Michael Cacoyannis—Zorba the Greek

Back in the days before Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the standard Hellenic reference point for American audiences, there was Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek. Filmed in black and white, set in a poor village in southern Crete, featuring a number of grim scenes and culminating in catastrophe, it would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the international film sensation of 1964. And yet, it took the world by storm, becoming both a critical and a commercial success—among other tributes, it was nominated for eleven Oscars, won three, and was even credited with helping the late-sixties tourist boom in Greece.

This is to a large extent a tribute to Anthony Quinn’s hyperkinetic turn as Zorba, a recklessly charismatic adventurer who moves through life so quickly that the disasters he creates can never quite catch up with him. As with the scene in the film where he emerges unscathed from a mine collapse, he has an astonishing ability to get out just in the nick of time, and while he certainly carries the scars of what he’s lived through, they haven’t so thickened his skin that he can’t feel the pulse of new experiences. He lives with such vitality that everyone around him—his cautious, bookish boss, the black-shrouded men and women of the village, even the flamboyant French prostitute—seem like shadows. Zorba is a force of nature, a hurricane of existence that we can’t help but be overwhelmed by, precisely because he resists our better judgments.

It’s a role that defined Quinn ever afterwards, and it defined “Greek” for several generations of movie-goers as well, though with a strong assist from the innumerable restaurants and diners that stuck the mnemonic “Zorba” in their names. A Google search turns up literally hundreds, and it’s no coincidence that Vardalos, in her own portrayal of what it means to be Greek, pays ironic homage by calling her family's restaurant “Dancing Zorba’s.” Though one has the impression that she’s never danced a day in her life, and certainly not there.

There’s another irony to Zorba’s success, though, which has to do with Cacoyannis himself. From his earliest films, Cacoyannis displayed a sensitivity to women’s position in a male-dominated society that would be rare in any director, but is simply astonishing in a male director of his generation. Zorba is, in fact, one of his few films to even feature a male protagonist. Of his fifteen feature-length works, over ten place women in the starring roles, including his three adaptations of Greek tragedies—Elektra, Iphigenia, and the powerhouse Trojan Woman, which actually stars four women: Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Pappas, and Geneviève Bujold. In the early Stella, Melina Mercouri plays a woman who would rather die than give up her freedom by marrying, even to the man she admittedly loves. It was made in 1955.

And then there’s Zorba, a movie so relentlessly preoccupied with its male characters that it could qualify as an early example of a seventies “buddy film.” In fact, it would be hard to come up with an apter description of Zorba's structure than the genre definition provided by The Journal of Popular Film and Television: Buddy films “replac[e] the traditional central romantic relationship between a man and a woman with a buddy relationship between two men. By making both protagonists men, the central issue of the films becomes the growth and development of their friendship. Women as potential love interests are thus either eliminated from the narrative ... or pushed into the background as side characters.”

And yet, with the women being portrayed by Irene Pappas and Lila Kedrova—who won an Oscar for her performance—one can hardly call them side characters. I would argue that Cacoyannis has done something extraordinary here—he’s made a buddy film that clearly honors the central place of the men’s friendship, and as well novelist Kazantzakis’s tribute to a life lived with courage and a refusal to bow down to the quotidian demands of bourgeois existence. At the same time, Cacoyannis also pays homage to the women who are systematically—albeit unintentionally—destroyed by the men's pursuit of their friendship.

Zorba is indeed admirable for the freedom he asserts as his natural right, but Cacoyannis can’t help but also notice what happens to the women who try to grasp even a small piece of that freedom. Watch Pappas’s face as she welcomes Alan Bates into her house—she knows what she is risking, and she risks it anyway. She is, in this one moment, perhaps more courageous than Zorba ever is.

Michael Cacoyannis—Attila 1974: The Rape of Cyprus

Journalism is, in the words of Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post, “the first, rough draft of history.”

This quote has several interesting implications—the first is that the journalist isn’t merely a transcriber of events or an information monger who gathers dry bits of fact and assembles them for a readership. He or she is already involved in the interpretation of events, in the making-sense-of-things that we usually imagine is only the historian’s job.

At the start of Michael Cacoyannis’s documentary about the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, the director seems to understand and acknowledge this by making known his own position. “I am Greek,” he announces, “and my name is Michael Cacoyannis.” There’s no pretense to objective journalism here—this is from the start an interpretive documentary.

The other implication of Graham’s quote is that, since journalism is only the “first, rough draft,” the journalist should be given some leeway if he or she gets a few things wrong.

What’s remarkable about Cacoyannis’s film, made at the exact, impassioned moment of the Turkish invasion of his homeland in 1974, is how much he gets right.

The invasion and division of Cyprus was not a simple event—it was a disaster that was provoked by some, carried out by others, and allowed to happen by still others . . . and the island’s continuing division is the responsibility of yet others still. There’s plenty of blame to be spread around, and Cacoyannis is committed to calling out all the guilty parties. It would be easy enough for him to point a finger simply at the Turkish invaders, but he doesn’t settle for that—the British, the Americans, the Greeks, and even many Cypriots come under fire as he teases out the interlocking causes of the invasion.

Of course, Cacoyannis isn’t a journalist, but a filmmaker who was already well into his mid-career when this film was made. He had lived abroad in Greece and England for years, but returned immediately to make this documentary when he heard of the invasion. Therefore, not being a journalist, he doesn’t just give us the facts, or even the facts and an interpretation. Instead, like the filmmaker that he is, he creates a documentary that is as rich in atmosphere as it is in information. He gives us a chance to experience for ourselves what it feels like to be in his country at that moment.

He does this by alternating between information and emotion, by sequencing interviews and factual narration with long—almost embarrassingly long, sometimes—shots of individuals as they tell their stories, cry in sorrow, scream in despair, or simply sit in resigned humiliation. These shots, actually, have no purpose within the narrative of the film—they convey no information, and the flavor they impart could be edited down by a professional documentarian to just a few minutes. But that’s not Cacoyannis’s point. These shots are not just a little spice in the thick stew of important information. They are stories told by the people who experienced them, with no greater purpose than that the people have to tell them and Cacoyannis is there to listen.

Part of Cyprus’s problem is that its history is remembered only in pieces—the Greek Cypriots remember the 1974 invasion; the Turkish Cypriots the violence against them in 1963. Turkey remembers the 1974 coup by Greek nationalists; Greece remembers the 1955 expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul, made in response to the Greek Cypriot independence movement.

What Cacoyannis lets us see is another sort of memory in the making—not the collective memory of the Greek Cypriots as a group, but the deeply personal memories of Cypriots as individuals. These memories are almost entirely of loss—loss of sons, husbands, or fathers; loss of property or a good life; loss of a sense of belonging and of the pride of self-sufficiency. Among other things, this might be the best film made on the experience of refugees, whom we see in their pain, boredom, anger, and stunned emotionlessness.

Again, Cacoyannis shows this though extended, almost too-personal shots of his fellow Greek Cypriots as they communicate, each in their own way, what they’ve lost. It’s a process that continues to this day. As late as 2004, when I was in Cyprus, there were still old women standing by the border crossings, dressed all in black, holding pictures of the loved ones who had disappeared without a trace in 1974. Politics falls away in the face of these women.

Though Cacoyannis opened his film with a declaration of his own viewpoint going forward—I am Greek and my name is Michael Cacoyannis—he closes quite differently. In an epilogue added 25 years later, he is looking back and wants to know only about the dead. “I am Michael Cacoyannis,” he declares “and I want to know, where?” Where are the nameless dead buried?

Just a few years ago, more than three decades after the invasion, bi-communal teams of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot forensic scientists were assembled, to begin exhuming and identifying remains—from both sides—and returning them to their families. Until they are all identified, however, we have Cacoyannis’s film to help us remember—if not to remember them, then at least to remember their loss.