Documenting the entire cycle of aluminium production, from bauxite extraction to final processing, and capturing the construction of the industrial infrastructure at Aspropyrgos, Boeotia, in 1960, Roussos Koundouros delivers Aluminium of Greece – one of the first industrial documentaries in Greek cinema, a striking testament to his scientific precision and cinematic vision in recording the radical transformation of the Greek landscape. With no voice-over narration, but guided by Tania Karali’s pioneering electronic score, Koundouros doesn’t simply depict the before and after of an industrial process. In full harmony with his artistic ethos – and almost in defiance of the film’s corporate commission by “Aluminium of Greece” – he challenges the limits of cinematic poetry, using his lens to uncover unexpected beauty, rhythm, intensity, and even a quiet melancholy in the mechanization of progress. In what might have been a dry technical record, he finds sacredness in steel, movement in machinery, and an eerie poetry in progress itself, revealing the human and environmental stakes of industrialization as it reshapes both landscapes and lives.
Roussos Koundouros
Roussos Koundouros was born in 1923 in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, and was a physician and filmmaker. In the mid-1950s, he founded the Institute of Educational and Scientific Cinema, with the primary aim of producing scientific documentary films. In 1958, a collective was formed by him, along with Roviros Manthoulis, Fotis Mestheneos, Yiannis Bakogiannopoulos, and Heraklis Papadakis, with the purpose of promoting, disseminating, and developing documentary film. In 1961, he was appointed as special adviser in the field of cinema at the Ministry of the Presidency of the Greek Government, organising what was then the “Newsreel and Documentary Film Service,” whose operation was interrupted in 1967 by the Colonels’ coup d’état. He created a multitude of short films for state agencies on subjects relating to everyday life, tourism, and education. At the 1st Thessaloniki Film Festival, he was awarded an honorary prize for his contribution to the art of documentary. The themes of his works cover a wide range of subjects: from folklore and ethnography to medicine and technology. His film Aluminium of Greece (1965) stands as an example of an industrial documentary of high aesthetic quality through which the stages of bauxite extraction and aluminium production in Greece are recorded. He passed away in March 1990.