From Stella to Iphigenia: the woman-centered films of Michael Cacoyannis.

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From Stella to Iphigenia: the woman-centered films of Michael Cacoyannis.

The most prolific period in Greek cinema got into high gear in the 1950s and managed to produce more than thirteen hundred films before collapsing in the 1970s. Although comedies, musicals, and melodramas comprised the bulk of the cinema produced by an industry modeled on the Hollywood studio system, a handful of ambitious directors were able to use its facilities and personnel to make world-class films. The most successful was Michael Cacoyannis, who adapted multilayered texts from ancient and contemporary Greek writers in formats that blended the conventions of Greek melodrama with those of Greek tragedy. What most distinguished his work, however, was his adept direction of women and his candid exploration of where women stand in Greek society.

The film milieu in which Cacoyannis worked had begun to form in 1943 when Filopimin Finos used facilities in Athens to produce The Voice of the Heart, the first Greek film since the onset of World War II. The film, a tearjerker about hidden identities and snobbish Greek elites, drew a spectacular hundred thousand admissions, a de facto assertion of cultural resistance by Greeks who had virtually boycotted German and Italian films screened by the Occupation forces. The Voice of the Heart was the first produ...

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