Echoes of Trauma in Cinematic Soundtrack Music and the Greek Film Melodrama of the Sixties
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Abstract
Major traumatic crises, such as the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) and the forced uprooting of more than 1.5 million Greek people from their homelands to the Greek mainland by the Turks, have been displayed in numerous popular films of the so-called “Old Greek Cinema” of the sixties. Klak Film, a B-movies production company, specialized in low-budget cult melodramas starring Nikos Xanthopoulos, a much-loved actor and famous singer, some of which refer to the aforementioned disaster. These films reproduce the widespread Greek perception of cultural controversy between the East and the West by forming an epic musical and filmic illustration built upon conceptual generalizations and naïve representations of the past via popular/national memory of collective traumas. The paper presents Klak Film’s production The Odyssey of an Uprooted Man with particular focus on its music as an example of nationalistic nostalgia that echoes previous traumatic episodes but also present-day anxieties and inconveniencies.
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