Electra2.0019_Cacoyannis

Michael Cacoyannis, director, Electra, motion picture adaptation of Euripides' Electra, 1962.

Michael Cacoyannis (1922-2011) was a native of Cyprus who studied in England before turning to filmmaking. He crafted several cross-over films, made in Greece for an international audience — Zorba the Greek (1964), Stella, aside from the “Euripidean Trilogy” of Electra (1962), Trojan Women (1971), and Iphigenia (1977). He played an important role in developing New Greek Cinema (NHK) and promoting it abroad. In the late 1950s and early 1960s a renewed interest in classical narratives was rising in Athens. In part, the Greek film industry was collectively seeking a national character, and the native narratives from Hellas’ classical past offered home-grown topics, characters, and plots. Cacoyannis said that in the making the film his “aim was not to re-create “Electra” in time but to strip it of time, and in this my film owes almost everything to that part of Greece today which appears timeless — a village clinging to the rocks, the proud figures of draped women against whitewashed walls, the carrying of pitchers to the spring, the hospitality to strangers, the lament of a shepherd’s flute. My guide was Greece, its landscape, tradition, folklore, the only tangible links with the past. Greek tragedy has no age.” — M. Cacoyannis quoted in P. Michelakis, Greek Tragedy on Screen (OUP, 2013), p. 49.