eressos81 Reviews

I peripeteia tou vlemmatos (2023)

A cinematic adventure of a high aesthetic level

[10/10 · 17 December 2023]

"The Gaze Adventure" by D. Athanitis is a cinematic adventure of a high aesthetic level.

The director connects with an excellent text excerpts from his films, following the gaze of his heroes, creating a new visual feast with the same aesthetic background.

No, it's not an essay. Athanitis, looking back at his work with a fresh eye, composes with beautiful cinematic mosaics a new cinematic space.

Extremely original and interesting proposal.

Cinema nights like this one, are rare anymore.

They are like little diamonds that sparkle brightly in the modern cinematic mud.

Thank you Mr. Athanitis!" -Panos Kokkidis.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Eros and horror by a leading auter

[10/10 · 16 July 2023]

Terence Fisher's "Dracula" is not just a horror film. It's a love movie. Starting eight years earlier, with the first "Dracula, the vampire of the Carpathians", he makes the big cut. He puts eroticism at the center of the story, breathing life into the dark creature and into the whole of his fantastic cinema. At the same time he makes another breakthrough, shooting the first horror film in color, transcending the safety of evocative black and white.

"Prince of Dark" picks up at the end of the first film after the Count has been exterminated by Dr. Van Helsing and has a story that departs from Bram Stoker's reference novel. At the same time, it is a more operatic film, more exuberant than the first and has also a more free script, inventing original elements, far from the original.

Fisher creates a tangible realistic world, but one that has that indefinable charm of the artificial, just like Hitchcock's films.

Starring Christopher Lee again, he casts him in a commanding role where he doesn't have to utter a word and contrasts him with the sensuality of Barbara Shelley, who will go from being a quiet wife to the lover she was hiding inside.

The Count hypnotizes his female victim, while displaying his body as an object of desire and worship, conveying a metaphysical sense of erotic attraction, which is at the same time completely physical.

Fisher, a leading English director creates as stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cussing, makes a total of 50 films, collaborates with actors like Dirk Bogart and Gene Simmons and creates an underground erotic universe that remains unsurpassed to this day. Directors like Polanski or Coppola will try in vain to imitate him much later.

Dimitri Athanitis, the notorious Greek auteur, has acknowledged the value of this underestimated film and it's master creator and has written many articles on this extraordinary film maker.

Lavyrinthos (2019)

A magical stroll in the arcades

[10/10 · 14 July 2023]

Born and raised in the heart of the city and having a strong relationship with the arcades Athanitis tries to exploit the personal stories of the people he meets, people who work in the arcades for an entire life. But their personal stories go beyond, composing the story of the city, and even more, the stories of a country. The film is also an ode to the hard-working people there and the dignity of work.

"Labyrinth" is a poetic and elegant stroll in the labyrinth of arcades in Athens' heart that interweaves the history of the city with the evocative stories of the store-owners and composes an ode to the lure of Athens and its people. The movement of the camera as it submerges in the labyrinth of the arcades provides a mystical touch to the film, resembling a dive into the unconscious.

The film is a mixture of documentary and personal fiction on the arcades, where the narrator gives the fictional side of the film. Shot in black and white, "Labyrinth" goes further than realism, touching the inner sense of people and places. Impressed by the artificial light in the arcades,

"Labyrinth" gives the sense of another world, a magical place in the heart of reality and finally has an unexpected meeting with cinema itself.

Invisible (V) (2015)

Urban western, pure cinematic style

[10/10 · 13 June 2023]

Invisible is a film with a purely cinematic narrative, a film that mixes forms. Thriller with realism, western with fantasy, although Invisible has to do, or it seems so, with a social theme.

The directing style of Athanitis has an originality, which denies linearity to follow better his main hero, Aris (the name means Mars), who confuses reality with imagination, crosses the living space with a heartbreaking despair, which has no name, invisible, as he is too.

If you thought the western genre only exists against the prairies of an American frontier, think again. With Invisible, filmmaker Dimitris Athanitis adeptly draws from western tropes to tell of a gritty fight against injustice in urban Greece.

In a career-defining, bravura performance, Yannis Stankoglou plays Aris - a 38-year-old factory worker who is fired without warning. He is floored by the shock and any attempts to be re-hired fail miserably. As his distress builds, he becomes more and more fixated on taking justice into his own hands but even these plans are thwarted when his ex-wife saddles him with their six-year-old son.

With eerie accuracy and detail, Athanitis shows how the powerless and undervalued can be society's most dangerous time bombs just waiting to explode. The end of the film, or rather the choreography of the end, is also completely astonishing and unpredictable.

Mideia (2022)

A film one of a kind with a pure cinematic sense

[10/10 · 4 June 2023]

"Medea" is a rare film that combines a pure cinematic sense with tragedy, standing out of time, out of space. The film re-invents the original play using primary, archetypal elements, as Medea herself is an archetype character. The filmic time is not clearly defined but it is certainly very far from today, in the distant past. The space in which characters move, is also extreme and abstract. The only scenery is the mountains and the woods, while Medea with her children lives in an abandoned, collapsing house. Costumes have no very specific ornaments of the exact time period, although we have the sense that the story takes place in a time some centuries bc.

Medea is a mother, a stranger, a completely fallen and abandoned woman with no place to live as she has to go away for one more time. But she is a powerful woman, who does not dare to confront the Power, the man's power. Even if the characters speak in modern Greek, their talk is very near to Euripides language. Medea stays distant, almost dark, nobody can read her thoughts but at the same time her character concerns us, as she looks emphatically modern.

The film stays faithful to the spirit of the original masterful play by Euripides but has some important novelties. Here, nothing is told before action, as there is not any Chorus. There are also some changes in two characters and finally Athanitis adds four new scenes, of his own. These scenes, two in the beginning and two in the end -in a meaningful symmetry- have no dialogues and gives a pure cinematic sense to the film, helped by an abstract music theme, signed also by the director.

"Medea" besides her classic approach has the structure of a thriller as we never know, we can never predict what is going to happen next. Even the characters close to Medea, the Maid and the Nurse cannot understand her thinking and preview what is coming up. Medea is a completely unpredictable character, who based on her own internal forces and wisdom tries to face her enemies, taking advantage of every little change is happening. So in every scene except the main action we watch, there is a second one, that takes place in the mind of Medea for which we have only few signs.

Filmed mainly in black and white, Athanitis's view on the classic play by Euripides has an extraordinary beauty and a surprisingly powerful performance from Alexandra Kazazou, as Medea. Sixty years after the unsuccessful attempt with Maria Callas, Athanitis dares to confront the provocative story of an archetype character, maybe the most powerful female character ever presented in literature and to drive Alexandra Kazazou to a solid performance that reminds those of Falconetti in Drayer's Vampire or Adjani's in Posession.

The Revenant (I) (2015)

The "Revenant" copies Tarkovsky?

[22 February 2016]

The "Revenant" copies Tarkovsky? Renevant copies Herzog's "Aguirre", Annaud's "The Bear", Mel Gibson's "Apokalypto" is the right answer is yes. The Mexican director has put a lots from these films in the mix, that's why you have the sense of deja vu, watching "Revenant". The story with Tarkovsky is just a brilliant -but fake- marketing idea to give a touch of art and "poetry" to this moderate big budget Di Caprio film and so to achieve better sells outside America, where things seem to be difficult at the box office. The only common between Inarritu and Tarkovsky is that they both finally give you the same empty taste under the well done but completely artificial universe they create. But this is not what the creators of this incredible story "Revenant by Tarkovsky" want to spotlight!

Three Days Happiness (2012)

A bizarre wonderful world

[10/10 · 3 April 2013]

Three young women are at the heart of this story: Irina, Anna and Vera. The first is a prostitute, whose dream is to move to Canada to change her life. The second, a saleswoman in a bookshop, wants to get married to overcome her family's trauma. And the third, a literature student, discovers the secrets of her parents. Around them, a whole world that seems to be moved only by one thing: money.

The sense of the film, the color, the acting, the direction, it is cold, icy. It reflects the psychology and actions of persons trapped in situations that exceed them. Three Days of Happiness do not try to be simply realistic. The film chooses to highlight the instinctive, the snapshot, the unseen, what we don't notice. Athanitis takes advantage of the unsaid, the silence, the comprehensive short sequences. He gives a symbolic meaning to objects and the body, assigning to them an aptly narrative character, reminding to us Bresson.

Filmed entirely in a dark blue tone, with long shots on faces, and an extremely accurate tone, the whole film gives a strange, sometimes vampire's sensation. Watching the film, I felt been hypnotized, diving in a realistic but at the same time, bizarre world. I loved this film!