Takis Kanellopoulos was one of the first prominent auteurs of 'New Greek Cinema.' His 1960 documentary short 'Wedding in Macedonia,' awarded at Thessaloniki Greek Film Festival, was quite a revelation in its originality establishing a major trend for new promising film-makers who were to produce lots of compelling shorts, whether documentaries or fiction, in the years to come. However the real Kanellopoulos’ breakthrough was his debut feature film 'Ouranos' (Glory Sky / Ciel, 1963), a sad and lyrical anti-war film focusing on disenchanted soldiers returning back home. 'Ouranos,' thematically and in narrative style, was a break with anything done before - and, often, after - in the genre of war drama in Greek cinema. Though 'Observer' included 'Ouranos' in the 10 best films of 1963 and despite the many admirers of the film, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Federico Fellini, this early gem of 'New Greek Cinema' remains virtually unknown and is unavailable in DVD or other digital format. The later oblivion of Kanellopoulos oeuvre can be largely attributed to his extremely personal, minimalist, lyrical and anti-narrative style that found no followers and went out of fashion with arthouse film aficionados early on. By 1975, one year after the collapse of 'Colonels junta,' the time when his fifth feature film 'Memories of a Sunday' was shot and screened at Thessaloniki Greek Film Festival, Kanellopoulos’ maniΓ¨re, poetic and introvert, seemed completely out of date amidst a sea of left-wing militant docs, a wave of experimental filmmaking and, above all, against the tremendous impact of Angelopoulos’ Thiasos with its heavy historical symbolism. 'Memories of a Sunday' is even more personal in tone since Kanellopoulos scripted the scenario as well (this film could be perfectly titled 'Memories of a Filmmaker'), bringing together six stories drawn from his own memories and treated with bittersweet nostalgiaβ¦ The film bears a dedication in its opening frames to fellow Greek director Nikos Koundouros.
opcorn: Ντομπλυ Ατμος και starwars ..
