death (then standing in the middle of the motorway, between the cars, with eyes closed)...
Because, as the TV news inform us once more in the film, to the ending, this time from Sarajevo, we have to live together in peace. But, as the woman in the picture wonders, along with the film, how can we feel optimistic about what we can not predict?

In various tv sets scatterd everywhere in houses and stores, the news form the whole planet appear reguralarly. Pictures of poverty, misery, rebellion, preparations of the Millennium celebration or conflicts, that give the tone to the film ...                  
 
Summer night's Dream
The Summer Night’s Dream (1999) describes the getting on stage of the Shakespeare's homonymous work by a youth group under the direction of the first time director Akis.
 
In the film, we have to do with many faces, but not with narrative, not with many stories of different people who eventually converge, like in the next Athanitis’s films. Here, all characters are part of the same story, the same play in a modern version and they all have common artistic and sentimental match. As love is the theme of the play, the director adapts and carry it into today Athens.
 
The centerpiece of both the theatrical and the actor's relationships, are love and the erotic feelings. The erotic desires and moods of the characters change, moving from one person to another. The cravings are exchanged, one loves the other who loves someone else, and then the desires and preferences are redefined. As Shakespeare says, love like a whack makes all mortals...

Are the heroes of the film really in loving or are they pretending to be, as they are actors? Do they, even in themselves, condemn that they love? Perplexity keeps growing to a climax but at the end all become cool again...
 
The film deals with the relationship between art and reality, life and art, or theater and life. The words and actions of the characters, who are actors, match the words of Shakespeare's work. The dialogues and thoughts of Shakespearean characters match to those of today’s people...

The film was based on improvisation. The actors kept their real names, they wear their clothes without makeup, play in their homes, put a piece of themselves in the roles and partly improvise. (Perhaps, Solomos, in the basic, central role of the director of the performance, did not have the required stardom). The script was written by Athanitis on the actors, and he continued to work on rehearsals and shooting, enriching it by the improvisations of the actors. It is a small production, with a small crew, camera in hand, without lights or decoration.
 
No Sympathy for the Devil
No Sympathy for the Devil(1997) is a modern, very erotic, dark version of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. This is a very remarkable, black-and-white film, gloomy, atmospheric full of eroticism and visual, cinematic poetry. Athanitis produced an original, modern creation, overcoming conventional fictional boundaries, a harsh cinematic, deadly  and dark. Being conscious at the limits of small and economical production, he chose an austere "tough" aesthetic line in his images with strong contrasts, loud, bright white and bright black in the image.

Threatening, mysterious and decayed industrial spaces as decor, naked, provocative bodies in a state of erotic madness , erotic enforcement or violence (from some dynastic men characters), or sexual demonstration (striptease or sex), it is strongly iconoclastic with abrupt dialogues, simple or poetic.
The ensemble consists of an odd, fetishistic, sexually charged, violent and magical universe within the boundaries of fantastic cinema, though it moves through the dirty, half-dead night city and its boundaries (as the industrial port landscape).
 
The surprisingly seductive and sensual Eurydice (Lena Kitsopoulou), wild and pure beauty, just released from prison, is embedded in the world of bars, stripes and drugs. She works in a fast food and moves between the underworld and the exploiters of sex and the female body...
Orpheus (Kazanas), boxer and cashier in a supermarket where he captures her to steal, he falls for her in love, passionately and fleshly. They make intense sex and live a (surreal) crazy love. When Eurydice disappears, he dives into her filthy, unethical (under)world to find  and save her from the dangers of fading and overdose (eventually she is dying of overdose and abuses).
 
Addio Berlin
His first feature, in 1994, is a typically independent low-budget film, minimalist, black-and-white with strong contrasts, and atmospheric, with a lot of vitriolic, self-undermined  humor, as its story unfolds in the field of cinema. It is also characterized by its minimalist coolness, as well as from a sense of frustration and despair impregnated by (self)sarcasm. We are dealing with a self-referencing, cinephile film that is self-inflicted.

Although a small production, the images are mundane, functional, artistically processed, and vary, that is, unfolding from the title’s Berlin to the regions of Athens. The hero of fiction, Alex, is a Greek director, who in Berlin has an insignificant career but a great dream, an important project and a script for which he spent three years of his life, waiting in vain to find a producer through his Greek-German agent. The yearned opportunity will be given in his hometown Athens, where he will be invited in an expensive hotel room.
 
Alex has a style, a funny face and a funny outfit, and is perfectly played by the actor P. Thanasoulis, fleeing, poetic and strange just as he has to be...
His course is erased from expectation, hope and disappointment and resignation, to denial, rejection, destruction and death. The refutation of the great cinematic dream is common with other characters, as the German actress wishing in vain, to take part in a great,  Hollywood production. Many characters of the film have big dreams for success and recognition, wanting to become stars in their field: Alex, the young waitress whom he chooses to play the heroine of his script, her father on her behalf, the German actress, even the producers he meets.

Alex’s journey is scattered by people of the cinema: An agent, producers (of whom the Greek reminds some of Max Roman), a notorious German actress who rejects his script, the young Greek woman who dreams of becoming a star, his old father a former cinema owner etc...
 
The film is, to some extent, a road movie also, as it wanders in several cold, dark, strange and half-empty spaces. It reminds a little of Jarmousch first films. Besides, among the two villains who watch Alex (the two directors - another cinematic reference - Athanitis and Nikos Triantaphyllidis), one of them looks like Jarmousch... They chase Alex wrongly  confusing him with a guy who owes money in the underworld and who looks like his double and alter ego. In the course of fiction, a lot of turns down and frustrations appear. So, in the end, after Alex's costume drama script has been rejected by the producer as expensive and old fashioned, they kill him, adding an additional painful note, a bitter taste of death failure, although the refreshing, vitriolic humor is everywhere.
 
The film has, among other things, a (German) expressionist dimension - like the director's next one- as he uses the intense contrasts of white / black and shadows, for example the shadow of the Greek producer who speaks behind a white curtain (which remarkably reminds a little Dr. Mabouze). In the background, there are often TV sets that play movies (even an old Greek musical) or video clips from the MTV, usually hip hop. All the above contribute to the creation of a strange, bizarre atmosphere...

As the director and his father, ex cinema owner say, in cinema life becomes a dream and everything is allowed ...
 
There is a special interest in the selection and filming of highways, air and pedestrian bridges, trains, buses and trucks, that is, images of industrial, poor areas. Their dynamic use in the visually powerful images, betrays the architectural studies of Athanitis
 

Three Days Happiness from Dimitri Athanitis on Vimeo.