From politics to nostalgia – and back to politics: Tracing the shifts in the filmic depiction of the Greek 'long 1960s' over time

Abstract

<p>A number of Greek feature films in the 1990s and early 2000s – from <em>End of an Era </em>to <em>Uranya</em> – created a standard depiction of the Colonels’ dictatorship as an era filled with bittersweet adolescent memories. <em>The Comedy of the Junta: The Light Side of a Dark Era</em>, a recent documentary produced in April 2010 by Elias Kanellis, presented it as a laughable farce. More importantly, even, this period was treated as distant and definitely over. Almost from the onset of the economic crisis, we may say that there is a change of paradigm regarding the use of the junta and a radical departure from both the grotesque and the nostalgic view. Rather, its more brutal aspects began to be stressed in a thinly veiled attempt to highlight the continuities between past and present, the police violence and authoritarian practices of the 1967–74 era and that of the 2010–12 one – best encompassed in the popular slogan of the Indignados “The Junta did not end in ’73”. Typical examples are Fotos Lambrinos’ television documentary series <em>It's just a junta, will it pass?</em> and Alinda Dimitrious’s documentary<em> The Girls of the Rain</em> (2011). This article traces this shift and its poetics, focusing on various representative examples of both tendencies and the ways in which they sought to create a certain form of public memory.</p>