ODES TO EXISTENCE

1. What unites and what separates the protagonists of the films “FOR NO REASON” (Giorgos Maniatis), “DEBT” (Alekos Zoukas) and “FAREWELL” (Giannis Lionakis), and how would you describe each film on its own?

I will try, very briefly, to sketch how each of these “heroes” lives inside me and how I experience each film, in the order in which they were made.

Giorgos Maniatis first held me spellbound with his writing. After the first reading I was left wondering: how far can the human mind go? It can't be – this is hubris, I kept saying...

“Words attract or repel each other, or remain indifferent, just like people. It depends on the quality of the encounter. ... A text sparkles with the electricity that words generate in their ‘adventures’ (of an erotic nature). ... Whoever does not know how to devise such encounters – that is, to exploit (and indeed to reveal) the eroticism of words – does not know how to write. The one who writes is the one who knows how to make words become unrecognisable.”

We got to know each other better and recorded our first meetings. Perhaps it would become a film... We would decide together. Maniatis was something very special. The usual portrait format – interviews with him and with other people, combined with biographical and factual information – didn't satisfy me. In his case, intuition pushed me towards one basic choice: that in the film there should be only him and his Work.

Giorgos Maniatis – a legionnaire in Algeria at 18, later a writer and musician – defines himself as a “public danger”. He believes deeply, and lives by it, that “Whoever changes their life changes life”. In the film we follow the struggle of a consciousness in constant alertness, setting itself on fire, which wants to find a place in this world that it is entitled to. “...This search to be consumed by the flames in action, ... this paroxysm and alcoholism of constant movement, is in essence the protagonist of the book – and perhaps its author himself.” These observations by the literary critic A. Ziras on The Foreign Legion are, I believe, also the final impression the film and our “hero” leave on the viewer.

Watching it, one may perhaps better feel its title too: “FOR NO REASON”. Whatever he does, he does for no reason. Nobody asked him to. Nobody anywhere asked Maniatis to do the things he did (nor, of course, for this film to be made). “Artistic creation is unpaid patriotism”, he tells us somewhere, and it is done for no reason, I would add, trying to stay true to his spirit ...

Alekos Zoukas, a chance acquaintance, drew me in from the very first moment. Seeing him, I murmured to myself “we are compatriots”, and of course I didn't mean it geographically. Later, I felt the phrase “Every person we meet in our lives is a journey, and often we sense from the start whether we will travel with them first class or with no luggage and empty pockets” – which I heard from a friend we had in common – triumphantly confirmed.

In the film, by choosing two parts of his life – his confessions about his experience with cancer, and our trips with his friends to Pyrsogianni, which took place before the cancer – alternating sections are created, linked by excerpts from his writings and personal diaries. Alekos is treated purely as a literary “hero”, and there is no biographical information and no comments from friends and acquaintances.

Taking the experience Alekos lives through as its starting point, the film does not talk about cancer; it talks about qualities of life. It talks about the cancers that tyrannise our lives and that we uncritically accept, and through our “hero” it asks “when will man understand that he owes more to poetry than to the tax office?”, before finding redemptive refuge in the hand that stroked his forehead and in the embrace of his friends. “I belong here; I will come back”, Alekos assures us...

The title DEBT was suggested by the poet Panos Kyparissis (also a friend of Alekos), who reads Alekos's diaries in the film. I adopted it at once. Besides being a DEBT to our friend, the film is above all a DEBT to the richness of life and fulfilment that spending time with this man gave me the chance to experience. It is gratitude towards life itself, which on a few occasions is fortunate enough to offer us its gifts generously. And friendship with Alekos guided you along those very paths...

I feel very lucky that we shared a deep friendship with a “sinful angel”. A relationship watered and nourished by humanity and selflessness. Its unspoken and silent parts resound deafeningly within me. The film is an elegy to male friendship.

Giannis Lionakis is a partisan, a warrior-partisan. His allure is not exhausted by the image of a man faithful to his ideals. In my eyes he is one of the “...thousands of fighters all over the world who had given everything they had for a cause which, as they believed, as they said, was greater than themselves, but whose greatness, in the end, turned out to be they themselves.”, to borrow a phrase heard in a documentary by Chris Marker.

In the film, Giannis Lionakis tells us of an incredible struggle for survival lasting 14 years (1948–1962), after the end of the Civil War in Crete. He is fully conscious of the memory of the land that sheltered them and of the tradition that protected them in its embrace. The account of their survival is a fine piece of embroidery, framed within the value system of the place where our story unfolds.

When I think of his life, my mind passes over the historical context in which he lived and acted. I think of the heroes of the folk songs and of our popular tradition. That was the stuff Giannis was made of. It is no accident that the film ends with the folk verse “My God, what has become of the brave men of the earth...” (an inspiration of Mitsos Kasolas). I am especially honoured by the friendship and trust of this warrior. Here too, our silent walks and his confidences resound deafeningly within me.

The filming took place in 2007, for the documentary “There Was No Other Way”, and Giannis was 87 at the time. In essence it was his farewell journey to the land that had largely shaped his life – hence the film's title, FAREWELL. Very little of it had been used in “There Was No Other Way”; Giannis died in 2012, and this material remained unfinished business inside me.

2. Is the title of the tribute, “Odes to Existence”, representative of these three films?

Without Maniatis (FOR NO REASON) I don't know whether DEBT and FAREWELL would ever have existed. When I started with him I had no idea what would follow. At the time I simply had before me an undertaking that was unprecedented for me: that in the film there should be only him and his Work. Half-jokingly I kept repeating the phrase “this will be a triple jump – straight up”, as he himself so aptly describes their attempt to escape from the Foreign Legion. When the film was finished and the screenings began, with great anxiety about the result, I felt it was well received.

Then, amid the coronavirus and financial hardship, creativity, wanting to stay alive and to keep me alive, began to scheme for ways out. I remembered the unfinished business and the material I had stashed away. I thought about it and felt more and more that now I was ready and mature enough to deal with it. Once I was convinced of that and believed it, one film led to another. Fortunately, the result was neither a compromise nor reheated leftovers. They had to be made, and they deserved to be. Throughout this whole story, the generosity and trust of friends and collaborators were decisive. Wherever they were needed, in every way, they were constantly by my side.

When the three films were completed, I felt an underground connection between them. Three titles – For No Reason, Debt, Farewell – rich in meaning, whose sense keeps changing and refuses to settle inside me. I'm not sure which of the three films each title belongs to. They are easily interchangeable.

Each film focuses on a single person – not as a biography or a portrait – and is essentially a journey through the geography of its “hero's” soul. Little by little I came to feel them as a trilogy, with three completely different people, each of whom was nevertheless an ode to existence. That, at least, is how I experienced them, and that is how I presented them in the films.

“Odes to Existence” it is, then: that will be the title of the trilogy, and I am particularly glad that its promotion has been taken on by the very dynamic team at CINOBO, who are especially dear to me. I am honoured by our collaboration and by the fact that, after the screenings, the films will remain available to the public on their platform, and in good company.

3. What is it that makes someone a hero of your films?

I have often asked myself that too, but each time practice and events proved the answer wrong. The conviction that documentary is absolutely a fiction film, made on different terms, led me to look for the answer in literary heroes. What makes a person a literary hero?

Again, I don't know. Can you say why you fall in love with someone? What makes them become the object of your love?

4. What is the “method” you use to get the protagonists of your films to trust you?

The excerpt from Maniatis, I think, says it all: Words attract or repel each other, or remain indifferent, just like people. It depends on the quality of the encounter...

There is no “method”, and it isn't something that can be taught. It depends entirely on the quality of the encounter, of those talking and of their relationship. And on something else that goes unspoken but that we experience, and that lies decisively latent in the atmosphere: the eroticism of the people themselves. We call it “aura”, we call it “chemistry”, and so many other formulations, politically correct and acceptable enough to get by...

Creative documentary – let's call it that, as a convention, since there are only good films and bad films – is a fiction film. When you film a person or a situation, you are at the same time filming yourself. That is how your “protagonist” converses with you, and it is you who sees events, situations and the world that way. Out of the thousands of possibilities that existed, this is what you chose to be interested in.

With these thoughts in mind, I cannot talk about a method or tactic for approaching people, at least as far as our own films are concerned.

5. On the whole, you seem to turn your gaze to stories of heroism – not necessarily in the sense we are used to, but in another, more down-to-earth, everyday sense. Who, in the end, are the true heroes of our world?

I am challenged by people who live through borderline situations and, within them, reflect anew on existence. I am interested in the adventures of human existence, and I approach them with love, full of wonder and questions, without a prosecutorial attitude or ideological blinkers. I let the people themselves speak and reveal their a-letheia, their truth. I am not looking for some kind of objectivity, but for a-letheia in its literal sense: wresting something from lethe, from oblivion. I don't believe in messages and sermons, and I don't think they have ever been my motive for making a film. Nor has the subject, especially if it is a topical one.

In the end a film is a construction, a creation. And it is not subjects that make films great, but the way we approach them, shed light on them and talk about them. The aura our creation will ultimately radiate.

6. All three protagonists of these three films are dead. And yet through the films they are not only fully alive but also examples of survival. How hard is it to talk about someone who has gone? How easy is it to talk about death?

Without it, without the finiteness of life, everything would be very different, and perhaps unbelievably dull. It is the cornerstone of our reflections, the ghost we are constantly trying to exorcise.

But when I watch these films again, none of them is dead. They all move about gently inside me; I live and converse with them as I did then. Through the films they have perhaps become immortal, in a way. That, at least, is how I feel. And I have somewhat beguiled my own fear of death too.

After all, as Panos Kyprassis used to tell me – he heard it from his father – life isn't for having your fill; life is whatever is left over. At the end of “DEBT” we hear a text by Alekos: “We all leave at some point, each chasing our own fate, our own star, yet leaving behind us whatever connected us to the world, to others. In the end, what will be preserved is not the people and the events themselves, but people's view of those people and events.”

People die when they stop living inside us. I am glad of everything we shared and lived through together with my “heroes”. They created me, and I carry them inside me always.

7. How do you choose which accounts stay in the film and which get “cut”? How does the central idea of each portrait take shape?

Robert Manthoulis – a great filmmaker and a remarkable man – wrote: “A documentary is a creation like God's. Just as God made the world, you make a documentary, under exactly the same conditions. It is a small creation, a little big bang, when you make a documentary. That is what sets it apart from all the other genres of cinema.”

When you begin editing, you don't know what you are going to do. You have raw material, a piece of stone or marble, in front of you, and you have to create something. “I carve, and it will show me what shape to give it,” an artist confined in the psychiatric hospital once told me, when we were filming The Man Who Disturbed the Universe.

Endless hours of editing, of absorbing the material and of inner silence may lead somewhere. You enter a process of vigil, let's say, and wait for a little light. Once you begin, it is the material itself and the overall economy of the narrative that guide you and determine your choices. The fascination of creation is that when you start, you don't know what will come out.

8. In the end, what is “documentary” to you? “Documentation”?

I think that with everything we have said above, we have covered what “documentary” is for us. I would just like to add the answer of one of my teachers in France, when I was starting out some 30-odd years ago. When I asked him “what is documentary?”, he told me “Je préfère filmer que parler” (I prefer filming to talking). I have never forgotten it.

9. When do you realise that one of your films has had meaning? Which reactions have moved you, made you think, or made you reconsider over the years?

It is the small, random and unexpected rewards of everyday life that confirm it: a warm thank-you, a reference to something people saw, the breathing of the audience during a screening, a comment or a look of acceptance afterwards... If I go into detail, I will give in to my narcissism. But above all you yourself must be satisfied with the result, and you must listen to people's remarks. That is important.

10. What have you learned about life through all these years of cinema?

As much as I created some films, they created me just as much. But let's not forget that the mechanisms of deception and self-deception are constantly present in each of us. It isn't a question of morality but of survival, both individual and of our species. Rubbing shoulders with these people, the experiences and situations I lived through, the endless hours I spent with them in the editing room, built inside me an edifice that is fluid in time, constantly changing and taking shape.

If I want to single out some of the cornerstones of this edifice, I would single out a few phrases: Whoever changes their life changes life. Each time, we tell the truth we are able to tell. There are no facts. There are interpretations of facts.

As I write them down, so many other favourite phrases come to mind... Isn't that how it goes with films too? For now we keep these. The rest another time. As we said, “life isn't for having your fill...”

11. In the end, does cinema make us better people?

What does “better people” mean, my dear Manolis? Are you sure we can define it and agree on what it means?