What Makes a Film Greek: Inward Investment, Outward Aspirations, and the Case of Jules Dassin's <em>Pote tin Kyriaki</em> (Never on Sunday, 1960)

Abstract

Pote tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday, 1960) is one of the most commercially successful films in the history of Greek cinema and one of the very few to fare well in international markets. However, because it was written and directed by a non-Greek, US expatriate Jules Dassin, and because it was financed and distributed by Hollywood major United Artists, the film has been marginalized in Greek cinema histories and excised from Greek cinema canons. If they mention it at all, Greek scholars place it outside the parameters of Greek national cinema and treat it as a special case. Meanwhile, Never on Sunday has attracted considerable attention from US film scholars, who nonetheless have approached it as a foreign (i.e., not American) production or as an early example of the Euro-American art film. This intriguing lack of specificity in terms of the film's nationality is the starting point for discussing what constitutes a Greek film. Through examining the film's production history and by placing it within an industrial context of film production in Greece in the 1960s, I will argue that this was a rare example of a Greek film with international ambition, therefore inviting Greek film histories to revise their approach to the film as well as their understanding of national cinemas.