ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS (Lila Kourkoulakou, 1966)
Category: Cinema > Films
| Original title: | ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΟΣ ΒΕΝΙΖΕΛΟΣ |
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| Director: | Lila Kourkoulakou |
| Release date: | 1966 |
| Country of origin: | Greece |
| Genre: | Documentary | History | Biography |
| IMDb: | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255993/ |
Censorship incidents
| 1965-07-12 | Ban on the film ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS (Lila Kourkoulakou, 1966)
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| 1966-01-11 | Scenes cut from the film ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS (Lila Kourkoulakou, 1966)
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| 1967-04-21 | Ban on the film ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS (Lila Kourkoulakou, 1966)
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Description
Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936), the most important political figure of the first half of the 20th century in Greece, is nowadays almost unanimously considered as the creator of the modern Greek state; having delved into both diplomatic initiatives and major internal reforms, he is hailed as an «εθνάρχης» (“leader of the nation”), a title given to only a few politicians and having a similar meaning to “founding father”. His public presence in contemporary Greece can be traced in hundreds of statues and monuments, street names, institutions, the name of the Athens International Airport, in the political and public discourse. But this was not always the case: in his time, he was a highly divisive figure who played a key role in the quasi-civil war that started in 1915, called “the National Schism”. Later on, from his death until the fall of the military dictatorship of 1967-1974, Venizelos was a contested symbol and a national idol in the making. He was frequently commemorated by almost every political faction, by different agents and for various different reasons. He served as the primogenitor of the emerging centrist political faction; he was appointed the forefather of the anticommunist national-mindedness; he was used as a prism through which the history of the first half of the twentieth century was contextualised. His memory gradually transformed from a divisive one, him being the leader of a political faction in a fierce clash, to a widely accepted one.
The film discussed here appeared at a time of change for the Greek post-war society: in the early 1960s, a great clash, called the “Relentless Struggle” – in which the Left participated reluctantly – began to arise between a social coalition led by the Centre Union party (helmed by Georgios Papandreou, an old colleague of Venizelos) and Konstantinos Karamanlis’ governing right-wing party, the National Radical Union. The contested elections of 1961 were the spark that ignited underlying political and social tensions in the semi-authoritarian Greek state, and Venizelos was an important symbol used to frame the political struggle. The crown’s political interventions were a target for the centrists, so the National Schism of 1915 was the appropriate framework for them to use against the government and the “deep state”. In 1963, the centrists came to power, and immediately employed a political and historical narrative through which they placed themselves in the grand genealogy of the Venizelist saga, via the celebration of the centennial of Venizelos in 1964–1965. This commemorative program contained a vast array of events, rituals, memorial services, lectures, radio broadcasts, press features, memorabilia, and the production of the documentary at hand.
However, in July 1965 a part of the governing party, in collaboration with the Crown, forced the prime minister to resign through political manipulation concerning the military’s role –a series of events known as “the apostasy”, which led to the military dictatorship of 1967. A few days later, it was announced that the documentary of Lila Kourkoulakou was not granted a screening license, supposedly due to technical and aesthetic issues, as it used footage from the 1910s. This decision caused an intense backlash and accusations that the intervention against the film was the work of the Crown –with which Venizelos had fiercely clashed during the 1910s on the grounds of Greece’s participation in World War I, igniting the National Schism. Intense political and public pressure led to the revocation of the ban, and the film was granted a screening license in 1966, with cuts concerning the role of the Crown and of anti-Venizelist politicians during the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922), the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936-1940), and the Greek military preparation during the years prior to World War II. This can be explained by the rise of anti-Venizelist and monarchist memory during the 1960s, as an answer to the intense political and historical commemoration of Venizelos by the Center and, to some extent, by the Left.
The documentary was again banned from 1967 until 1973 by the military dictatorship, although the latter extensively commemorated Venizelos –in fact, the largest statue of him at the center of Athens was inaugurated by the colonels’ regime in 1969. However, Venizelos’ historical reputation as a pro-democracy fighter –mainly formed during the 1960s, as discussed previously– led the dictatorship to this ban. In 1973, thousands of people attended the screenings, mainly university students. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, the total delegitimization of national-mindedness and of the Crown granted Venizelos the almost unanimous acceptance that he holds until today.
Christos Triantafyllou
Sources – Bibliography
- General State Archives–Central Service, Archive of the General Secretariat of Press and Information.
- Venardou, Evanna, Αποφασίσαμεν και διατάσσομεν, Η Χούντα, η Λογοκρισία και ο Ελληνικός Κινηματογράφος (1967-1974), ντοκιμαντέρ, Παραγωγή ΕΤ-1, 1997.
- Sakellaropoulos, Tassos, «Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος: Το πρόσωπο, η πολιτική και τα σύμβολα κατά την επέτειο των εκατό ετών από τη γέννησή του. Αφιερώματα και ντοκιμαντέρ», in Giorgos Koukourakis-Tassos Sakellaropoulos (eds.), Η πολιτική κληρονομιά του Ελευθερίου Βενιζέλου. Συνέχειες και ασυνέχειες, Αθήνα, Ίδρυμα της Βουλής των Ελλήνων για τον Κοινοβουλευτισμό και τη Δημοκρατία/Εθνικό Ίδρυμα Ερευνών και Μελετών «Ελευθέριος Κ. Βενιζέλος»/Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 2021, pp. 373-390.
- Triantafyllou, Christos, “Collective Memory and Political Mythologies: Eleftherios Venizelos in Greek Postwar Historiography, 1945–1967”, Historein, 19/2 (2021).
- Chalkou, Maria, «Κινηματογράφος και λογοκρισία στην Ελλάδα από τα πρώιμα χρόνια έως τη Μεταπολίτευση», in Penelope Petsini-Dimitris Christopoulos (eds.), Λεξικό λογοκρισίας στην Ελλάδα. Καχεκτική δημοκρατία, δικτατορία, Μεταπολίτευση, Αθήνα, Καστανιώτης, 2018, pp. 82-99.
