From Greece
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | From Greece |
 | |
| Country of production | FRG |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1966 |
| length | 26 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Peter Nestler , Reinald Schnell |
| script | Peter Nestler, Reinald Schnell |
| production | Peter Nestler |
| music | Mikis Theodorakis |
| camera | Peter Nestler |
| cut | Peter Nestler |
| occupation | |
|
Peter Nestler (speaker) | |
Greece is a documentary film in black and white from Germany by director Peter Nestler from the year 1966 . The film premiered on February 16, 1966 in Oberhausen and was defamed by the trade press as a communist work. It led to the professional emigration of the director to Sweden. The film depicts the struggle against fascism in Greece and reflects the internal political conflicts of the state in the 1960s, which finally led to the Greek military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974.
content
The film tries to trace the phenomenon of fascism in Greece from 1940 until the shooting in the summer of 1965 in three sections: (1) the partisan struggle of the communist-led ELAS against the war crimes of the German occupation army; (2) the civil war that began immediately after the end of the occupation in 1944 between ELAS and the right-wing EDES , which was supported by the occupying powers of Great Britain and the USA and ended with the victory of the right-wing royalist forces, and (3) the political struggle of the following Time in which many civil rights were restricted until the 1960s. The focus here is on the demonstrations against the premature replacement of the liberal Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou , who was in a power struggle with the right-wing military, which was supported by the royal court and the right-wing conservatives.
At the center of his documentation Nestler places the war crimes committed by German occupation forces in the Distomo massacre in which an SS unit killed 1,800 residents of the village of Distomo in central Greece on June 10, 1944. Nestler tells the story in front of the pictures of a long sequence of an interview with a village woman dressed in black, without, however, describing her in more detail or giving her voice. In a second sequence, he reads a mother's letter to her son, who has been sentenced to death, in front of a picture of a tree on the coast.
The film is designed in an agitational and instructive way that tries to tell the political events of the past twenty-five years from an anti-fascist point of view. He dispenses with the stories of contemporary witnesses and gets by solely with the narration of the narrator. Individual sequences are underlaid with the music of the composer, politician and “folk hero” Mikis Theodorakis . During the demonstrations in 1965, Nestler repeated the demonstrators' slogans without interpreting them. The film ends with the announcer's appeal: "Fascism must be overcome, there will be a free Greece, long live the Greek people!"
On April 21, 1967, less than two years after the end of the shooting, the Greek military seized power in the so-called Colonel coup and established a military dictatorship.
reception
In the documentary 5 Comments on the Documentary , the interviewed Peter Nestler expresses himself as follows: “The necessity of the fight against fascism just became clear to me at the time with the literature on Nazi fascism. I have seen more and more how great the danger of fascism is, as Brecht puts it: 'The womb is still fertile from which this crept.' (It is) the property relations and the social conditions that made fascism great, still… .. And Greece was a good example. I couldn't sell this film 'From Greece'. I tried it at every institution, every broadcaster, and I didn't succeed. I would have liked to work in Germany and only went to Sweden because I was hoping to at least be able to continue making films here. In the Federal Republic it was no longer possible. "
In fact, Nach Greece was a film that was extremely undesirable among the ruling establishment in Germany , especially against the backdrop of the Cold War and the involvement of Great Britain and the USA in the political struggles of Greece in the post-war period. This led to boycott and scandal. At the short film days in Oberhausen, the film was sharply criticized and described by the industry magazine Filmecho / Filmwoche as a communist piece of work. Nestler was finally no longer commissioned by the public television companies. Nestler then moved to Sweden in 1967, where he had family ties.
From Greece is currently available on a DVD with the complete works of Peter Nestler; the 16 mm film has been transferred to DCP ( Digital Cinema Package ).
Web links
- Of Greece in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- From Greece in the online film database
- From Greece at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ To Greece. Filmportal.de, accessed on August 7, 2017 (German).
- ^ Jörg Becker: Peter Nestler. A question of trust. ray Filmmagazin, 2007, accessed on August 7, 2017 (German).
- ↑ Kay Hoffmann: Peter Nestler. Poetic provocateur. Films 1962–2009. In: 5 DVDs in a slipcase with booklet. absolutely media.