Makronisos as a Lieu De Mémoire: Filmic versions of the island’s landscape

Abstract

Among the Greek islands that served as places of exile in the 20th century, Makronisos holds a prominent position due to its unique history. During the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s, a ‘rehabilitation’ camp was established on the island under army control. Physical and psychological torture was the primary method for implementing rehabilitation, aiming at ‘reforming’ young recruits and civilians who were under the sway of communist ideology. When the Civil War and its traumatic impact on postwar Greek society became the subjects of public debate during the Metapolitefsi (restoration of democracy), Makronisos remained a widely discussed case, and in 1989 it was officially proclaimed as a historical site. The contribution of cinema to the construction of the island as exemplary lieu de mémoire (‘realm of memory’) is significant. Making extensive use of archival material, filmmakers have constructed visual narratives and drawn a new mapping of the island’s natural and symbolic geography. This article examines four films about Makronisos produced over a span of nearly forty years, from 1975 to 2012, and explores the way in which each film represents the island’s status as memory place. It discusses how the different versions of the traumatic memories of the Civil War are recorded on the natural and architectural landscape of the island and how each director discovers, interprets and brings to the fore its haunted topoi, mapping anew the geography of collective memory, through the insisting presence of traces that the camera discovers, and transforming each film itself into a lieu de mémoire.