Cypriot Cinemas

Memory, Conflict, and Identity in the Margins of Europe

Costas Constandinides, Yiannis Papadakis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623560027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Cyprus, the idyllic "island of Aphrodite, " is better known as a site of conflict and division between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, rather than for its film production. Constandinides and Papadakis work to rectify this dearth of information by discussing the ouevre of filmmakers engaging with the island's traumatic legacies: anti-colonial struggles, post-colonial instability, interethnic conflict, external interventions and war. Starting with the cinema of the 1960s, when the island became a republic, the collection focuses on the recent decades of filmmakers exploring issues of conflict, memory, identity, nationalism, migration and gender, as well as the work of filmmakers who chose to cooperate across the ethnic divide. Cypriot Cinemas utilizes a methodology that engages all necessary perspectives for an illuminating critical discussion: historical, theoretical and comparative (Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot films in relation to regional film cultures/practices). While the volume develops a discussion based on the reading of the political in Cypriot films, it also looks at other film cultures and debates such as (s)exploitation films and transnational cinema.

1

Archive, Evidence, Memory, Dream: Documentary Films on Cyprus

Elizabeth Anne Davis

We left our place. We left our home. We left our memories. We left our photographs. In short, we left everything we had. […] I have no photos that date before ’63. They must have been burnt, damaged. They’ve all disappeared. Not only our photos but also our memories have been lost.

Turkish-Cypriot survivor of a 1963 attack in Nicosia

Because I’m so attached to my village and my house, I’ve tried to make my own archive—to find recent photographs of my village, of our house and our neighbors.

Greek-Cypriot survivor of the 1974 massacre at Palaikythro

Parallel Trips (2004)

In late November 2011, around 25 people—almost all women—gathered for a film screening at the Home for Cooperation (H4C), a research and educational institute and a shared space for inter-communal dialogue and action located in the buffer zone between north and south Nicosia. The spacious meeting room and café on the first floor had become popular venues for exhibitions, lectures, gatherings, and other cultural events since H4C’s inauguration six months before. This November evening marked the first of several screenings at H4C of Women of Cyprus, a 2009 documentary film made by Vassiliki Katrivanou, a Greek teacher and mediator, in collaboration with members of Hands Across the Divide (HAD), a bi-communal Cypriot women’s organization for equality, peace, and reconciliation. A number of HAD members attended the screening, including several who were featured in the film. One of these women, Maria Hadjipavlou, a professor of political science at the University of Cyprus, introduced the film. She described its inception in 2004 as a documentary about the referendum on the Annan Plan for reunification, and about HAD itself, whose members largely but not unanimously supported the plan and met regularly in the lead-up to the vote to organize actions on both sides of the Green Line. The film developed into something larger, Maria explained, as the filmmaker explored these women’s memories of violence and displacement during the 1960s–70s. Their experiences, narrated by Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot women who were separated for so many years by the conflict, and who now yearned to “come together in peace,” became the central focus of the film.

In the film, Katrivanou’s interviews with Cypriot women are intercut with archival photographs and film footage: images, in black and white and color, of British soldiers checking Cypriots’ identity papers in the 1950s; of EOKA rallies against the British led by Archbishop Makarios, later elected president of the newly-independent Republic; of Turkish Cypriots fleeing Nicosia in 1963 as their businesses and homes fell to fires set by Greek-Cypriot extremists; of Turkish Cypriots leaving their villages in busloads in 1964; of Turkish Cypriots living in tents throughout the 1960s and early 1970s; of Greek Cypriots living in tents after the invasion in 1974; of Turkish bombers flying overhead, and Turkish naval vessels landing at Kyrenia in the summer of 1974; of Greek-Cypriot women and children gathered in village streets, awaiting the return of their husbands, fathers, and brothers taken prisoner by the Turkish army. As the interview subjects speak, or as Katrivanou speaks for them in voice-over, this archival material plays without captions or credits, as if directly illustrating their personal memories.¹

This archival material comprises a series of quotations from other documentary films and television programs—a structure marked not only by the grainy, faded quality of the material itself, but also by its presentation in a 4:3 frame inset into the 16:9 frame in which Katrivanou’s contemporary footage of interviews, public events, and landscapes appears. As archival sources, the film credits list the Press and Information Offices (PIOs) in the north and the south, the Greek-Cypriot television channel, Mega, and the work of two Cypriot filmmakers: Antonis (Tony) Angastiniotis, a Greek-Cypriot photojournalist and activist whose films, Voice of Blood (2004) and Voice of Blood 2: Searching for Selden (2005), expose massacres of Turkish-Cypriot villagers by Greek Cypriots in the summer of 1974; and Michael Cacoyannis, a Greek-Cypriot film director whose one documentary, Attila ’74, was shot in Cyprus immediately after the coup and invasion in July–August 1974. Sequences from both films are reproduced without citation or comment in Women of Cyprus, alongside archival footage of violence in 1964 and 1974—thus seeming transparently to depict moments of a single, seamless history of conflict, without heeding the radically discrepant conditions under which this complex visual record had been produced.

Following the screening, a discussion held mostly in English—a native language for only a handful in the room—was led by a HAD member, Nahide Merlen, one of the main characters in the film, whose narration of the bombings by Turkish forces and her childhood experiences in a northern enclave had brought several viewers to tears. Another HAD member, identifying herself as Greek Cypriot, said how sorry she was “for all that we allowed to happen,” referring to the defeat of the Annan Plan. Several audience members attributed this failure to Greek-Cypriot racism toward Turkish Cypriots. Another Greek-Cypriot woman confessed she had never known that Turkish Cypriots had lived for years in enclaves; she had known “in a vague way” that they had lived in protected areas after 1963, but not that they had been so massively displaced, living in tents like refugees, “like we [Greek Cypriots] did after the war” in 1974. She thanked the filmmakers for making this information available to a Greek-Cypriot audience. A Turkish academic in the room, who taught at a university in the north, said she wanted to apologize to Cypriots, and especially to Turkish Cypriots, for Turkey’s role in this situation. She apologized on behalf of “the Turkish Left” for their ignorance about the “realities of this situation.” She had come to Cyprus thinking she “understood the occupation,” she said, but after watching the film, she realized that she “knew nothing before,” and now hoped the Turkish Left would become much more active in helping to resolve the Cyprus Problem. A young American woman said she thought it would be better if the film had included nationalist or anti-reconciliation voices, since those voices seemed to her more representative of the Cypriots she knew. She had seen the film before she came to Cyprus, and it had not prepared her for the depth and entrenchment of mutual hostilities between the two communities.

Maria and Nahide fielded this last comment together, explaining that they had wanted the film to have a “positive message” about the possibilities of reconciliation, and to represent voices that were normally ignored or excluded in popular discourse: not only women’s voices, but also voices in support of peace. Yet they had long been aware of their limited influence. Another HAD member agreed that they often found themselves “preaching to the converted. It’s always the same people who attend this kind of event; if we’re lucky, we’ll see one or two new people. We never seem to be able to reach outside this small circle.” This film had been more effective at delivering its message of peace to international audiences than to Cypriots.

Introduction

In this chapter, I consider how documentary filmmakers in Cyprus use photographic and film archives as resources for remaking the present: for staging a relationship between the present and the past that disturbs and displaces the nationalist histories they have inherited from films of the war and the immediate post-war period. Quotation from those older films—as in Katrivanou’s quotations in Women of Cyprus from Cacoyannis’ Attila ’74—is built into the contemporary documentary record. But in reproducing archival sequences from older films or original source footage, contemporary films also reproduce the partialities and exclusions of the archival material. I thus examine the structure of quotation from the archives in contemporary documentary films as a structure of memory in the process of being formed. I look at how quotation is used in films to assert the transparency of archival evidence—or, on the contrary, how it is thematized in films that aim explicitly to experiment with history. Along these lines, I explore contemporary Cypriot documentary film as an archive in itself: a medium not only for transmitting a common cultural and political heritage, but also for creating a common record—for collecting, preserving, and questioning evidence of the violent past.

The decade since the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 has seen a rapid growth in the production and consumption of documentary films by Cypriots in Cyprus.² The rise in traffic between north and south, and the revivification of the “dead zone” at the center of divided Nicosia, have fostered the development of an anti-nationalist, multi-communal culture—something like a “minor” community, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975) sense of an essentially political collective that speaks in a majority language from a marginal (in this case, formerly-colonized) position—whose origins can be traced to bi-communal groups active since the 1980s. The territory in and around the “dead zone” in Nicosia has become a new common space for Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, as well as other Cypriots and expatriates, to participate together in political and cultural events—among which, documentary film screenings appear to be among the most popular.

The overwhelming majority of documentary films being made and seen in this emergent political space address “the Cyprus Problem.” Most contemporary filmmakers did not experience the events of the 1950s-70s themselves, or experienced them only as young children; but they have become politicized in relation to those events, and have come to occupy a meta-positional vantage on the ways in which the events have determined social and political life for Cypriots since the division. Some are self-described amateur filmmakers who have picked up a camera to extend their activist work; others are trained filmmakers concerned not only with the political efficacy of their work but also with its aesthetic and poetic dimensions. In Cyprus, the growth of community-based media and the spread of low-cost film technologies such as cell-phone cameras have blurred lines between “amateur” and “art” filmmaking. In this context, documentary film has become a popular platform for what is often called “peace messaging.”

Another factor in the recent expansion of Cypriot documentary film is the relative opening of official film and photographic archives to researchers, and the circulation of archival images in public media where they had never before been seen. In the summer of 2010, for example, as the 50^th anniversary of Cypriot independence was being observed in the south alongside the annual commemoration of the coup and invasion of 1974, the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC)³—the official radio and television service in the Republic of Cyprus—broadcast several documentary films addressing both events. These films included references to violence against Turkish Cypriots during the Greek-Cypriot campaign for union with Greece in the 1950s, as well as footage from the Greek-backed coup in 1974 that led to the Turkish invasion. Footage of the invasion in the summer of 1974 was, in the south, so frequently shown in the years afterward that many Cypriots seemed to see it as their own visual memory; but footage of the coup, and the attendant violence against Greek Cypriots by Greek and Greek-Cypriot combatants, seemed less familiar. A Greek-Cypriot friend of mine born shortly after the invasion told me she had grown up without any “visual connection” to the coup; but in the late 2000s, this visual connection was commonplace.

Similarly, the restriction of official visual archives in Cyprus, considered by some as a form of political censorship, has been a constraint and concern of long-standing for Cypriot journalists, researchers, and artists. But, while I have heard such investigators complain of limited access to the film and photographic archives at the CyBC and the PIO in the south, I have heard as many describe their almost complete freedom in these archives—complaining of perhaps too much freedom, given the massive volume of uncataloged materials stored without regard for chronological or topical principles of organization. Although the CyBC’s collections are beginning to be digitized, and some photographs, films, and television programs are now available for streaming on the CyBC website, a former archivist told me that most of its materials are simply “unknown.” He described dark, dusty rooms full of unlabeled film cans and piles of prints without names or dates. Despite directives from the European Union regarding the preservation of film as cultural heritage, very little in the way of organization and digitization has yet been undertaken in the state media archives.

Of course, these official archives are not the only sources of images and footage from the pre-division period and the war; many Cypriots on both sides of the Green Line have recently been sharing photographs and footage from their personal collections with documentary filmmakers. These archival materials are new, in the sense that they have never before been seen by Cypriot publics; but such a passage from “private” to “public,” as Derrida (1995: 2–3) notes in his essay on the archive, is not always a passage from “secret” to “non-secret.” Often, unlike official footage of formerly-unacknowledged violence in the 1950s-70s, these personal materials easily find a place in familiar genres established in earlier nationalist films—genres such as personal portraits, wedding photographs, family photographs, human landscapes—which limits their potential to advance new, post-nationalist visions of recent Cypriot history.

This tension between the novelty and the familiarity of images coming from personal and public archives is a distinctive and intriguing feature of Cypriot documentary film today. Much of my research with filmmakers and film viewers in Cyprus during 2011–12 was conducted inside that “minor” community of activists, writers, teachers, artists, journalists, academics, and community organizers in Nicosia, who mostly took for granted that multiple perspectives on the conflict—and indeed multiple histories premised on incompatible factual claims—were present and arguable. At the same time, members of this community often expressed frustration and even boredom with the perennial posing of the Cyprus Problem as such. The chronic impasse in regard to a political settlement, the perpetual reiteration of entrenched positions, the stale terms of discussion, the occlusion or outright exclusion from consideration of other political problems in Cyprus, and the intractable self-congratulatory demeanor adopted by people across the political spectrum—all these features of the Cyprus Problem played a part in disposing progressive Cypriots to disaffection with activism and activist cultural production.

Documentarians, too, were frustrated. Funding to support film projects was limited, by any measure, and further restricted by its earmarking—especially by international organizations like the UNDP⁴—for “peace projects” that would emphasize one or another aspect of reconciliation. These limitations on funding not only constrained the radical and creative potential of filmmaking, but also generated competition among filmmakers that hindered collaboration and mutual support. In this vein, a filmmaker living in the south told me that he was heartened by how much documentary film was being made these days by Cypriots, but worried that their films had “no edge” and “no heart.” Many filmmakers, he said, were obliged to work on others’ projects, usually through an NGO or press outlet, and thus contributed production or editing labor without sharing in the vision of the film. Likewise, a friend of mine, an avid consumer of film who grew up in the Turkish-Cypriot community in the north and now lives in the Greek-Cypriot community in the south, acknowledged that documentary films were being made in the north as they were in the south, but she insisted they weren’t any good: “They’re not professional, they’re not imaginative. They tell a story we already know; it’s what the audience expects. These films just don’t work.”

Filmmaking was also threatened by the mainstream political silencing of non-nationalist perspectives. Accusations of censorship by the state in the north and the south were not uncommon. A case in point is Akamas, a fiction film directed in 2006 by the Greek-Cypriot filmmaker, Panicos Chrysanthou, and co-produced by the Turkish-Cypriot filmmaker, Derviş Zaim. Chrysanthou and Zaim have accused the Ministry of Education and Culture in the south of censoring the film by limiting public screening and television broadcast—a contested claim—and of waging a “financial war” against them, ultimately withholding funding that it had contracted to provide during the production of the film. In this controversy, Chrysanthou has publicly denigrated the Ministry as nothing more than a petty bureaucratic organization without artistic vision or any appreciation for Cypriot culture. Outright censorship was not necessary, he told me, when filmmakers had to depend on such institutions for support.

Such conditions of cultural production in Cyprus were ripe for cliché. Many documentary filmmakers worked consciously and deliberately against them, seeking new knowledge about the recent past and new ways to represent it. That this quest for novelty often materialized in archival images in their films might seem paradoxical. What does it mean for Cypriots to turn to the archive for something new? In this chapter, I unravel this apparent paradox. In Part One, I address the social, political, and economic factors that have contributed to the recent profusion and popularity of documentary film in Cyprus. In Part Two, I closely examine a number of documentary films made about Cyprus by Cypriots in the last several years. I focus on the relationship between the present and the past that filmmakers stage in these films by intercutting contemporary footage with archival photographs and footage from public media and private collections. In looking at the use of this archival material in contemporary documentary films, I consider the archive itself anew. The art critic and theorist Simone Osthoff, examining contemporary art works that engage archival materials, observes “an ontological change—from the archive as a repository of documents to the archive as a dynamic and generative production tool” (2009: 11). Along these lines, I argue that the contingency, partiality, and ultimate unknowability of the documentary archive in Cyprus position it as a tool for capricious but potentially radical memory-making and truth-telling.

Part One: The social space of documentary film

In the last decade, venues for documentary film production and screening have proliferated in urban Cyprus, especially in Nicosia. In this section, I explore these venues as spaces of sociality and productivity, where filmmakers collaborated with one another and connected with audiences, and where networks materialized among filmmakers, artists, journalists, scholars, and pu...

Table of contents

• FC
• Topics and Issues in National Cinema Volume 3
• Topics and Issues in National Cinema
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Scenarios of History, Themes, and Politics in Cypriot Cinemas
• 1  Archive, Evidence, Memory, Dream: Documentary Films on Cyprus
• 2  Aesthetics, Narratives, and Politics in Greek-Cypriot Films: 1960–1974
• 3  Cyprus Past, Present, and Future: The Derviş Zaim Trilogy
• 4  Tormenting History: The Cinemas of the Cyprus Problem
• 5  Transnational Views from the Margins of Europe: Globalization, Migration, and Post-1974 Cypriot Cinemas
• 6  Women and Gender in Cypriot Films: (Re)claiming Agency amidst the Discourses of its Negation
• 7  Postscript: Borders of Categories and Categories of Borders in Cypriot Cinemas
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright