Tonia Marketaki’s The Price of Love (1983): The Corfu of class differences and universal archetypes

Abstract

Tonia Marketaki’s I timi tis agapis (The Price of Love, 1983) is a film adaptation of the novel Honour and Money (1912) by renowned Greek author Konstantinos Theotokis (1872-1923), the plot of which is set in Corfu in the early 20th century and revolves around a romance doomed to fail due to economic and social factors. As the article points out, before Marketaki’s film, mainstream Greek cinema portrayed Corfu from a tourist perspective, with a few unconventional productions showing the island in an unflattering light. In The Price of Love, Marketaki departed from these traditions by capturing the island’s beauty in pictorial compositions, giving it a fairytale quality. She combined this fairytale charm with Theotokis’s social criticism and changed or added scenes to Honour and Money that expanded Theotokis’s political commentary or gave it psychoanalytic dimensions. Marketaki’s Corfu, the article argues, is a setting where significant social differences and Jung’s universal, archetypal opposites intersect. The Price of Love thus encourages viewers to see the island in a new light and prompts a broader consideration of audiovisual representations of islands as part of a dialogue with previous or contemporary reconstructions and other disciplines. The article supports its argument through a comparative analysis of the film and the novel, also drawing material from Marketaki’s archive.