The leading Greek filmmaker and director, Yorgos Lanthimos, has been denied permission to shoot some scenes for his forthcoming production, a dystopian film titled “Bugonia”, on the Acropolis in Athens.
The Central Archaeological Council (KAS), which oversees the Acropolis site, with the backing of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, has formally turned down a request from the acclaimed director’s production company to film what is a reimagining of the 2003 South Korean sci-fi cult classic “Save the Green Planet!” in areas between the Propylaea and the Parthenon as part of a dramatic finale atop the Sacred Rock.
Poor Things: riding the Greek weird wave
The irony is that Lanthimos, who won a series of awards for his European Gothic phantasmagorical film “Poor Things”, including Best Film Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, might have had a figurative premonition of this during production of “Poor Things” based on the 1992 dark Victorian novel by the Scottish writer, Andrian Gray.
In the original novel, the reanimated heroine Bella Baxter, who in the film is played by Emma Stone (winner of an Academy Award for her incredible performance), has been brought back from the dead and furiously jumps throughout her surreal, wildly anarchic journey of self-discovery, eventually exclaiming: “I am finding being alive fascinating”.
At one point she writes to her spiritual ‘creator’, Dr. Godwin Bysshe Baxter (Willem Dafoe), declaring that “we’re sailing from Lisbon to Athens but we stop in Alexandria along the way (Athens in 3 hours) … I hope they have mended the Parthenon”.
In Lanthimos’ cinematic rendering of “Poor Things”, the cruise ship carrying the protagonists sails from Lisbon to Alexandria, bypassing the Greek capital. As it turns out, Athens would only have played a minor role in the film through a card written by Bella to Godwin exclaiming, “God, the Parthenon is still broken”, but this cameo was cut during editing of the film.
Lanthimos, who is also an accomplished photographer, went on to produce a limited edition photographic vignette under the same title:
As real events have transpired, it is still broken.
Yorgos Lanthimos in Athens
Born in Athens in 1973 during the death throes of the then Greek military junta Yorgos Lanthimos went on to find work in the world of advertising music videos, TV commercials, short films and theatre plays before embarking on film making, highlighted by his 2009 film “Dogtooth”, an absurdist, existentialist and “perfectly perverse” comedy about adult children imprisoned in their own home, which earned him accolades as a master of dystopian cinema. “Dogtooth” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as the world engaged with what would become known as the Greek Weird Wave of Cinema: a series of strange and provocative films that surfaced from Greece’s years of financial turmoil and dislocation and which broke from Greek traditional cinema.
In an interview which he gave in 2012, Lanthimos remarked:
“(My generation and I) are interested not in the picture-postcard Greece. I prefer exploring other, more contemporary themes, which relate to more contemporary Greeks, more contemporary people.”
Bleat
In 2020, before “Poor Things”, Yorgos Lanthimos teamed up with Emma Stone to film “Bleat”, a short silent black and white arthouse movie set on the Greek island of Tinos with a backdrop of goats. Stone gives a mesmerizing performance as a young widow who embarks on a journey featuring surreal and disturbing scenes of sex, death, and resurrection.
The work was commissioned as part of the Greek National Opera’s and the NEON program The Artist on the Composer and premiered in May 2022 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens.
Emma Stone in Surreal Athens Photo-Shoot
And to celebrate Bleat, Lanthimos and Stone combined in a black and white shoot for the magazine W set in Athens:
“I love the contradictions that you find in the city: the mix of the very modern and rather ugly next to the very beautiful. We wanted to do a combination of wide landscapes and intimate portraits. And we wanted to tell a little story.”
The Acropolis as a cinematic stage
Shakespeare famously wrote “all the world’s a stage” and the Acropolis in Athens has been the cinematic backdrop to some well-known movies and other artistic performances over the years.
In “Boy on a Dolphin” (1957), the sultry Sophia Loren, when not fighting antiquity looters on the island of Hydra, literally adorns the Parthenon. An actual cultural warrior in Melina Mercouri made a prophetic appearance before the marbl’d columns of the Parthenon in “Never on Sunday” (1960).
“Life Without Zoë”, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and featuring the acclaimed Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini, was shot partly in Athens as part of a trilogy “New York Stories”(1989).
“Ruby Cairo” (also titled “Deception”) was a 1992 drama thriller featuring Andie McDowell. Ironically, her daughter Margaret Qualley went on to play in “Poor Things” as Felicity, a haunting young woman who has also been brought back to life via a brain transplant.
In “My Life in Ruins” (2009) Nia Vardalos brought her big fat Greek wedding family to Athens and the Acropolis.
In “Two Faces of January” (2014), the two lovers played by Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst are filmed walking through the Parthenon in a film set in the early 1960s. Spoiler alert: Kirsty Dunst’s character meets an ignominious end in the depths of the palace at Knossos in Crete as the sacred Minoan ruins are literally the setting for a Greek fatal attraction.
More recently, a brightly lit Parthenon forms the backdrop for a scene in the spy action thriller “The Little Drummer Girl” (2018).
The Acropolis has also been used as a haute couture stage for the Christian Dior Cruise 2022 collection whilst only last year Greece’s 2024 Eurovision contestant, Marina Satti, obtained permission to choreograph part of her song Zari in the Parthenon.
But the Acropolis and its ancient environs have also been subjected to other ‘artistic’ interventions which have been problematic, if not cringeworthy. One that comes to mind is “The Magic Crystal”, a 1986 Hong Kong ‘action’ film primarily set in Greece and Hong Kong in which a mercenary has to rescue an archaeologist from the Russian KGB and where the viewer is subjected to hysterical martial arts antics at the Parthenon and in front of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.
Save the Green Planet!
Which brings us to the current furor over Yorgos Lanthimos’ remake of “Save the Green Planet!”
The film is based on two conspiracy theorists – a beekeeper and his cousin – who abduct a powerful pharmaceutical company executive (played by Emma Stone), convinced that she is an alien from the planet Andromeda who, along with other people in positions of power, is plotting to destroy the human race in an imminent alien invasion.
As an aside, this writer is confident that any links, allegorical or otherwise, to Theo Angelopoulos’ “The Beekeeper” or current Big Pharma conspiracy theories would be purely accidental, but delusional and conspiracy-riddled paranoia is certainly not new, either in film or in real life.
The film is understood to have a blood-soaked post-apocalyptic finale.
The Greek Ministry of Culture was quoted as saying that it had every intention of supporting the film but the final scenes were deemed by the KAS to be “incompatible with the symbolism and values of the Acropolis and in particular the Parthenon, as a universal world heritage monument.”
The original South Korean film has been described by one film critic as a “brutal, slapstick descent into humanity’s madness”, as the aliens vainly try to save planet Earth from the humans themselves. The film takes aim at how evolution has led to an “awful chaos” in a world increasingly punctuated by dictatorships, holocaust and genocide. The head alien is reduced to an earth-bound apoplexy in response to humanity’s seemingly innate violence and incessant brutality, lamenting that “you humans are insane”.
Lanthimos’ take will be interesting. What are we doing? Isn’t this insane? What’s the point anymore?
However, as Lanthimos has himself insisted, his work is open to different interpretations:
“I try to make my films as open as possible. Different people with different social experiences can see different things in movies and have their own, personal experience of what they see … (a film should) not be one-dimensional but appeal to everyone and have different interpretations.”
“Bugonia” may be a combination science-fiction, horror, political commentary and anarcho-ecological manifesto but it should not be judged by one apocalyptic scene alone. As the filmmaker Alex Shkurny has written:
“This is why Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are so discomforting to watch: they simultaneously force us to immerse ourselves in a fantasy where the prearranged order is foregone, while also happily showing what happens to the one who breaks the order of things.”
Death in Athens
So in the end Greece’s leading contemporary filmmaker – who is widely acclaimed not just for his foray into the Greek Weird Wave (possibly the world’s “most messed-up cinema” in the opinion of Stephen Jones, the Guardian’s film critic) but also for his innovative cinematography – has been declined permission to film a final scene of his upcoming film “Bugonia” because, in the view of the cultural police, it will offend the historic sensibility and aesthetics of the Acropolis through the spectre of dead bodies strewn over the Panathenaic landscape.
But Greece is not simply a stage for a Mediterranean holiday idyll, endless travelogues and big fat weddings. Yorgos Lanthimos, as a master of dystopian cinema, is one of the pioneers of a new genre of absurdist, surreal cinema that can be confronting but also stimulating.
His stellar reputation and creativity have been lauded at the highest levels of the Greek Government.
The Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has been especially effusive in his praise of Yorgos Lanthimos, describing him as a “pioneering Greek among the leaders of international cinema”. In congratulating him for his Golden Globe award for “Poor Things”, Mitsotakis spoke of Lanthimos’ “bold look at approaching current and, at the same time, timeless issues through expressive ways with his own unique stamp is justified … proving that cinema remains an art for many, bridging personal search with common concerns”.
After Lanthimos’ Oscars achievement, the Greek PM hailed the filmmaker’s “distinct perspective and narrative prowess” which has not only captivated global film enthusiasts but also instilled pride among Greeks.
Mitsotakis went on to add that Lanthimos’ pioneering work reflects “a Greece of continuous exploration, creativity, and advancement” and expressed hope that his artistic vision will continue to inspire in the future.
So what has changed? What has happened to the Greek State’s supposed embrace of Yorgos Lanthimos’ bold and creative approach to current and timeless issues?
According to reports in the Greek media, one unnamed member of the Central Archaeological Council claimed that the proposed scene “contradicts the timeless messages of the Parthenon, one of which is connected to eternity.”
As the interlocutor remarked, what does this mean? That the monument, as a crystallisation of eternity, would be tainted by the fleeting image of mortality? That its inherent eternity is so vulnerable that it cannot withstand attempts to renew its “timeless messages”?
As another commentator quipped, even if in jest, if the world were to end and we were to see the last scene of human civilisation, where is more fitting than in the shadows of one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the Parthenon ?
But seriously, in the words of the New Left MP, Sia Anagnostopoulou, the Acropolis monument in its entirety, including the Sacred Rock, has seen many corpses over the centuries.
Indeed, the sight of bodies atop the Acropolis or in Athens, whether captured on canvas, in sculpture or through a photographic lens, may be brutal but it is not shocking.
Two of the most famous artworks by the artist Panagiotis Zographos commemorating the 1821 War of Independence – depicting the First Battle of Athens and later the Siege of Athens – graphically show the bodies of fallen fighters in the bloody war to liberate the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire.
One of the metopes from the Parthenon itself, although presently held hostage in the British Museum courtesy of Lord Elgin, is South Metope XXVIII which depicts the fabled Centauromachy, with a Centaur rearing triumphantly over a fallen Lapith.
Not to mention the iconic photo of the gruesome – even chilling – aftermath of deadly protests in Athens in December 1944 in the prelude to the disastrous civil war that ravaged Greece.
Where the real corpses are
But it is deemed acceptable that both the Greek PM and his Culture Minister visit Jerusalem in recent weeks to meet with their Israeli counterparts, including the ICC-indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and issue reassuring statements about ongoing Greek-Israeli defence and cultural co-operation at a time when the reported death toll in Gaza exceeds 50,000, the majority of whom are woman and children, in what the International Court of Justice has held may amount to a plausible case of genocide.
A real time genocide. With real bodies. An apocalypse now.
But a Yorgos Lanthimos film shot within the environs of the Acropolis with apocryphal scenes of corpses strewn about the Sacred Rock, highlighting man’s ultimate inhumanity and self-destruction, will ‘offend’ the aesthetics of the historic monument.
Through no fault of Yorgos Lanthimos the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema just got weirder.
George Vardas is the Arts and Culture Editor of Greek City Times.
The feature image is courtesy of CreativeProtagon