Nadia Fragkouli

The emergence of film brought forth a new form of narrative literacy based on the moving image. Added to a series of truly seismic changes that mark the early decades of the twentieth century, the birth of this new narrative form –that also became intertwined with the aesthetics of modernism– raised a number of challenges for literary narrative. This essay presents a brief reasoning for the importance of cinema in the approach of twentieth century literature, and centers on the methodological aspects of an intermedial/interarts approach that studies how and why certain literary texts evoke a filmic illusion. The analysis of two prose examples (Alexandros Kotzias’s Antipoiesis Arhis, 1979 and Maro Douka’s Ourania Mechaneke 1999) aims to show how filmic references can vary in their function as well as their form, and how the aforementioned variety is greatly determined by the historical moment of each intermedial encounter, in which social, cultural, aesthetic, literary and filmic tendencies come into play. This review of filmic references in actual novels published in the late twentieth century brings forth a methodological aspect on how we analyze and study the filmic illusion created by a literary text. Filmic references are found in literature throughout the twentieth century. It is only in the last two decades however that they become explicit, thus allowing the reader/critic to identify them as such through the presence of a marker – a marker as defined by Irina Rajewsky in her approach, entails one or more filmic refences that explicitly and clearly point to a certain medium / art form. The obvious lack of markers in most of the examples of “filmic” literature published by 1980, dictates a need for a different way to define filmic references that goes beyond an explicit mentioning of film or its elements. I thus suggest that the study of a literary text in light of to the trope of showing, as defined by Gerard Génette, can be a more reliable indicator of a literary narrative that engages film in its tropes.

Κορυφαίο έργο της μεταπολεμικής πεζογραφίας οι «Ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες» του Στρατή Τσίρκα, κορυφαία μορφή δασκάλου και συνοδοιπόρου ο ίδιος για τους μεταπολεμικούς και μεταπολιτευτικούς λογοτέχνες. Σύντομος φόρος τιμής στη ζωή και το έργο του Τσίρκα, ενός συγγραφέα που με τα πεζογραφήματά του, αλλά και με τον προσωπική του στάση, υπογράμμιζε διαρκώς το ηθικό ανάστημα του Ανθρώπου όταν καλείται να πορευτεί σε σκοτεινούς καιρούς.

The presence of cinema in Greek literary magazines in the second half of the twentieth century (1949-2009). Presentation of the research programThis paper describes the results of the research program  ‘The presence of cinema in Greek literary magazines in the second half of the twentieth century (1949-2009)’. This research project, funded by ESPA, resulted in the creation of a digital database that will become available online within the year 2021. This study presents the structure and content of the created data base, along with an indicative case study. The case study focuses on the theme cinemagoing as a part of everyday life, analysing text samples from a wide variety of genres found in the literary magazines of the second half of the twentieth century.

The years 1951-1961 mark the reception of Italian neorealist cinema in Greece with the production of films influenced by neorealism and the discussion of the nature of neorealism by Greek film critics. The novel Anthropi ke spitia [Of Houses and Men] by Adreas Fragkias, published in 1955, four years after the first viewing of De Sica’s Bicycle Thief in Greece, shows significant similarities to the themes and style of the Italian neorealist cinema. Discussing unemployment as a crucial problem of post-war Greek society Anthropi ke spitia presents the life in a poor urban neighbourhood in a series of seemingly random episodes that B. Klaras in his review of the book called ‘cinematic tableaux’. Most importantly, however, it seems that Fragkias’ novel explores the boundaries and the style of realism in post-war literature in a way that resonates the aesthetic principles of the Italian neorealistic films.

This paper explores how intermedial (in this case filmic) references relate to the overall aesthetics of a literary work, and highlight its reception of contemporary cultural trends. In this case, the late 1970s and early 1980s are seen as a transitional period during which modern greek fiction distances itself from the themes and tropes that prevailed during the postwar period. It becomes egotistic, playful, and rejoices the very act of narration, while experimenting with more or less extensive parodies. In this context, filmic references can be seen as an indicator of the aforementioned change, as they involve artistic films by young auteurs in the early 1970s, and popular Hollywood narratives in the early 1980s.

The 1980s marked a turning point in greek fiction writing. The young writers of the '80s distance themselves from the recent greek history and literary tradition, redefine their image as apolitical, away from the high literary standards of their predecessors. Their prose becomes funny, adventurous, and clearly evokes the urban atmosphere of the big western capitals. The plot and the characters in these books show a hyperbole that seems to derive from the Hollywood adventures and gangster films that were popular in Greece at the time. Hollywood fiction films of the 1980s and 1990s arose as a paradigm that offered greek prose the material to create self-referential parodical myths that seemingly glorify crime and easy money, while underscoring the inability to find the truth about the modern world, let alone narrate it.

The modern age presented literature with a series of challenges, not the least of which was the rise of a new narrative art, the art of cinema. This essay explores the relation of Modern Greek prose to the cinema during the first three decades of the twentieth century with examples from the works of Dimosthenis Voutyras, Petros Pikros and Giannis Mperatis. All three develop an explicit or implicit, certain or ambiguous relation to the cinema in their work. The examples cover the best part of the first three decades of the century and in their similarities and/or differences they show the interarts relation of the Modern Greek prose to the cinema in its first steps.

This paper aims to explore and describe the function of filmic writing in a literary text in the example of the novel Antipoiesis Arhes by Alexandros Kotzias. Despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there is no thorough study of the relation of Kotzias's prose to cinema, Kotzias was a writer with a thorough knowledge of the literary trends of his time and his work shows him to be a writer greatly preoccupied with the refinement of narrative techniques, while containing a variety of elements indicating the interarts dialogue of literature to the cinema. Antipoiesis Arhes is chosen as an example for the interarts dialogue, since it is built around the constant back and forth between the present / reality and the main character's memory / imagination, which is carried out through the literary exploration of the continuity editing technique.

Η πεζογραφία του εικοστού αιώνα δεν διαλέγεται απλώς αδιάλειπτα με τον κινηματογράφο. Από την επισκόπηση του φαινομένου στα επίπεδα της Ιστορίας, της ιστορίας του κινηματογράφου και της ιστορίας της λογοτεχνίας προκύπτουν σοβαρές ενδείξεις ότι η πεζογραφία στη διάρκεια του εικοστού αιώνα διαλέγεται κατά προνόμιο με τον κινηματογράφο, περισσότερο από ό,τι με οποιαδήποτε άλλη τέχνη της περιόδου.
Η δεσπόζουσα λειτουργία της αφηγηματικότητας στα δύο αυτά καλλιτεχνικά είδη, αλλά και οι παρόμοιες λειτουργίες του μυθιστορήματος και του κινηματογράφου σε κοινωνικό επίπεδο οι οποίες συχνά οδήγησαν στη μεταβίβαση λειτουργιών από τη μία τέχνη στην άλλη, εξασφαλίζουν έναν άρρηκτο δεσμό ανάμεσα στο μυθιστόρημα και τον κινηματογράφο μυθοπλασίας πρωτίστως, ο οποίος εντοπίζεται λιγότερο ή περισσότερο και στα άλλα λογοτεχνικά και κινηματογραφικά είδη. Η μελέτη της επαφής της πεζογραφίας με τον κινηματογράφο στη διάρκεια του εικοστού αιώνα φωτίζει γόνιμα την εξέλιξη των λογοτεχνικών μορφών αποκαλύπτοντας τεχνάσματα και πειραματισμούς που υιοθετεί η λογοτεχνία στον διάλογό της με την δική της ιστορία και με την εποχή της.
Ειδικότερα για τη νεοελληνική πεζογραφική παραγωγή η διακαλλιτεχνική της θεώρηση υπό το πρίσμα του διαλόγου της με τον διεθνή κινηματογράφο υπογραμμίζει τις αναλογίες ανάμεσα στο ελληνικό και το δυτικό λογοτεχνικό παράδειγμα και συμβάλλει στην ερμηνευτική τους προσέγγιση αποδυναμώνοντας σημαντικά το αφήγημα περί υστέρησης της ελληνικής πεζογραφίας.