REWIND

The first modern performance of an ancient tragedy takes place at the ancient theater of Epidaurus on Sunday, September 11, 1938. Electra by Sophocles is directed by Dimitris Rondiris, with Katina Paxinou performing, Alexis Minotis addressing the camera, and A. Meletopoulos directing the documentary. The first aerial film shot over Athens and the Acropolis was filmed in 1918, piloted by Thanos Veloudios. Conductor Dimitris Mitropoulos wanders alone through the Acropolis as Nelly films him. Villar stages Wedding Under the Acropolis at the foot of the sacred rock, and film critic Vassilis Rafailidis comments on the surrealism of the choice. Three interwar documentaries are presented in an episode of the series Documentaries Through the Passage of Time by Lakis Papastathis (2009), from the ERT Archive. Thessaloniki’s waterfront at the beginning of the twentieth century; Venizelos attending a church service in 1910; farmers transporting supplies in 1916; the civil war raging as the Olympic flame departs for England in 1948; the Lefkada earthquake; the national elections of 1951; and later, in color, tourism footage from the 1960s in Athens, Corfu, Crete, and Thassos, all appear in reports and newsreels from the British Pathé archive. Together with Aristotelis Maragkos’s The Unknowing of Things, an original found-footage work commissioned by the Festival and in collaboration with the Greek State Archives, this is a program that brings together documents and archival materials to engage in dialogue with Greek history, as well as with the present and the future.