TIGER IN A
THINK-TANK
Previously, I have written but a single interview without relying on the taped version. But interviewing the Greek-Ethiop film director Nico Papatakis amid the camp décor of the Charles French Restaurant (where I lunched with him and his actress-wife, known professionally as Olga Karlatos), I have found my second experience fertile and reassuring. Papatakis is—in one valid and still useful word—chic, and besides that, talented and very serious. I tend to be soothed by spacious restaurants and can smile at overt camp. But our environs were just not in it for the more than two hours we spent at table; nor, except casually, were the dishes (that we more or less ate) in it. Papatakis has a large dash of charisma that makes all else secondary. At first glance, he looks like a lionized Italian movie star in declining years, and yet, at second glance (to the expert), he could be nothing but Greek; primarily.
Born in Ethiopia of an Ethiopian mother and a Greek colonist father, he fought, when seventeen, against the Italians in the Italo-Ethiopian war, and went into exile on Italy’s victory, going to live first in Athens, then in Paris. It was a period of hard times and odd jobs till he had the notion of starting a night club that would cater to the smart set. It was the famous La Rose rouge. Before long, its success palled and provoked a disillusionment. Wryly, he asks of that distant time: “What could I hope for? the Légion d’Honneur?” Always—his skin is a kind of quicksilver-pink—his racial origin posed certain problems. Instinctively, on the national crises of Vietnam and Algeria, he sided with their peoples as underdogs. Yet to be, as he recalls, “a little adopted African”? No and again. No!
Result: today, at fifty-two, Papatakis is well launched on a filmmaking career in which he writes, directs, and produces (like a model auteur-director) his own films. He looks much younger than he is, and his ideas strike me as so young, vital, and challenging that I have risked the epithet at the head of this interview. Something about Papatakis challenges your own daring.
Early on, he pronounced—a tiny bit wearily as if he has said it much of late—”I cannot go back to Greece.” A slight shrug gave the sentence both italics and suspense. Papatakis has a delicate way of, what he terms in an English neologism, “ironizing”—calling the fatal turn of events, one might say, with tongue in cheek. He has an excellent English, up to points where his anxiety, to make something clear, precipitates him into French—at hand was our charming interpreter, Margie Goldsmith, who translated at such points. Papatakis, I was informed, is a marked man, even in Paris, which he has made, to date, his home of exile; ironically enough, France, unique among European nations in this respect, is a friend of the present Greek regime.
It was while he was shooting his latest feature, Thanos and Despina, that the coup d’état of the army officers took place in Greece. He had to finish up in fifteen days, packaging his film miraculously under the very eyes of the Greek censors. Well might its original French title, Les Pâtres du désordre, mean shepherds of disorder. Before the final shots were completed, the false uniformed policemen, who have a role in the closing sequence, had some trouble being distinguished from the genuine uniformed policemen who suddenly sprouted on the mountainous scene. The film ends on a wild mountaintop after a struggle and chase up the adjacent mountainsides. A strange personal drama with significant social overtones is reaching its climax. Thanos, a former shepherd—brilliantly incarnated by a real Greek gypsy—is technically eloping with a native Greek girl whom he has morally, if not physically, seduced, or rather, subjugated; for his temperament is gay, cynical, and cruelly autocratic despite his occupation. One doesn’t know how ironic Thanos’ way of seducing the girl has been; it seems to be, at least partly, revenge on the community for having tricked, insulted, and cast him out. The whole village (except the girl, Despina, who follows him, hypnotized, like a slave) has been organized against him. The engineer of this plot is a young man of the district—a former chum of Thanos’ in the army—who nurses a physical yen for him, and has plotted, begged, and otherwise pressured him into getting away from it all and living together; unfortunately, just what the two men’s past relationship was is left undefined.
Now, anyway, the shepherd just won’t have his suitor. Thus has Thanos’ exit come to running away and being pursued by the whole village as well as by Yankos, his male lover, and the police. In a perverse turn of mind, the thwarted suitor seems to have decided to settle for the maiden, his “intended,” whom he tries to capture from Thanos. So the plot, after all, takes the classic form of a fight over a girl. After a brave and debonair show (during which he makes a toreador’s move of confronting, outfighting, and sparing his suitor’s life), Thanos is cornered on the mountaintop with the faithful girl at his heels—suddenly he takes her hand: they jump over the cliff and die.
In the same breath that I told Papatakis how thrilling and beautiful I thought this filmic sequence, I objected that it was spoiled a bit by the young man acting Thanos’ lover: he just didn’t, physically attractive though he was, project an image of passion; since the homosexual passion was an axis of the plot, the young actor’s negative mediocrity was a serious blemish. It took special courage to say this because next to me (between Papatakis and myself) sat the Despina of the film, Mme. Papatakis, looking fabulously like her screen image; that is, smooth, lovely, immaculate of feature, all black-and-white linear harmony. A fragile, slight-shouldered, dreamish young woman, she is the opposite of the busty, intense, showy film star. Gazing into her pure black eyes, I hastened to add that, despite said blemish, the movie had not for an instant bored me.
Promptly, Papatakis admitted, after considering a moment, that maybe, as I believed, the thwarted ex-soldier (in the habit of wearing his old paratrooper’s uniform) had not “projected.” Yet the admission seemed not to make Papatakis at all unhappy. I think I guessed why. People inspired by ideas tend grandly to look to the ideas, beyond their spoiled realization, and particularly to an idea. For his ideas, this Ethiopian Greek obviously has a very positive—even a tigerish—affection. What ideas or idea? I quickly took measures to identify them, and the answer was ready enough: anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-estabIishment; in a word, “revolution.” If I hadn’t already sensed Papatakis’ seriousness, and the tigerish glint in it, I might have mistaken him for a man dealing dubiously in radical clichés. My ploy was to cleave to his work and its plans.
The presence of a moral and political sensibility in Thanos and Despina is crystal clear—but not so its ideas. Nothing could be dumber, on the other hand, than to take the facile view of a Vincent Canby that the film is a “mock-folk epic.” One might as well call one of the old English morality plays mock-folk. As in Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes, it is the ritual pattern that matters in Thanos and Despina, and (in both films) the political overtones inherent symbolically in the assertion and composition of such rituals at this time. I sought for a key to the past in Papatakis’ future. So I asked him what he was working on now. Was it another updated “folk” theme?
Not exactly. He has completed, he said, a film script about the student uprisings in May 1968 in France. “You mean you haven’t started to film it?” A flicker of trouble shot through his expression. Yet he smiled that ironizing smile. “I have some backers that are interested in it but I do not know … I really don’t like to live in France because the police harass me. I have no feeling of freedom. They are always there. I answered my phone once and what did I hear when I asked who was speaking? ‘The police,’ they politely answered! They want to remind me I am under surveillance all the time.” There was a “that’s all” in these words and their intonation.
For a split second, I reviewed what I knew about Papatakis’ past work. Terribly radical? Terribly “political”? On the surface, hardly. I had to mention my regrets that I had somehow missed Les Abysses, his first film, which brought him general attention in Europe with its controversial success. Gaining a signal award at the 1963 Cannes Festival, it was considered a breakthrough for the “violent cinema,” a trend then not so impressively topical as now. The history of Les Abysses attests to the fierce, deep-going unconventionality of this decidedly auteur-director, with his mixed race, adventurous career, and revolutionary motivation. The film is not an adaptation of Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes (The Maids), which provided only the take-off point for a story about another offbeat sex triangle. Having himself been, when a child, a servant, Papatakis must have had an affinity with the basic social situation in The Maids. Remember that Thanos, the humble shepherd, has a passive detachment till pricked and persecuted. Then, like the humble hero of legend, the canonic Fool, he rises up and asserts the true power of his ego.
Papatakis’ film has been called “anarchistic.” That is a vague label nowadays, spanning a wide range of actions and motives. Did something, aside from politics, in Papatakis’ personality explain, perhaps, his obsession with the idea of opposite sexes at war over one sex? I had to get deeper. So I went on to his association with his friend Jean Genet. Genet’s unique temperamental perversity is reflected in the fact that originally he wanted the roles of the two maids in his play acted by young men. Incidentally, this idea has been executed, with success, I think, in Eliot Feld’s recent ballet based on The Maids. Now, startled yet not really surprised, I learned that Papatakis’ original film venture was the production of Genet’s famous film Un Chant d’amour, set in a prison and full of its author’s peculiar homosexual esthetics—tender, violent, poetic at once. Genet has inherited the French erotic tradition (offbeat-Baudelairean) of violence, death, crime, and perversity. Self-evidently, a profound rapport with this complex as a life situation—and specifically a political situation—has helped to mould Papatakis the creative filmmaker. Yet this Greek-Ethiop is no more “another Genet” than he is “another Baudelaire.”
Les Abysses was rejected outright by French distributors, and only at the behest of André Malraux himself—prompted by such prestigious individuals of French culture as Sartre, André Breton, and Genet—was the film entered at the Cannes Festival where it caused its furor. Papatakis kept referring to Genet, and suddenly he confessed—now I had the clue!—that his interest focused on “evil” as represented by all forms of revolutionary action, sexual, political, or economic. Thus, apparently, Genet’s sublime criminal inverts, hero-worshipped by their author, have crystallized Papatakis’ belief in evil as a necessary vital force, a force greater even than the lives of criminal inverts as conceived by Genet.
The theme of Papatakis’ new, unrealized film script, he said, expresses his transformation of Genet’s viewpoint and its highly personal esthetic. He has concentrated on the role of “the delinquents” (his term) in the May 1968 disorders that began with the Paris student demonstrations. Criminal waifs, all sorts of undergrounders, quickly joined the action. But when the shouting and the heaving were over, the wounds bandaged, when, in short, accounts had to be settled with the authorities, the students proceeded to repudiate their emergent allies, the delinquents, taking no responsibility for them. Why? Because, technically, most were criminals; many (some of Genet’s friends, doubtless) already had police records. The arrested students, having hired lawyers, decidedly did not wish their defense tainted by association with the underground rebels who had joined them in the battle … “I see,” I murmured to Papatakis. We found ourselves just sipping and eating.
It had been strange to hear this film director, so poised and—yes!—chic, so conversationally casual, come out for evil in its specifically “delinquent” form; especially as his wife, pure, tranquil, lovely, sat next to me as we faced each other. Here was a fascinating wrinkle. Brushing to one side the unworthy thought of Papatakis as a fashion-follower, I silently reflected: Well, that’s art for you! Only in the safe, pure, tender environs of art can an idea such as Papatakis’—at once so abstract and yet so real as a daily happening—persist and define itself with liberty and ease. Assisted by our interpreter, Papatakis had started to explain his conception of good and evil. Good seems to him a static principle, a sort of embodiment of the Establishment in terms of civilized progress. Yet this same good represents the past as rigid, undynamic, played-out, with the result that evil is automatically called upon as the force that will energize society over again by destroying its barren, rigidified traditions. Papatakis’ evil is the very principle of true energy: health itself! Anarchism? Perhaps. But surely a very personal brand: a chain reaction of good and evil, an existential paradox.
On one hand, it sounded like Marxist logic, and yet the naming of Evil as if with a capital letter brought up the function of opposites in classical dialectics. This suggested, of course, Hegel’s concept of opposed forces that perpetually transcend violence by reaching a peaceful plane of resolution which becomes a higher form, a forward stage in society’s predetermined drive toward perfection. I said as much to Papatakis. Scouting the problem of perfection, he would have neither the Hegelian philosophy of ultimate reconciliation between the opposites of good and evil, nor (when I brought it up) anything like a perpetually suspended contest between good and evil, like that of God and the Devil in the so-called Manichean heresy of Christian theology. I suspected all that was too “academic” for Papatakis, who conceded, however, that his idea was basically materialist.
“Marx’s conversion of Hegel?” I queried. I got an “ironistic” shrug of faint impatience and he shook his trim, handsome head in the negative. He seemed to smile with a shadow of despondence that I could not see his idea in the clear. He started to ejaculate in French and I saw that I had to put to him the decisive question. “Wait,” I said. “Let me ask you just this: Do you believe in evil as an eternal force—not as something that will wither away after the true revolution comes and achieves its aim?” Our interpreter, turning to Papatakis, carefully phrased my sentence in French. Unhesitantly, in French, Papatakis answered: “Yes, that is what I mean: evil is an eternal force.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed. “Now I understand Thanos and Despina better!” We smiled, then, all around the table. Papatakis’ eyes, I thought, had sparked with a gleam of relief and satisfaction. More seriously, at last, we got down to our meal. In my mind’s eye I was recalling that rocky mountaintop against the sky and the gypsyish shepherd—lean and handsome as a swift revolutionary act—hoping to go scot-free (though now encumbered by the village beauty in love with him) and yet inevitably trapped by his pursuers. I recalled that Papatakis had expressed a profound anger with the classic idea of Greece as “the cradle of civilization” and as an “eternal culture.” To him—taking him at his present word—only evil seems “eternal.” The very beauty of the wild countryside where he filmed the last scenes of Thanos and Despina provided what he termed “traps for myself.” The filming of the action could not but emphasize the landscape’s great photogenic qualities. Yet beneath the surface, “all that beauty,” Papatakis had said that he sensed “the color of oppression and the tragic presence of man.”
“Now that,” I thought (as I went on pretending interest in my filet of sole in cream sauce with tomatoes), ‘’is surely a classic conception of man: the conception of the great antique tragedies!” Yet Thanos, the picturesque shepherd, debonair and dandied-up for his flight, is no Orestes or Oedipus; he is pressured, as it were, by eternal forces, into his odd, ironic, if self-destroying gesture—full of its own force, Byronically vainglorious. The double suicide—his and Despina’s—suggests the emergent pseudo-lesbian incest of Genet’s suicidal “maids.” But … what, I quickly reminded myself, of the new Papatakis film, the one whose hero is to be the delinquent collective as of Paris, May 1968?
I put aside all interest in my sole—Papatakis was showing only faint interest in his curried shrimp—because at that moment a million-dollar-movie question had flared up in me (I don’t mean that Papatakis’ movie is expected to cost that much: the less spent on a well-produced movie, nowadays, the better it is apt to be. No, I speak only figuratively). “Tell me,” I said, catching Papatakis’ elusively tigerish glance amid the subtle quicksilver of his face, “tell me! Do you plan on making your hero as individualized as Thanos in your new film about revolutionary evil?”
“Oh, yes!” he replied, as if the prospect were a foregone conclusion. And twice he nodded, emphatically. FULL STOP. A new Thanos, I inferred, a more fully charged symbol, because now he’ll be collectivized.
What can be expected of this as yet untitled film?—it is, so Papatakis admitted with boyish embarrassment, still untitled. With what there is to go on, one can speculate. Could there be in Papatakis’ mind a “dandy’’ of anarchistic evil—tragically climaxed evil—a kind of gay martyr; a man who laughs in the environmental trap of our times? Yet a man who acts, too, with daring and grace and authority, in the very midst of knowing he is the elected scapegoat, the Fall Guy of modern history? Is this what, in fact, the Abbie Hoffmans, Jerry Rubins, and Bobby Seales of our day predicate? Papatakis’ sensibility and his revolutionary urge, his feeling for fate mingled with his feeling for style—a personal style as seen in his shepherd-hero—might … just might … issue in a Daring Young Delinquent on the Flying Trapeze of the World Revolution. That, unexpectedly, could be very nice! If, of course, it were done with taste, true emotion, and penetration of the depths.
Perhaps (such are my afterthoughts) something inherently Don Juanish exists in Papatakis’ delinquent-hero. For Don Juan (as we see vividly in Don Giovanni, Mozart’s opera) gears up very well with Papatakis’ stated concept of evil as a perpetual, ever renewed and renewing force. With his thousand-and-three seductions, and still going strong, the Don Juan type would seem to incarnate the same “anarchy” of moral action Papatakis has in mind when he lauds evil as the essential energizer. The many ladies loved and left by the fabulous Don were unhappy. But happiness—especially any particular person’s happiness—is not the relevant issue; it wasn’t in Don Giovanni’s time, and presumably it isn’t now. Don Giovanni himself is “happy” only in being conscious of his own person as a force transcending all morality of conduct. His only happiness is the transcendent freedom to seduce. He is out to lay the world, and all that stops his illustrious career is the intervention of the supernatural powers supposed of the Christian religion. These powers remain a valid theatrical device, a “classic” device. And yet very few people today believe in the ability of anything to halt the growing revolutionary temper of our restless society … except tentatively and temporarily.
In this tentativeness and temporariness, we are, all of us, trapped as the earthbound race of man. No Apollo mission to the moon, successful or merely heroic, can extricate us from this trap whose dilemmas we have to work out down here during this and all other “earth days.” I was really sorry not to have been able to pursue such thoughts with Nico Papatakis. He and his wife, when we had our coffee, were quickly wafted away to another rendezvous with the agents of publicity. I did have the chance, however, to ask him if he would go back to France in order to film his new work in the actual setting where its action took place: Paris and its hoary groves of Academe. “As you know,” said Papatakis, “I don’t like the prospect of working in Paris. They are trying”—the slight, ironizing smile again—”to get me to live and work here.”
“Really?” I broke out. “That’s marvelous!”
Yet the “they” was vague enough to make it tactless of me to inquire just who “they” might be, and what inducement they were offering. Besides, time had really run out.
I can add, personally, I hope they—that is, we—do keep Papatakis over here. Everything else being even, he might add up to something wonderful. Think tanks need tigers—preferably with a flair. And flair, indubitably, Papatakis has.
Our interpreter, long hair floating in the wind on Sixth Avenue, was out in the street frantically hailing a cab. On the curb, I shook the dreamish hand of Olga Karlatos. I was thinking: “Add a sex, add a problem!” Our day is one of piling-up problems, and there’s nothing piling-up problems need so much as one real good hero … That word “good” is merely colloquial. Papatakis: take it from here!
One page from a feature devoted to the release of Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s Quiet Days in Clichy, which included numerous publicity stills, excerpts from Henry Miller's novel, and the lyrics of Country Joe McDonald’s theme song for the film, from Evergreen Review No. 85, December 1970