OLYMPIA

Stavros Psillakis: “Time is not measured in absolute terms; what counts is its density”

Winner of the Audience Award at the last Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the renowned documentary filmmaker Stavros Psillakis did us the honour, a short while ago, of granting us a moving encounter that left its mark on our memory, thanks to his exceptional gift for laying things bare, for clarity and for sincerity. Known for his works “There Was No Other Way” and “METAXA — listening to time”, Psillakis returns with his penetrating eye in the 45-minute film “Olympia”, which follows four days in the life of a young mother fighting an extremely aggressive cancer, having just brought a healthy baby boy into the world. In Psillakis's skilled hands this difficult and delicate subject is stripped of any trace of melodrama or grandiloquence and becomes a piercing chronicle of death and rebirth, with simplicity as its backbone. It is a work that ultimately won him the Audience Award, even though he revealed to us that he initially had reservations about whether he wanted it shown at all – reservations that gave way after the warm response of the public. Over the course of an hour, the director talks to us about Olympia, the ethics of pain in cinema, and the density of life and time.

You have said that it is unethical to sell pain. Where are the fine lines for cinema in depicting and presenting it?

That's hard to answer, because even in cases where we might recognise this sort of thing, the person who makes it will never claim to be selling pain. They will say they are informing, providing information. Words are cheap; anyone can say whatever they like. What matters is what you feel, whether from the conversation we are having now or in the cinema. Whether the film gave you something. Did it take you somewhere? Did it create a state of mind in you, or do you just have two wretched people something happened to, and someone else exposing them? I sometimes say that in this film you see everything that television is not – which of course doesn't mean you can't see very interesting things on television; that is precisely the alibi, the thing that redeems the situation so that everything else can go out on air. What carries the weight and the ethos is what each person radiates, what comes out of them, not what they say. And to be able to truly handle and bring out things of this kind, one basic notion comes into play: the notion of trust, how much people trust you. Sometimes the person may be ready to give in. Nobody forced Annita Pania's viewers, for example, to go [on her show]; they go of their own accord – what am I supposed to do about it? And the person [who goes there] may feel such relief inside at having done it that the belittlement and humiliation you feel this person has suffered is something they don't feel at all.

But isn't that somewhat unethical, all the same?

I don't know what it is, nor can I define the limits of another person's world, if they feel satisfaction and balance inside. I can set limits on my own actions and behaviour, and maybe those of five other people; the rest are none of my business.

You chose, of course, not to use music, so as not to stir up melodrama. Is that a personal rule of yours, based on those limits?

There is no rule. Even with this, a musician could indeed find himself in the same state of mind as me and not provoke or force such emotions. Look, death is something that is bigger than all of us, and I feel that, throughout the ages, all civilisation has ever done is try to exorcise it through art. So in this film, whatever we did or said, death was lying in wait outside the door, saying “I am the master”. If I want to convey that as powerfully as possible, I will use the barest means. You don't need much; what can be said is best said through silence. What am I supposed to start telling you – how beautiful life is? That's all very well, but it stays on the outside. So in terms of form I wanted to handle it in a spare, unadorned way, but I don't feel that this is a rule. There could have been music that coexisted with it in that way.

Following on from what you said, that death is outside the door: the work is about life and death, but also about rebirth, since alongside this difficult situation there is also the child.

Of course, a new life came into being, and I would very much like – this is only in my imagination, of course – for this film to be finished by Panagiotis, the child who was born. For me it would be the best thing if, years from now, he came and told me: I make films and I want to finish this one.

This is not the first time you have touched on cancer, since it was preceded by the celebrated “METAXA — listening to time”, set in the cancer hospital of the same name. What were the differences between the two works, and what drew you to each?

With “Metaxa...” I didn't choose the subject; it was suggested to me by a doctor at the hospital, Nikos Karvounis, who had also fallen ill with cancer. A mutual acquaintance who had seen my films knew about the doctor's idea and put us in touch. When he told me about it I was very interested, because it involved doctors who had themselves fallen ill with cancer and had this dual identity of healer and patient. But I wasn't interested in the subject medically, sociologically or journalistically. So I turn to him and say, “yes, I'm very interested, but let's make something poetic”, and the doctor said to me, “but that's exactly what I want too”. If you don't speak with poetry in the face of this subject, where else will you speak of poetry? “Metaxa...” takes cancer as its starting point and talks about life, in the sense that the moment someone is told they have cancer, their world is turned upside down, regardless of the outcome – because just as cases are common, so the outcome is often positive; it isn't like ten years ago. What happens, then, is that the deeply shattering experience you go through when you are first told becomes an occasion to reflect anew on life itself, because death, which exists in our minds as something distant, becomes very concrete. After all, the only thing in life that truly belongs to you is your death. So [this announcement] puts a person in a reflective frame of mind. One of the “heroes” of “Metaxa...” says: “My doctor told me, I've cured you. Yes, but what have you cured, I said to her? The body. My soul you will never cure.” That comes right at the very beginning of the film, because here we are not going to hide; here we are going to talk. In that film, because the people were truly remarkable, each one complemented the others in their own way, as if a song about life itself kept unfolding before the camera. You don't need to have a terrible illness to identify with it; you can watch the film and take courage from it. Being able to look at death and turn all of it into a dance for life was, and is, what came closest to the spirit of the film. That was “Metaxa...”. Here, though, things are different; it isn't the same frenzy of life.

Here you have Olympia, a simple working-class girl. She wanted to become a hairdresser; she didn't, but she became a seamstress, then a shop assistant, and then she worked in a patisserie. She learned to make sweets and is over the moon about it, because on the one hand she believes that making sweets is a creative process, and on the other she loves making them for her friends – she loves to give. So we are not talking about some intellectual or someone tormented by big questions; she is a simple working-class girl who enjoys life in her own way, so in this film you won't hear the grand words you hear in “Metaxa...”, where a friend, for example, says “when will we finally understand that we owe more to poetry than to the tax office?” Here, with Olympia, in an unspoken way, something that is never put into words, you feel something at the very core: that you have a simple family, one of its members is struck at a difficult moment, and there is an enormous embrace around Olympia – what anyone would want in their life. We don't need many great things; we need some love, an embrace, but we don't understand that and we make our lives complicated. That is why I am glad the documentary was filmed in that house, without grand words, so that you can touch this situation with your own hands. Olympia herself, even though she is in a critical condition, wants to live for Panagiotis, and you see life trying to hold on by any means. These most archaic, most primal emotions are the ones set in motion in the film. That is why no extra brushstrokes are needed; they are enough for me to bring out this great love of the family.

The filming took place over four days. How difficult was it, as an experience, to film such an intense subject in just four days?

I'm often asked about that. It is a difficult shoot, more difficult than “Metaxa...”; it is more personal. Olympia was at an advanced stage then, and some things were intense. I am afraid too; I too have the fear of death, and if these films stir certain things up, first and foremost they stir up my own fear of death. This young woman had wanted a child for years, and now that it had finally happened, the cancer came too. Documentary is my work and I love it very much. I haven't let go of it since I started in '87-'88. But that isn't what matters – nor do I think about how much I may have suffered at times. Life is something you have to drink in, and you mustn't hesitate to plunge into it. If you run away, you achieve nothing. What stayed in my memory is not how painful it was; these people were so incredibly sweet, so unbelievably kind – I love them like my own family – that this is the first thing I think of [from that experience]. Every time, whatever you have accumulated as experience in your life comes and does this to you [so that you get this result]. That is how much I needed, even now. I needed sixty years [to make this film], because everything you have distilled comes together. What I would have done at thirty I have no idea. Time is not measured in absolute terms; what counts is the density of time. How many times do you go to cafés and remember nothing, and then you sit with someone once, for an hour, and get so much out of it?

Your earlier film “There Was No Other Way” deals with a completely different subject, and your work often revolves around social themes. What is it that connects the subjects of your documentaries?

I do. It is my own consciousness, my own experience and the way I take in life. I will deal with two partisans who lived in hiding in Crete for fifteen years (There Was No Other Way) with the same interest as I will deal with someone I met here in the street who clicked with me. I don't consider myself to be making activist cinema – not that I look down on all that, but this is my character. Politics, for me, is what you do every day, not how you vote. That sense and that connection are there in the earlier subjects too: for example, “The Man Who Disturbed the Universe” is about madness and psychiatric hospitals. It is a film shot in the Chania Psychiatric Hospital in '97, and the title isn't mine. It came about when at one point, while we were filming inside the hospital, the people there had joined in the fun and were asking for the camera – “can I film too?” – and while one of them was filming on his own, he said the phrase “I am the man who disturbed the universe”. The other one, next to him, said with a child's innocence “Let me see God!”, then turned and pointed the camera up at the sky, and he doesn't see God, he sees the sun. That primal expression and a deep wisdom – because they said things without any filter – are the essence. These people were in a borderline state. In Western civilisation we say “I think, therefore I am”; when thinking is shaken, a person reaches their limits, they are in a borderline state. So I was interested in borderline states. The other man who takes up his rifle and goes into the mountains of Crete because the Germans have come – not the going up the mountain, but carrying on with it after the Germans, and after the Civil War too – refusing to surrender no matter what and deciding “no, we will keep on hiding, we will stay partisans”, and so making a different choice: that is a state of that kind. All around them people were getting on with building their lives, and I ask myself: what makes a person reach a borderline state? Ideology alone isn't enough; it is something more inward. That fascinates me, when you walk along the edge.

So the common thread in your work is the extremes that people reach.

It is the density of life itself. I can take hold of anything, and once it has fascinated me and carried me off on its journey, I can reshape it. Documentary is not objective. I no longer feel the need to define it; it is enough for me that certain things pulsate. It is very flattering for me that, twenty years after “The Man Who Disturbed the Universe”, young people have taken the documentary, put it online and are commenting on it.