VERNACULAR INSTANCES OF VISUAL FOLKLORE: RECONTEXTUALIZING THE GREEK FOLKLORE DOCUMENTARY FILM (1960-1990)

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the short-length Greek folklore documentary film has focused on documenting folkloric expressions in social construction, mores and customs, and folk art in Greek society. Shot in a rather ethnoromantic vein and exhibited in local and international film festivals, it incorporated original ethnographic fieldwork and recorded the last instances of worlds in the process of cultural change in Greece after WWII and the advent of industrialization and tourism. Its rise, coinciding with the history and the developments in the field of Greek documentary film, has triggered many negative allegiances expressed by film critics, including folklorism, atavism, and naïveté. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative research, this article seeks to provide historical evidence on the emergence of the Greek folklore documentary film, and it will explore its formal evolution and ideological traits within three decades (1960- 1990). Through the close examination of specific case studies, it will be argued that three different tensions surround the Greek folklore documentary film: its formative years as standardized by Nestoras Matsas, the advent of the New Greek Cinema in the 1970s, and a self-reflection to tradition in the 1980s until its assimilation into the Greek state television after the 1990s.