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„Little England“ by Pantelis Voulgaris *
with Pinelopi Tsilika, Sofia Kokkali, Aneza Papadopoulou among others acting in the film leaving from beginning to the end a strong sense perception.
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Bewahre das Wetter zählt nicht alleine da gibt es Schiffe zäh wie Winde jagen sie vom Indischen Ozean zurück ins Mittelmeer nach Andros wo die Felsen das Wasser ständig kämen - auf und ab der Wellengang, manchmal aufbauend hohe Mauern die mit Wucht umkippen so bald das Ufer erreicht wurde und danach wieder diese seltsame, weil trügerische Stille enthalten im Schauen aufs Meer. HF 30.1.2016 |
Beware the weather alone does not count there are ships as tough as the winds which chase them from the Indian Ocean back into the Mediterranean Sea to Andros there where the rocks comb steadily the waves - up and down the movement of the waves at times becoming huge wall if only captize with a crash once they reach the shores and after that once again this strange, equally treacherous silence entailed when looking out to the sea. |
Orsa as a twenty year old woman falls in love with a young sailor named Spyros, but her mother does not approve since he is not wealthy. There is a scene in which the father asks for the hand of her daughter on behalf of Spyros, but she declines. Instead she forces her daughter to marry someone else. Spyros hears the news while on a ship already dreaming to marry her when back and he has become capitan of a ship. He feels betrayed by her having married another man in his absence. When he returns to the island, the marries Orsa's sister Moscha.
Most of the plight of the women on Andros is anyhow connected to the fact that the men are gone most of the time since they are at sea.
Repeatedly are shown images of waves crushing against the shores of Andros. These are powerful images and prove to be a good entry into the film for the sea plays an own, mainly tragic role. Many men from Andros perish in these deep waters.
The film attempts to reconstruct life on the island of Andros mainly out of the perspective of the women. In this case tragedy develops out of a powerful, equally bitter mother who only seeks apparently for her daughter and through her daughter to further her grab on property and money.
The tragic unfolds once the daughter has married the man she does not love.
Love is named repeatedly as pathos, in German 'Leidenschaft' which was the translation in the under title while the film was in Greek. Leidenschaft in German means also the willingness to suffer a pain out of a love which cannot be fulfilled under the given circumstances.
The tragic unfolds, as said before, when the somewhat younger sister marries later on Spyros and the two live just above her room in the same house. The wooden floor allows all the sounds of making love come down to her. She is driven to the edge of insanity since the contradiction between closeness and yet not really living her love intensifies by the day. Her state of mind can recall Bunel's „obscurity of desire“. The woman is so close and yet her true love is as far away as America. She never dared to step outside the norms imposed upon women on the island, while her younger sister differs insofar as she is far more a rascal.
Anyhow, Orsa ends up being a woman trapped by her sadness although she has three children. The viewer learns later in the film that one of the children might be due to a secret love with Spyros. He too has not forgotten her. When he congratulates his brother in law for the third child, he shows what compassion he has still for her.
Spyros becomes the key figure. He is finally captain, Second World War breaks out, and he has to transport in his ship 'Little England' most dangerous materials. Danger stem from German submarines whose torpedoes have already taken down twenty ships coming from Andros.
He meets as well that fate but before his ship 'Little England' sinks, he instructs his men to take to the rescue boats while he stays behind, on board of the ship.
When the news of his death reaches the two sisters back home, different reactions set in. The main protagonist keeps no longer back her pain. She shouts at the news of his death 'my love'. Then she explodes and smashes all china and glasses within reach. What she had kept back so long, she no longer hides. She cannot suppress her grief about her big love.
What becomes evident to all is that a tragedy is about to unfold. She neglects everything including her three children. She refuses to eat and to talk with her husband. Her husband decides to leave for America for nothing can be done. Likewise the doctors attest no medicine can help, if the patient does not cooperate.
In the final sequence, it is a matter of sorting out between the two sisters who Spyros did love really?
She dies. Out of her hand drops a rusty spoon which Spyros had found during his early courting time in the sea and which he gave to her as if a rose.
The film is made in slow motion. It is in that sense powerful and strong but perhaps too long. It gives an insight what life on Andros was like during the thirties and throughout the years of WWII. The civil war is not mentioned but which raged in Greece 1945-48. As such it fulfils as well the idea of the rich families on the island of Andros due to men who became captains and who earned as a result a lot of money.
In other words, the film 'Little England' seems to reflect a strong wish by Pantelis Voulgaris to show not only life on Andros, but what tragedy is entailed in Greek life if a true love is not lived. Most telling is one line by the mother that it is better to marry not your love but a stranger since he will be gone on a ship anyhow, and most likely take another woman in another harbour, but when he does it this will not hurt as much. Her wisdom stems from own experience. Her own husband left her alone with the two daughters and when he finally returns to see how the two sisters have ended up, he asks her what sort of woman is she to intervene in the love life especially of the older daughter. And the younger one who married Spyros is equally furious for not having been told that Spyros had asked for the hand of her sister before he proposed to her. Tragedy unfolds in what destroys life. It was interesting to observe how the mother gets angry at her husband. She repeats his question, what sort of woman she was, and then as if entering a liturgy of numerous prayers, she tells him how she had wanted to secure a life for her daughters by making sure through marriage they would be rich enough so as to be able to survive within the norms set by the rich families on Andros.
The film is based on a novel. Here I would wonder what Socrates Kabouropoulos would say about this film? Does it entail a true representation of what had been written? Always films based on novels require not merely a translation from text into vivid images, but to overcome a risk to reduce the complexity of images contained in a novel to a visual narrative bordering on use of not words, but solely images. In any case, the film did not allow that the shortcomings of the story, if at all existing, could be detected. Rather it was a beautifully told tragedy bringing together life and death in what ends up being a wasted life. That sadness remains as a taste once one leaves the film and which weighs down heavily on mind and shoulders as one goes home.
Adorno said when reconstructing the past, what happened should be told as it was and any beautification to make things look better than what was really the case, should be avoided. Only then the reader or viewer will have a chance not to repeat the same mistake i.e. really marry the person you love even if the parents do not approve. Still, the motto of the film is quite clear: a love without money would be an invitation for disaster. Caught in between it depends on character what each respective woman or man choses to do. Added in the film is the ethical code of faithfulness. After all the love between Spyros and the older sister did start to blossom. He had promised to return from being at sea as capitain so that her mother would not have any objections. His father had brought up this prospect since he knew his son would make it. The mother was not convinced because she appraised the situation more or less as to what exists here and now.
The prototypes of all actors put things into a certain frame. Stepping back from the film, it can be seen a certain model to narrate the story was used. The actors were not altogether comfortable in their roles. It seems that they stood too much outside the normally lived reality with all its complexity and, therefore, the film sought to drive something back after having extracted this story about a tragic love.
At one point when the women were all alone at home and tried to entertain themselves by playing songs on the piance, but allowing themselves as well to smoke and to drink, the younger sister imitates a BBC broadcast of the latest news. She names the ships which were sunk by the Germans. But when she mentions the fact that 1 500 000 German soldiers were killed in Russia and so many others taken prisoner, she breaks out in a wild celebration over what fate has come over the Germans.
War in retrospect seems still to divide the winners and losers so that they do not really talk to one another. It reminds of what Michel Foucault said about us prepared to talk only then with the other once we have no longer a victory necessary. Till that moment comes, there will be still a desire for revenge or something else being expressed, namely not compassion for what the other suffers but what is called in German 'Schadenfreude': joy when the other suffers damages.
Here then a crucial question becomes critical in the context of the Hellas Film Festival aiming to initiate a dialogue between Germans and Greeks. For how the various damages inflicted over time on both sides are answered, it will influence in future relationships between Greece and Germany. While it is understandable if one has been occupied in a most brutal way by German troops to be elated when these 'bastards' get back much of the same, still, if this ingrained pain in the Greek soul fixes relationships to Germans in such a way, you can wonder when sitting in the audience and watching the film in January 2016, if this expression of joy by the younger sister could have been told differently so as to make possible redemption?
I leave it at these first impressions. Certainly this mix of a bad introduction / opening and a film clearly not only powerful but heavy made me feel the attempt to portray a national characteristic is bound to fail, and not only fail, but miss badly the levelling with a truth which can be lived. Perhaps most telling for what the film touches upon more or less on the side is what entails the many complex reasons for leaving Greece to become a part of the diaspora.
In the film, the husband of Orsa could no longer stay with a woman who mourns because her true love has been lost to the sea. When he asks his son whether or not he will come along, the son asks in turn if mother will come along and once the father says no, she will not, the son decides that he too shall become a sailor and go to the sea. The fate of men and women of Andros is going to be repeated.
Herrmann Broch has written about those romantic souls which find no footing on land but which are equally unhappy when at sea. When they pass coastlines, they wonder what life takes place along the shore line? It is a daily life. They imagine it is a life allowing you to experience how your own children are growing up. That differs from a life in which the women have to do everything alone while the men are gone and not only that, the men end up often to have different loves in other ports. The old Penelope theme of faithfulness reappears at the end of the film 'Little England' when the women question the value of staying back home, always faithful to the man gone off to the sea, and yet be abandoned in reality in a double sense?
Hatto Fischer
Berlin 21.1.2016
* Pantelis Voulgaris
http://www.hellasfilmbox.de/portfolio-item/little-england-by-pantelis-voulgaris/
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geboren 1940 in Athen, ist neben Theo Angelopoulos der bekannteste Vertreter des neuen griechischen Kinos. Er studierte an der Athener Filmhochschule. Danach führte er Regie bei Theaterstücken und Fernsehspielen. 1965 entstand „O kleftis“, sein erster Kurzfilm, 1967 der zweite. 1972 Spielfilmdebüt mit „Ein Bräutigam für Anna“, ein Film, der mehrfach prämiert wurde (z.B. Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival). Während der Zeit der griechischen Militärdiktatur war Pantelis Voulgaris im Jahr 1973 für sechs Monate im Exil. Seine Filme wurden auf vielen Filmfestivals gezeigt. Sie erhielten zahlreiche Auszeichnungen, so z.B. „Happy Day“ (1977), „Eleftherios Venizelos: 1910-1927“ (1980), „Petrina Chronia – Steinerne Jahre“ (1985), „Das Trikot mit der 9“ (1988), „Isiches meres tou Avgoustou – Ruhige Tage im August“ (1992), „Akropol“ (1996). „Ola ine Dromos – Ein langer Weg“ (1998). Pantelis Voulgaris realisierte außerdem zahlreiche Dokumentarfilme für das griechische Fernsehen.
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Comment by Christine Gouzelis
Hong Kong 28.1.2016
Berlin 28.1.2016
Dear Christine,
The scene you remember so vividly, that is truly an outstanding moment.
I recall what students did in Paris when examining Picasso's Guernica: how he managed to express something so intimate that we hardly ever witness it? That intimate pain came out completely once Orsa was transformed by the news of the death of her great love, Spyros. She underwent tremenous changes physically, emotionally and mentally. You describe it best by her wishing to sacrifice herself instead of Spyros and since that is impossible, she decided then to no longer live.
Hatto
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