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‘Poverty, prostitution, filthy tavernas’: cinephilia and popular Greek film of the fifties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

N. Y. Potamitis
N. Y. Potamitis*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Abstract

The diametrically opposed critical and commercial reception of two Greek films from the early 1950s exposes the contradictions inherent in the project of national cinema formation articulated by Greece’s cinephile press. Critics such as Eleni Vlachou and Marios Ploritis sought to locate Greek film within the context of a realist–humanist European art cinema, and denigrated the commercial cinema for its over-reliance on foreign models and popular genres. This cinephile discourse reveals, however, keenly felt anxieties of cultural authority and status, anxieties manifest in the constant shifting between the twin semantic poles of cultural indigeneity and foreign cinematic influence.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , 2007 , pp. 213 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2007

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References

1 Μα Τίχνη, 1 June 1946.

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