ABSTRACT

From Theo Angelopoulos’s emblematic O Thiasos / The Traveling Players (1974) to Nikos Tzimas’s O Anthropos me to Garyfalo / The Man with the Carnation (1980) and up to Alexis Damianos’s Iniohos / The Charioteer (1995), the genealogy of films regarding the Greek civil conflict fulfilled to a great extent the function of substituting the very absence of historical work on a very contentious issue. From the 2000s onwards, however, a reversal of this trend seems to have taken place: the boom of historical studies on the Civil War had no parallel in terms of cinema. Interestingly, it was only after the unprecedented riots of 2008 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2009 that the civil conflict started attracting cinematographers again. This article deals with two such recent representations of the civil conflict. Pantelis Voulgaris’s Psyhi Vathia / A Soul so Deep (2009) is a large production aiming to provide the new national narrative, while, Kostas Charalambous’s Demeni Kokkini Klosti / Tied Red Thread (2011), an independent and controversial production trying to undermine it. The paper aims to trace the aforementioned relationship between film and historiographic production, and the way in which the theme of the Civil War and violence taps in – through cinema – to the general political reconfiguration of Greece in times of crisis.

Keywords: A Soul so Deep, Civil War films, crisis, genealogy reconciliation, Tied Red Thread, ultra violence