Archive

Through Cyprus with the Cinematic Camera

Cyprus presents us with an idiosyncratic case of a geographical, cultural and affective space. Often positioned on the fringe of the ‘East’ or the ‘West’, the Mediterranean as well as Europe, it is also a space where, due to its small size, social activity often acquires specific dynamics and manifestations. At the same time, contemporary Greece has developed a somewhat special relation to Cyprus, formulated mainly through affiliations with the Greek-Cypriot community and its perceptions of the Cyprus Problem. As a result, Greece often ignores the historical complexities and the multiplicity of contemporary reality of the country’s inhabitants. In putting together this year’s Themed Section of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival our aim was thus to screen films and initiate discussions on certain aspects of the ‘familiar’ yet ‘distant’ Cyprus, which are still largely unknown to audiences in Greece.

Looking at this relationship from an anthropological perspective, it could be said that for Greece, Cyprus is a familiar Other. The notion of the familiar Other, which to a large extent we believe reflects contemporary social, cultural, even political relations between Cyprus and Greece, becomes particularly conspicuous when we consider language. Due to the fact that it is only superficially known in Greece, the Cypriot linguistic variety allows for the clear marking of some of the defining lines of familiarity and otherness between the two cultural spaces, while it also showcases the ethnographic aspect of the films included in the Themed Section.

The first visual renderings of Cyprus on the photographic and the cinematic film were imprinted with the colonial imagery of the place and its people. Subsequently, visuality about Cyprus followed various trajectories which did not always reflect social and historical changes: for example, up until the previous decade, the Cypriot experiences of modernity and post-modernity were almost banned from the country’s visual representations. For the title of this Themed Section, we appropriate and hybridise the title of the first extensive photographic rendering of Cyprus, produced by John Thompson and published under the title Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878¹. By doing so, we aim to highlight the pivotal role of the colonial gaze in the process of creating the dominant cinematic construction of Cyprus. However, the Themed Section includes not only ethnographic films but also documentaries, fiction and video art in an attempt to investigate various cinematic genres and narratives, composed and articulated from the end of the colonial era, in 1960, to the present.

During the last five decades or so, the Cyprus Problem has obviously been centrally positioned within these cinematic narratives. Nonetheless, audiences of the Themed Section will see that we chose not to include films which position the Problem as their main or exclusive theme, since such films are characterised by what Constandinides and Papadakis call ‘the excess of the political’²: an excess, which more often than not, dominates narratives about Cyprus and which does more to preclude than facilitate an understanding of contemporary Cypriot society. Although these films form perhaps the largest part of cinematic production in Cyprus, we attempt to highlight films which either acquire alternative starting points in their approach to the Problem, thus looking awry at and through it, or incorporate it within other thematic scopes in ‘atypical’ ways. In this way, we are able to respond to a growing movement within Cypriot society, which seeks referents beyond the Cyprus Problem, and is evident in areas beyond the cinematic and the photographic, such as the visual arts, playwriting, literature and music.

A related issue which preoccupied us extensively in the process of putting together this Themed Section is the presence of the Turkish-Cypriot community both in front and behind the camera. Although the issue emerges all the more intensely within Cyprus, dominant narratives about the country, and particularly those which reach Greece, continue to present primarily Greek-Cypriot perceptions of the society on the north side of the dividing line. Contrary to our aspirations and our efforts, which were geared towards including more films from and about the north part of the country, the rather restricted production as well as technical difficulties limited our choices. We do however want to point out that cinematic production on the Turkish-Cypriot community and the north part of Cyprus is on the rise. Examples of this growing trend are included in this Section.

An equally important issue is the cultural diversity of Cyprus, which has been a historically prominent characteristic of the island, as well as the linking of this cultural plurality to the issue of present-day migrant realities and trajectories. The growing engagement with migrant communities in Cyprus is captured in a number of films, especially those originating from the south part of the country, thus forming another cinematic trend included in the Section.

Aware of our task as curators of the special Themed Section of the Ethnographic Film Festival of Athens, we aimed to prioritise those films which approach issues such as the above through the lens of the everyday. In other words, films which, adopt an ethnographic gaze even if they haven’t been made by anthropologists.

Pafsanias Karathanasis, Social anthropologist
Despo Pasia, Museologist – Museum Educator

¹ John Thompson 1985 [1879]. Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878. (London: Trigraph)
² Costas Constandinides & Yiannis Papadakis (eds.). 2014. Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict and Identity in the Margins of Europe. New York & London: Bloomsbury.

From forced marriages in Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood (The Nile Fiancée, 2016) to the struggle of the first candidate for mayor of a small indigenous community in Mexico (The Euphrosyne Revolution, 2016) and from there to the story of an 85-year-old female feminist (Rebel Menopause, 2012), the films of the special themed section Ethnographic approaches to the social roles of gender give a voice to women and their struggle for self-determination of their gender identity.

What is it that brings all these different ethnographic stories together on a common cinematic theme?
A gender theme indicates a common starting point at least, or rather a meeting point of the stories. However, this point is not at all eloquent, clear and transparent in terms of its qualities. For some, it would be a female identity, that composes and frames the female experience, and it can express social, political and emancipatory peaks. At the same time and in the same movement, it smooths out the peculiarities of the experience and constructs closeness and affinities, ignoring the difference. We are not the same and we do not fit into the same female positivity, others will say. Our experience differs significantly; does this difference return us to a meeting point based on our biological sex?

The cinematic writing and the filmic gaze are involved in the reflection. What does it mean for female stories to follow one another in narration? What are the qualitative characteristics of this baton that changes hands in the context of the same film text or the Special Theme of an ethnographic festival?
Is there a specific cinematic gaze that allows these stories to coexist and what is the relationship between this gaze into the gender issue? Is the woman a single cinematic and ethnographic ground, on which the organization of a coherent thematic section can be justified?
Is it the differences between women that are gender differences, resulting from crosses of race, class, physical fitness, ethnicity, sexuality, but also power relations between women, to the point that we are talking about versions of women that also make up the gender spectrum beyond the man/woman dipole?

Hélène Cixous, a French-Algerian feminist philosopher, argues that femininity cannot be defined, which does not mean that it does not exist. Can a precarious sign be a starting point, a common point? Where does the woman tell her stories from? From the tongue or the body?
Stories that, thanks to the film camera and the anthropologist/cinematographer, travel from distant continents to the Astor cinema in Athens, invite viewers to see a moment from a distant but never radically different female life.
Do films need to claim objectivity through the deletion of the gaze, the renunciation of mediation? Is a feminist film organized by the Look of God, which claims to simply record a story it makes?

By organizing a series of films on the subject of gender, we bring to light the common gender dimension of these films – stories of oppression that are gender, stories of struggles that are female, come together, not to eliminate all the other dimensions that compose them, but create a connecting thread.
By deconstructing the “trick of God”, seeing, filming, the person involved in the anthropological cinematic process claims the possibility “to connect with someone else, without claiming to be the other”. Our constant attempt is to create “networks of connections”, which in politics are called “solidarity”, and in epistemology common “discussions”.

Through the synthesis of these stories for, by, and with women, an attempt is made, in the few days they are together in the Ethnofest and the Astor cinema, a temporary archive, a fleeting place of political empathy is described.

Aliki Theodosiou, Melina Klafanti, Christina Margioti and Athena Papanagiotou

The “Ethnographic Views on Gendered Roles in Society” section is realised within the framework of the Operational Program “Public Sector Reform” and is co-funded by the European Union (European Social Fund) and national resources.
For this section, we also invited the Centre for Gender Studies (Panteion University, School of Political Sciences, Department of Social Policy) to take part in the screenings. The post-graduate students Aliki Theodosiou, Melina Klafanti and Athena Papanagiotou will be introducing the films, with Carolin Phillip acting as co-ordinator. All of the screenings are free of charge.

A selection of films that were produced by Summer School students. The Summer School is being co-organized by Ethnofest and the Netherlands Insitute at Athens (NIA).