Dark Cinema, Dark Sounds: Mimis Plessas and the Integration of Jazz into Greek Film Noir

Abstract

Music of the so-called ‘Old Greek Cinema’ of the 1950s to the early 1970s plays a fundamental role not only in the construction of the films’ narrative milieu, but also in the formation of a distinctive, hybrid cinematic soundscape, which is characteristic of Greek film and popular music production of the period and crucial for their perception and reception by the audience. Particularly, in line with neo-noir film music of the post-classical era, Greek film noir heavily depends on the incorporation of jazz music styles, textures, and practices but this relationship has not been investigated in detail. Mimis Plessas – a remarkably prolific composer of mainstream cinema – has been widely acclaimed as the composer who integrated a jazz feeling into Greek film music of the aforesaid period. By providing a critical examination of Plessas’s soundtrack for the film Eglima sta paraskinia / Murder Backstage (Katsouridis, 1960), this chapter draws attention to the performative practices of audiovisual representation in early Greek film noir and the ambiguous qualities of Plessas’s scores as a means to explore mixed cultural identities, collective memories, personal emotional situations, and the osmosis between everyday life and the social imaginary during the early 1960s in Greece.