THE STORY rippled across social media, setting off guffaws from art critics and journalists, an eyebrow-raising international headline with precious little real information attached: Investigation ordered over movie with sex scene at Acropolis. The film was called Ξεπαρθενών (Departhenon), a pun on the “deflowering” of the parthenon, in Athens - the original etymology of the storied structure’s name being a reference to the virginity of the goddess Athena. There, somehow, an anonymous artist collective managed a feat which was logistically and politically impossible: filming a real-life sex scene at one of the most treasured still-standing historic sites in the world. The AP article quoted the collective, but only insofar as describing the Parthenon as representing "nationalism, the cult of Antiquity" and "patriarchy", and the footage as “a political act". I had questions. Was Departhenon any good? Was the intention for the movie to be banned and thus gain attention online? I was not yet aware that Departhenon was more “video project” than “movie”.
None of the press coverage indicated that the filmmakers had a wordpress or, indeed, that the full Departhenon was free to view on the open-source site archive.org, complete with English subtitles. Was it a conspiracy to downplay the actual film, or just old-fashioned journalistic oversight? Likelier that, for editors and social media managers, the headline was more interesting than the controversy (to say nothing of the artwork beneath it all.) The phrase “sex scene” usually implies a plotline, a story, a narrative mostly comprised of non-sex scenes… and/or some level of production value. (One of a great many films I was devastated to miss at this year’s TriBeCa Film Festival was Kristy Guevara Flanagan’s’s Body Parts, which appears to be a deep dive into sex scenes - their ethics and repercussions for actors and actresses, but also how they actually get choreographed and shot.)
Then there’s the issue of location shooting: film crews’ takeovers of iconic sites often sees the Heisenberg principle taken to its most extreme logical conclusion, capturing images of famous national/religious symbols at risk of destroying, or at least culturally eroding, the spectacle in question. I enjoyed Paul Benedict Rowan’s recent book about the beleaguered shooting of David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, in Dingle, Ireland, a years-long process that turned the island hamlet into a satellite of Hollywood debauchery. In my essay about The Godfather movies I made passing reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s de facto occupation of the Philippines during the making of Apocalypse Now. And my colleague Kevin B. Lee’s astonishing “desktop documentary” Transformers: The Premake carefully contextualized the culture shock of Michael Bay’s military-grade occupation of China and Hong Kong during the making of 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, including the infamous incident when two brothers attempted to first extort, then sabotage, the production. Heroes!
Anyway: back to the investigation ordered over the movie with sex scene at the Acropolis. The scene in question lasts well under a minute: a single shot, wobbly, handheld, febrile, made possible only by a surrounding huddle of DSLR-armed tourists looking at the ruins. Uneasy touristy camerawork adjoined with strange heavy breathing noises in sync with crude digital zooms. Departhenon was neither a “real” (as in big-budget) movie nor was it a simple porno. The gay sex onscreen is made surreal by its surreptitiousness, a reminder that money shots in porno films sometimes come with a rigorous stare which can inevitably remind the viewer of the film’s fundamentally transactional nature - a kind of anti-cinema that calls awareness to its own making. Buttfucking on camera as a kind of upgraded graffiti, or flipping the bird?
I didn’t know enough about Greece, or history, or what the hell I was watching, to have a strong opinion beyond still wanting to learn more. Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of 2010’s Attenburg and 2015’s Chevalier (the latter a satire of normative Greek masculinity, with all the pent-up homoeroticism that implies, on the Aegean Sea) told me Departhenon created “a huge scandal amongst conservatives, everything church and state and archeolatry despises.” She helped steer me to the aforementioned wordpress, so I did some digging and eventually found the contact for one of the filmmakers from the collective.
They agreed to my interview, on the condition their name be withheld (no surprise there) and that the discussion be free to access as long as it’s online. I assented; an edited transcript of our conversation is below.
Thanks for doing this. Please tell me some basic facts, as many as you are comfortable sharing: about the production process, the number of people involved, the money, the discussions that went into staging the scenes.
I was the one who had the initial idea of doing this film. Let's note though that I find it hard to see ideas as property, since we are all of us heavily influenced by collective memory and discourse. Having been part of both LGBTQIA+ and anti-authoritarian movements for some years, plus having my own aesthetic ideas that I wanted to put into practice - these are some of the things which led to the film. For obvious reasons, I could not make an open call for collaborators, so I started carefully sharing the idea with friends, and with people from trustworthy networks; activists, artists. If you watch the end titles, you can see that more than thirty people were involved one way or another. But the core of the team was something like ten. The film cost roughly three thousand euros. This covered all expenses: transportation, food, body painting, STD tests.
We all worked for free. We discussed a lot through teleconferences, and then we had rehearsals and shoots on specific weekends, because some of us work on the other days; some of us live in different towns and cities. When I started approaching people, I had already written the story and the main part of the political text. But we discussed it collectively and made some changes - mostly in the political text - which would better reflect the spirit of the filmmaking group. We spent a lot of time discussing the security and legal issues and making the plan for the activist part, the sex at the Acropolis. We also spent a lot of time in rehearsals and theatrical games and discussion of the film itself, which gave us a better perspective and brought us closer as a group. We were cooking and eating together, some of us were staying at the same house, and so on. While the general coordination of the project was on me, each person also had their own initiative, whether recording video, facilitating theatrical games, or acting. Much of the film is based on improvisation, like the party scenes.
At risk of sounding like a film festival pitch-lab executive, some kind of cloneoid mushbrain… Can you describe the difference between your initial conception, and the film that’s on archive.org?
The script is very much like a map; it says where we should go; it is not the destination itself. The performance and interpretation of each actor adds a lot. Moreover, I told the members of the group that it was most important to be genuine, that it was okay to change some of the written phrases and so on, as long as they kept their meaning and performed it in their own way. The main structure is the same one I envisioned at the beginning: the number of scenes, what goes on in each scene, the dialogue, how it’s presented. But while rehearsing, people would come up with phrases, or even improvise their own dialogues, while continuing to play the role. So there are some things that we liked and kept. During each shoot, we felt that some elements were missing or needed to be changed - so we would discuss that, and people would perform on the spot.
To cite one example: in the second scene, while the group is painting the masks, we thought that it was too small so we added a verbal game referring to beers, and people improvised some dialogue about the Zapatistas. The person holding the camera captured some scenes while trusting themselves as things continued; it was not only the result of my directions. The general dress code was set, but when it came time to shoot the ritualistic dance scene, we brought different clothes, and people chose what they would use, and how they would paint themselves. Before the day of this shoot I knew what was going to happen… But the exact choreography of the dance was not in my mind. If you watch the film carefully, I think you will get the impression that, indeed, this was made by a group of friends. So far we have had five public screenings of the movie, and people at the audience always say that. The same observation. But most of us did not know each other before making the film. So the way we interrelated during the production is reflected in the way people interact onscreen. This is what I wanted to happen; this is why we organized the workshops and the rehearsals. I could not predict or dictate how we were going to relate and feel with each other in advance.
What is your collective’s relationship to Greek cinema? Whether that means a contemporary scene, an internationally held cliché of “Greek cinema” (Zorba the Greek? My Life in Ruins?) or the country’s own filmmaking history.
We don’t have much of a relationship to Greek cinema. One can always ask, “What is the Greek cinema?” I think many of us watch films and may have rather eclectic taste, but we are generally not involved in their production. Let's say it isn’t our profession, although personally I do not recognize people who are labelled as “experts”, only people who are willing to and can produce a work of value. I would also be curious to know your thoughts on the film, Steve.
Well, it occurred to me to call the film amateurish - at first blush that’s an insult, but it comes of course from the word for love, the idea of doing something for love rather than for money or a career. I would not recommend the film to everybody and I can understand why some people would laugh it off (indeed, some friends have assumed I’m doing this interview for the sake of shock, or comedy.) But by the end I was moved by Departhenon’s sincerity. I ended up taking the film more seriously than I expected, which is part of why I want to give it more respect than has been displayed in the Associated Press or other English-language coverage. There are still many things I don't understand as well as I would like to.
This is part of the DIY ethos, which our group embraces quite strongly. One of my goals was to make the statement that, if you are willing, you can do a lot without a budget, without needing to be recognized as an individual or an expert. Our group is much more related to theatre than cinema. Many of us have been in theater groups and some of us use theatre as part of their activist work. Our independence to institutions gives us absolute freedom to do and say whatever we want.
So you weren’t especially influenced by filmmakers or by films.
Truth be told, I do not watch films often. The idea came mostly from my experiences, thoughts, feelings and goals as an activist and as an artist. I wanted to connect several dots that play a pivotal role in my life. A few sources of inspiration might be the LGBTQIA+, feminist and anti-authoritarian movements - like the Zapatistas, or some tribal societies who rely far less than ours on a verbal, analytic and rationalistic mentality. Pussy Riot and Andrei Tarkovsky also influenced me. But I have only watched one film of his: Solaris. Even before seeing it, I had been interested in the notion of time and what we call the arrow of time. In science there are actually three arrows of time: the cosmological, the thermodynamic and the psychological. The psychological arrow has to do with how we experience time. So while reading about Tarkovsky I came across his idea of "sculpting in time" and the importance that he gave to the rhythm of a film. It is not like I have studied him, but his work gave me a boost to think hard about that.
There is a Greek artist called Georgios Vasileiou Makris, who wrote a manifesto with some others calling for the Parthenon to be demolished. But let me not be misunderstood - I consider the Parthenon an architectural and cultural wonder. I only wanted to "demolish" the symbolic structure that has ended up supporting it.
I guess my initial assumption from the AP article was: somebody got funding from the state to make a movie at the Parthenon, made this, and now the government will punish artists more. Which could still happen! I wasn’t considering the DIY angle.
But there isn’t much Greek financing for arts, neither by the state nor by private industry. We have some good artists, past and present; most of the ones working today struggle to finance their work and rely on volunteers and our culture of sharing. At some point they either quit or go abroad to find better funding. A lot is done through solidarity. We had no equipment; no funding. Some friends lent to us their own equipment, others agreed to host us at their homes when we were moving from town to town to shoot. Part of our expenses were covered by voluntary contributions of audiences and friends, the other part by us.
My favorite thing about the structure of the film is the weird temporal arc… After a quick prologue of the characters hiking, scored to Stevie Wonder, the first real scene is this kind of elongated set piece, a single shot of Mount Lycabettus at dusk as a group of friends have a conversation, but with no faces or cuts - just knees, feet, hands. It goes on for a long time, at least according to traditional narrative standards. And this lays the groundwork for the moment where the camera goes nuts, zooms in on the mountain, and begins the title sequence.
It goes on for something like nine minutes. Half the crew urged me to shorten it, because they think it’s boring. And maybe it is, for many people, but I think this lengthy scene, lacking dramatic incident, was the right way to express the relaxation and cosiness that this group is feeling after their long hike.
And as I understand it, the characters are sort of excavating a memory from their youth, which is also a kind of analogy. It is about "deflowering" and it becomes an act thereof. Can you talk about the theme of sexual repression vis-a-vis patriarchal antiquity?
The film has two dimensions: its own story, and the shooting of the film as a political act. In the story the protagonists were a couple in the past. They complain that they feel they have lost their energy and courage. Their friends empower them to get it back by fucking at the same place they did for the first time, at the Acropolis—with all the attendant risks that has. Which is then one of the political acts of the film: gay sex at the Acropolis.
Expanding on that - tell me more about the quotes from The Symposium, about the references to Alcibiades and his jealousy, and about Socrates’ awakening.
The Symposium scene we quoted is a funny one. Alcibiades arrives at the place drunk, interrupting a philosophical conversation that others are having about eros, and starts complaining about Socrates in front of everybody with him present. One interesting thing is the openness of their relation. Alcibiades is not ashamed to get in front of the people in the story, and Plato as the author is not ashamed to record it. This is a good indication of the aforementioned freedoms and freeness of perception of masculinity. The quotes used in the film shed more light on the relationship between male instructors and the adolescent aristocrats they were instructing in ancient Athens. A relationship that usually had erotic elements. And we also see that they considered - at least in Plato's narrative - wisdom as an important and beautiful trait to achieve, even more important than wealth and physical beauty.
I am not an expert in history or antiquity, but it does seem that the ancient Athenian society allowed men more sexual freedom, a different definition of masculinity. As far as I know, the term "homosexuality" is relatively new, about three centuries old. They did not share the same rules as we do today, about how men dress and behave; they did not have a rigid list of identities so as to classify each individual, which is mostly the case today. This is something that happens even in the gay community to some extent for example, using terms like bottom, top, twink, et cetera. I don’t mean to idealize ancient society or say that those Greeks had no stereotypes, but simply that they - men, not women - had more liberties. It was okay for Socrates to have an erotic relationship with the young Alcibiades. We used the paradigm of their relationship because modern Greeks are using false facts about antiquity, and instead favoring their own narratives of nation, history, masculinity. They praise what they consider a glorious past, referring to the ancient inhabitants of the space within the borders of the modern Greek state, while at the same time supporting a sexist, homophobic model of man. So, we actually made this film to break the news to them: You cannot be both proud of Socrates and a homophobe. Come to your senses.
If I understand correctly, the sex scene itself was smuggled within a tour group. One thought I had was, it could have been filmed somewhere else and just edited in. You don’t even see the ruins in the shot…!
It was posed as if we were some kind of group visiting the archaeological site, yes. We were pretending we to take photos so that nobody could see what was happening. The front part of the group made a wall to take photos, which was hiding the rear part, the “unit” who were shooting the sex scene. Tourists were passing by and they were thinking that everything was normal - by their own standards, I mean. Because to me, everything was normal.
Let’s get back to the story outside the film. Has your life been turned upside-down since the controversy broke? What form is the controversy taking in Greece, or in the government's threatened investigation?
Our life continues almost just as before, only better, because we go to screenings at art and activist spaces in both Greece and abroad and we have conversations with the audience, which is amazing. When the film made it to the news, it became viral and almost all Greek media outlets that I know published at least one article about it; usually more than one. We also issued a response to these outcries. After noticing a huge spike in visits to our wordpress from Israel, I found this article and deduced - via Google Translate - that our film has caused the implementation of a new security system at the parthenon. Yet despite there having been a lot of fuss around the film, we remain anonymous.
My personal concern was more about members of the far right and how they could react, rather than about the legal part. In actuality, we have hardly done anything illegal, because nobody saw us, we didn't harm the place and the shoot did not require professional equipment so as to need permission. Not that we were concerned about the legality of it - I’m just stating the facts. I haven't seen any more references to the film, so I think that it has been somehow forgotten as a shocking fact. The reactions were generally pretty much as we had predicted. Many were shocked and scandalized. Many saw the humorous part of the title and the act. Some defended the film. The bottom - no pun intended - line, about which I am very pleased, is that we started a public discussion on some issues and that our work and political text were widely shared in the media.
For an international (but primarily American) readership, can you give a sketch of what the extreme right looks like in Greece today? Here in the States, prominent Republicans have proposed and even passed queer/transphobic legislation, designating essentially all trans people and drag queens as “pedophiles” or “groomers”; this kind of hate speech and lawmaking are accelerating at a disturbing rate. It’s a crisis. Many in my generation are frustrated by the experience of discussing it with older, more moderate liberals and finding the issues described as somehow peripheral or secondary - so-called “culture war” stuff, rather than fundamentally appalling violations of human rights.
The Greek far-right has several factions and tendencies which intertwine somewhat improbably, as happens with most political movements. Within a century, the traditional far-right follows a line which begins in the 1930s with the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. It proceeds to Nazis in exile and their sympathizers, collaborators of the Germans who occupied Greece during World War II, the anti-communist groups of the Greek Civil War, and on to the followers of the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974. Even when those parts of society are lost from public discourse, their seeds remain and flourish from time to time. This was the case just a few years ago, when the Greek economic crisis started in 2010: Golden Dawn, the far-right party, gained a lot of popularity and even got into parliament, gaining several seats. But Golden Dawn committed several crimes, many immigrant murders as well as the killing of the antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013. The party members were put on trial and put in jail; finally, in 2020, Golden Dawn was declared a criminal organization. But the mainstream Greek right has traditionally been related to members of the far-right, and here lies what we call the deep state. Wikileaks documents revealed that several Golden Dawn members had been hired as security guards for members of parliament belonging to New Democracy, the main conservative party in Greece (and present government.) Of course this work entailed other errands. New Democracy has officially incorporated members from some of those parties, and three have been appointed ministers. A few years ago, two of those ministers protested the promotion of homosexuality in Greece.
Today we have what we call the alternative right - a kind of more glamorous, white-collar conservative right…
We’re seeing that here too, at least in New York City - people who are (more than understandably) fed up with the hypocrisy and ineffective right-of-left-of-centrism embodied by Biden et al, but apparently lack the imagination to conjure any alternative beyond getting into bed with fascists.
Here, the traditional far-right has been fighting against all progressive development. The traditional far-right promotes an anti-feminist, anti-migrant, anti-LGBTQIA+, Christian Orthodox, pro-capitalist agenda. The present government made school classes about Orthodox Christianity compulsory again, yet also seems willing to legislate in favor of rights for women and those who identify as LGBTQIA+. Of course there is a lot of tension, both on social media and within everyday life. A few days ago, at Thessaloniki Pride, some extremist teenagers attacked the parade. It’s important to note that this kind of conservative homophobia is not exclusive to fascists. Personally, I do not like categorizations like “right” and “left” that much, but I find myself using them. The Greek Communist Party does not allow outed gay men to participate in it, and has not voted in favor of same-sex parents. People of all political tendencies, but mostly men, still react to women's emancipation by using some of the well-known terms of the cultural wars you mentioned: mansplaining, body-shaming, slut-shaming, the denial of the term femicide, and so on. Despite all this, I would like to keep in mind a place’s politics are not defined as much by parties as by its people. And there is a strong progressive movement that is gaining ground even if it is constantly attacked.
As far as the investigation is concerned, I don’t really know if they can do much, even if they do manage to find us. They could try putting us on trial - you never know with a government that collaborates with members of the extreme right. But eventually they would be ridiculed.
Why?
Because in normal circumstances, their pursuit would not have much of a legal basis.
The film is dedicated to "all people suffering violence for no reason other than being different, and to all people who do not resign from eros." Tell me more about this dedication?
I care deeply about humanity and the rest of the living organisms of course. It is important that all members of our society are included in it as long as they are not toxic. The more we are and the more diversity we have, if we achieve a level of coordination, the better are the chances for life to continue. Unfortunately, many are marginalized and suffer violence because they do not comply with social rules and norms, even if they harm nobody. This doesn’t apply exclusively to the LGBTQIA+ community, but to all people: women, immigrants, people with disabilities, charismatic people and so on. It is important to understand that the oppressed should not care only about their own particular group but about all the oppressed; otherwise, the fight against oppression will fail. It’s also a matter of rationality; you cannot advocate inclusivity and diversity only in favor of your own group. How can we solve our big issues when we have to argue whether two men can raise a child or not, for example?
As for the second part of the dedication… It is my principle that I need to focus on what I want, what is my vision, rather than what I am against. We need to fight oppression not just for the sake of reaction, but to make space so that we can live the lives we want. Otherwise we are defined by others, we are not autonomous and we cannot create. And here comes eros. At some point in The Symposium one of the participants talks about the noblest deity Eros, in contrast to the carnal Eros, son of the goddess of love, Aphrodite - a primordial deity who brings all into being. In that sense, eros is the driving force to everything that is important to us: reading a book, shooting a film, having a conversation, sex, whatever. This is how I define eros. We need to have things in which we find joy and meaning - our own meaning - things to fall in love with and to go for. There is no life without eros.
Special thanks to <REDACTED>, Jez Fielder, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Giampaolo Bianconi and Laurence Bond.
Current Mood: Contemplative… 🤯
Current Music: Rage Against The Machine - Freedom