GREEK FILM FESTIVAL
Como Cinema, September 20 to October 8

Any film that encourages its audience to "embrace life" is going to be difficult to argue with. Similarly, it seems churlish to rain on the parade of Melbourne's Greek Film Festival, a long-running community event that, judging from the titles available for preview, offers limited rewards to audiences seeking new and exciting cinema.

Grigoris Karantinakis' Chariton's Choir, for example, is the most retrograde kind of feelgood movie imaginable - a 1960s coming-of-age story starring George Corraface as a grizzled but potent headmaster who taunts the village military authorities, charms the pants off the local ladies, and generally acts as a roguish, irrepressible life force.

Seen through the uncritical eyes of a 14-year-old schoolboy (Stefanos Karantinakis), this is essentially Cinema Paradiso (1989) without the cinema - its dramaturgy is as quaint as its nostalgic indulgence of its hero's chauvinism.

More engaging is Thodoros Marangos' Black Baaa . . . which looks to the past in a more literal but genuinely open-minded sense. This meandering essay-documentary follows its director from Greece to Italy, where he visits the ruins of Herculaneum and investigates one of the most stunning archaeological discoveries of recent times - the sole library to come to us from the classical era, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius about 2000 years ago, and reconstituted, thanks to new technologies, from lumps of volcanic ash.

Chiefly, the rediscovered works are treatises by the poet and Epicurean philosopher Philodemos, but Marangos is less interested in critical exegesis than in mounting an argument, illustrated by cartoons and anecdotes, against the surprising lack of interest in this material shown by his homeland. In a variant of an old joke, he keeps showing us the cover of a book entitled What Modern Greeks Know About Ancient Greece - and of course, all the pages are blank.

In partial contradiction of this thesis, the retrospective side of the festival offers a trilogy of Euripides adaptations by Michael Cacoyannis, best-known for Zorba the Greek (1964). The Trojan Women (1971), performed in English, is possibly the liveliest of the bunch, with an all-star female cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Cacoyannis' spitfire muse Irene Papas, and Katharine Hepburn in the lead role of Hecuba, standing on her dignity as a quavery grand dame.

Clearly inspired in part by the contemporary significance of Euripides' despairing pacifist message, Cacoyannis sets the formal declamations and choral laments of his source material on a collision course with breathless, on-the-spot "realism", such as the brutal killing of a sacred deer in Iphigenia (1977).

Perversely, each movie is conceived as an historical spectacle in which hardly anything happens on screen. Hundreds of Greek soldiers scurry about the beach for the duration of Iphigenia, longing for the winds that will send them to battle; The Trojan Women takes up the other end of the story, with the end of the war leaving the central group of prisoners stranded on a virtually identical coast.

As their city burns in the distance, Cacoyannis' divas continue to battle tooth and nail for supremacy, but essentially it's all over bar the shouting.

www.greekfilmfestival.com.au