ABSTRACT

Produced and screened in 2017, Pantelis Voulgaris’s To teleftaio simeioma/The Last Note reconstructs the story of the massacre of two hundred imprisoned Communists, in retaliation for the execution of four Nazis by the Greek Resistance, in 1944. The analysis proposes a political reading of the film, as it deals with the collective trauma of the Occupation, and the heroic acts of the Leftist Resistance. The Last Note may be seen to produce what according to the historian Enzo Traverso (2017) can be called a “melancholic topos”, concerning the making of a symbolic locus, which reserves and revives an emancipatory horizon for the politics to come. In the midst of a prolonged and ongoing social, political and economic crisis that Greece and potentially the whole world is at, grand narratives of struggle, collectivity and emancipation may contribute towards the generation of politics that can overcome the political impasse that contemporary societies are experiencing.

Keywords: Antifascism, German Occupation, Grand narratives, Greek crisis, Pantelis Voulgaris, Resistance films