Retrieval and Invention: The Adaptation of Texts and the Narrativization of Photographs in Films on Immigration

Post-World War II Greek cinema treated immigration as a theme which could be represented appropriately through comedy and melodrama. The emergence of New Greek Cinema, as well as the flourishing of modernism in European film, inspired young Greek directors to rethink the significance of immigration as a social phenomenon to be represented in their work. Influenced by Alexis Damianos's films, Lakis Papastathis created Γράμματα από την Αμερική (1972), a documentary that questions the cinematic representation of the immigration story as shown by earlier Greek feature films and also by Elia Kazan's America, America (1963). Papastathis's film complicates the notion that archival facts present unmediated evidence about the past. Structurally, the film develops an argument on the techniques of filmic representation, especially on the relation between voice off and photography, but it also comments on how a seemingly "static" movie can expediently narrate and ironize what appears to be a simple and undramatic immigration story.