Cinema Vrasidas Karalis University of Sydney From the archives of Oblivion: the first female Greek director Maria Plyta (1915-2006) I "The film crew is admirable, the script is wonderful; the only black spot in this film is its female director.' Filopimin Finos Maria Plyta’s films are almost completely forgotten today despite the continuing popularity they enjoy when screened on television. There is something parochial and paradoxical in them that ignites more bewil­ derment and confusion than acceptance or enthusiasm. It is interesting to note that after so many decades of intense feminist film criticism there is only one significant study of her work by Eliza-Anna Delveroudi which deals with her contribution as the first female director. Consequently, we do not possess a digital remastering of none of her films, which circulate in bad and incomplete versions. Plyta belongs to the forgotten generation of early pioneers in global narrative film-making who were for a long time overlooked and disregarded, simply because of their gender. Indeed one could claim that she was part of a world narrative visual tradition because of the universality of the cen­ tral theme of her work, the representation of a gendered understanding of reality. Historically, Plyta stood at the very beginning of the most crea­ tive and prolific period of cinematic production in post-war Greek history. Her work, like those of Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Germaine Dulac andmost 45 Cinema significantly Ida Lupino during the same period, articulated a distinctly fem­ inine visual perception of identity, history and culture, giving direct priority to a woman’s desire to speak in the first person. Greek cinema, as every other national cinema in its institutional or­ ganisation, could think of a feminine presence only in front of the camera but never behind it; women were the passive recipients of the male gaze, as Laura Mulvey has argued in her well-known study. They existed as women only because of their “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 2009: 26). As Mulvey argues women “are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet in a real sense, women are not there at all,” (Mulvey, 2009: 13). The cinematic female gaze itself was always orientated towards the eyes of the Man next to her: only through his assertive self-sufficiency, expressed through his dominant and direct frontality, her existence could be meaningful. Consequently, her very ref- erentiality made her complete; the subliminal image of her submission was the ultimate representation of the direct correspondence between social normality and individual identity. Furthermore, the feminine image was the site on which female specta­ tors could renew and consolidate their identification with passive models of self-understanding and self-definition. The main genres of the period, melodrama, comedy or costume drama, were structured around narratives of masculine power as the central focus of meaningful behaviour. Female characters lacked agency and psychological complexity; there existed only one place for them—the private sphere of domesticity. They moved from the kitchen to the salon and from the basement to the bedroom: outside their closed reality of walled boundaries, they could only be prostitutes or nuns. Socially, they existed only as married wives; their very life was the act of getting married and accepting the submission to their husband. In certain Greek films before World War II, like Filopimin Finos’ The Song of Separation/To Trayoudi tou Apohorismou (1939) the image of a powerful and successful woman was associated with the moral corruption of masculinity. In Yorgos Tzavellas’ films, as for example The Agnes o f the Harhour/I Agni tou Limaniou (1952), also the fallen woman becomes the symbol of an ideal domestication process in which heterosexual consummation becomes the central narrative for a woman’s self-realisation. 46 Cinema Plyta’s films unfold a completely different cultural and social agenda about gender representation. In them, the cinematic feminine struggles to articulate its own language and construct its visual mythograhy, usurping from dominant androcentric visual regimes, iconographic and narrative patterns, necessary for the production of her films. Her early films during the fifties focus on strong-willed, determined and uncompromising female figures, fighting against social structures both in rural and urban environ­ ments; indeed the relocation from the rural to the urban is one of their main subplots. Some touches of the Italian Neo-realism in an uneasy coexistence with the French Poetic realism can be easily detected in her films of this period. One could claim that the first family drama from a female point of view, La Souriante Madame Beudet/The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) by Germaine Dulac, can be seen as the background of Plyta’s attempt to con­ struct a visual space for the female perspective. During the sixties, her films depict young women trying to become em­ ployable and adjust themselves to the capitalist order of the petit bourgeoi­ sie while suffering sexual harassment and constant assaults by their bosses and male colleagues. There is always a benevolent father in these films who becomes the deus ex machina solving the most complex situations. There are also lethal femmes fatales or malicious step-mothers who want to ma­ lign and undermine ‘pure’ young girls but in the end repent and transform themselves into positive role-models. Most significantly however the depic­ tion of female friendships becomes one of the central thematic threads of her work. Young girls form strong bonds with each other which last for their whole life, and save each other’s life in critical moments. There is something uniquely modernist about her later melodramas, which although finish with the formulaic happy ending, leave always some striking narrative and con­ tinuity gaps, which indicate the struggle with both the producer and herself to visualise female experience and articulate the social agenda of her film- making. One of the great admirers of her work, the female director Tonia Marketaki, pointed out that the two periods of development in Plyta’s work can be better described by her use of camera in two different ways: ‘‘Before the sixties, the audience wanted social realism; therefore, long shots. After the sixties, they wanted melodrama; therefore, close-ups.” (Marketaki in Kyriakidis, 2008: 66). 47 Cinema In her remarkable conversation with Gay Angeli in 1979, Plyta tried to articulate her own approach to filmmaking in terms of her empirical en­ gagement with the technical aspects of cinema or her personal preference for editing and montage. As she never studied cinema or was never involved in theoretical discussions about its nature, she stressed her decision to do the montage herself and the fact that: ‘I prepared everything myself to the smallest detail. I had a working notebook which I called ‘the log.’ I designed the settings on paper. I found the locations and placed the position o f the camera. I prepared everything and my great martyrdom was to wait for the technicians to turn the lights on. The truth is that I was always fighting with them; but in the end what I wanted was done. We didn’t have the necessary means. When shooting on location, we waited for hours for the sun to come out. We were working with reflectors. Travelling was a big thing. The railing never fitted properly. In many occasions the camera ‘chewed up’ the film; and it was as expensive as now. Then the studio was so primitive that on its roof raining made such a noise so much that we stopped the synchronised recording and we were shooting silently’. (Angeli, 1979:140) Together with her struggle to master the technical ability to make films, she also pointed out a significant feature of her style: ‘My early films had an ethographic character [social realism]; but then I made melodramas. [....] the melodramatic element didn’t only exist in the whole story but also in the mise-en-scene. For example if a character was angry, I depicted it through a close-up o f a clenched fist’. (Angeli, 1979:142). This is an important device of her directorial style: each frame, espe­ cially in her mature melodramas, was a synecdoche of a missing larger con­ tinuum. Her synecdochic visuality omitted elements that could not be framed but they had to be within the frame. In The Duchess o f Plakentia/I Doukissa tis Plakentias (1956) she depicted the moral and physical endurance of the main character by presenting what men failed to do: masculinity was absent from most male characters and, as a positive activity, it could be found in both genders. The same can be seen in her other films, as female charac­ ters take initiatives to redress imbalances and injustices, which the viewer normally expects to be taken by men. In the hilarious comedy I am man and I will do whatever I like/Eimai Antras kai to k ef mou tha Kano(1960) the 48 C inem a central female character dresses up as a man in order to find employment: a special haircut becomes the visual metaphor for gender. In her melodra­ mas, unhappy marriages are also depicted through fragments of missing unities: submission is expressed through new clothes, coercion through dis­ creet camera glimpses in the bedroom, finally self-alienation with intense domestic chores. The most obvious example also can be found in her superb melodrama The Little Shoeshine Boy/O Loustrakos, when the two youths embrace in pas­ sion ready to have sex, then suddenly a cross appears hanging on the wall, symbolising the sanctity of marriage that could make sexual intercourse possible.