Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:03  

March 25 2016, the Harvard Film Archive screened Chevalier. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton, and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.

David Pendleton  0:23  

Good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to see all of you here. Great energy in the room. My name is David Pendleton. I work here at the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a pleasure to invite you all to this very special evening.

Let me just say quickly to get it out of the way to remind you to please turn off anything you have on your person that might make noise, that might shed light, and please refrain from illuminating them while the house lights are down for the pleasure and concentration and immersive attention of all of us.

The film that we're about to watch is called Chevalier. We're showing the local premiere of the third feature by Rachel Athina Tsangari who is well known to local audiences here. Well, as we're saying, she's local now. As the name implies, she's got roots in Greece and is a central figure of what's been called a sort of a “new wave” of Greek filmmaking. But she was also here last year teaching film production when we presented a program of her first two feature films, The Slow Business of Going from 2001 and Attenberg from 2010, as well as some other shorts. In between those two films, she collaborated with fellow Greek Yorgos Lanthimos on his films Kinetta, Dogtooth and Alps. And it was really that sort of moment where Dogtooth and Attenberg came out in 2009, 2010, that launched this idea of a new energy in Greek cinema, one with a real fresh approach to narrative—that you'll see tonight as well—narratives often built episodically around rituals or around games, often with a rich range of tones— from the menacing to the comic, to the melodramatic, in the best sense, I would say.

The film that we're going to see Chevalier has been making waves on the festival circuit since premiering at the Locarno Film Festival last summer, as well as being featured in the New York, Toronto, Vienna, Rotterdam, and London Film Festivals—it's sort of a list of the major film festivals in the world—and won the prize in London and is now being theatrically released by the good folk at Strand Releasing. And now that Athina Rachel Tsangari is here this year as a Film Study Center-Radcliffe fellow, we're pleased to have her here in person to present the film.

I think one key film that I had in mind watching Chevalier is a film that Tsangari made in 2012, after Attenberg, a sort of a medium-length work, which we showed in 2015, called The Capsule that conjured up an island world of seven young women in a mansion on the rocks, enacting these strange rituals of desire and submission that led to a series of rewards, punishments, and transformations. I think that film is sort of the secret sharer or a secret twin to Chevalier, which is about seven men on a boat in the Aegean bound for Athens, who find themselves playing a game of rivalry and mastery.

Continuing Athina’s collaboration with other major figures of contemporary Greek cinema, the screenplay is co-written with Efthymis Filippou who's also worked with Yorgos Lanthimos. But besides that side to this film, those of you who are frequent attendees here will know that Athina is a consummate cinephile for her two programs of furious cinema that she put together from the 1970s for us. And there are plenty of echoes of other films in Chevalier, to be sure, from Kubrick's fascination with humans who are part animal machines that maybe slightly sentience, as well as a whole cycle of films set in sort of enclosed worlds with games that turn very serious—everything from Exterminating Angel to Deliverance to Cul de sac to Salo to Sleuth—but what Athina makes of all of this is truly her own. I won't say too much more about the film because it's full of surprises. But perhaps the main surprise is how funny it is, despite these shifts in tone and despite the fact that it's often a sort of deadpan or absurdist humor, but it's definitely there. She will join us for a conversation after the screening but here to say a few words of welcome, please welcome Athina Rachel Tsangari.

[APPLAUSE]

Athina Rachel Tsangari  4:54  

Thank you. Wow, that was a knockout introduction. David and I have been presenting Furious  Cinema for the last year and we’re usually here playing good cop, bad cop, but this time it's just good cop.

I'm extremely moved to be here. I was telling a friend today that to me this is in a way the most important screening after six months, because this has been my home, and also this is where Chevalier was edited last year, and it was a very, very difficult film to edit. So thanks to the Visual and Environmental Studies Department where I was teaching last year and the Film Study Center who supported me and the Harvard Film Archive [which] has been my home. I'm basically living here. [LAUGHS]

The film was ready for Locarno. I'm very moved. This film was extremely difficult. And although it's a comedy– It became a comedy because the circumstances that I was trying to talk about and critique have been dismal. I mean, it's a film about seven men on a boat that breaks down and about seven men who break down with the boat. So you can sort of make the connection to what's been going on not only in my country, but in Europe and the rest of the world. So it was my comment and my personal way of surviving that two years ago when I shot the film. Nevertheless, it is a comedy. So I invite you to laugh. And I'm sure you're gonna have many questions afterwards. And I can't wait to speak with you. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  7:28  

And now David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  7:31  

Please welcome back Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Thank you very much, Athina. I find the film fascinating. And we were talking during the credits, there's actually a couple of films... I mean, I listed a number of films, but there's really two films that I realized watching it again, that I would really like to mention, which is two films by women directors looking at relationships between or among men. First one is Mikey and Nicky by Elaine May that you showed and the other one is Claire Denis’ Beau Travail because–

Athina Rachel Tsangari  8:21  

Which I haven't seen.

David Pendleton  8:23  

Oh really?! Well, I mean, it's not similar. There's only a certain impulse if you read the film a certain way as almost the sort of this fascination about group dynamics among men. I guess I'm just thinking about the film.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  8:38  

I should say that the first tweet that came out of Locarno for Chevalier was “Boat Travail.” [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  8:47  

Oh, the first tweet. Boat Travail. Oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah, not to mention Knife in the Water.

I'm just wondering to what extent you thought about it as you were making it, especially after The Capsule which is this film about women and relationships among women? To what extent you were thinking about this as a film looking at men or at masculinity, specifically.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  9:13  

I mean, when I first started thinking about the film as a setup, as a universe, as always, when I start working on something, I don't think in terms of gender. I didn't think of gender when I did The Capsule—which of course it was all women and here it's all men—but not mixing the genders in a way made the power game and the power dynamics more clean. You know, if I threw even like a female cat on that boat, it would all be about who would get the female cat. And, so the women were, in a way, always there but in the soundtrack.

David Pendleton  10:04  

Right, right. Well, because I feel like in your films there is a constant play between eroticism that gets turned into ritual and ritual that seems at some level erotic but then also shades into questions of power. And so I find it this very potent meeting point of the erotic with the political, the role of games or rituals—in Attenberg, as well—and there's always a certain coolness that keeps these things at a distance. I'm wondering to what extent you find is there an erotic level to this film? I was thinking, for instance, is it Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer who has this piece, it's a bunch of guys roughhousing, like these college guys, and you know, she's put on it this caption, which is “You construct elaborate rituals to touch the skin of other men.” And so I was just curious about if you had any thoughts about what the status of these rituals is in the world of your films? Is it all about establishing dominance and hierarchy or is there a sensual aspect to it as well?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  11:21  

I mean, yeah, you can't have power without the sexual or sensual aspect in it, right, like they go together. The script was actually a skeleton of this. I mean, I knew that I wanted it to be a bunch of men figuring out their power dynamics and their so-called identity. But at the same time, what I was more interested in is how you approach vulnerability and insecurity in a basically, power system, which was a very difficult thing to do within Greek society. So in a way, it was very much a social experiment.

Casting this film was a social experiment. The whole casting process was basically half of the film because I had this skeleton that I had written with Efthymis Filippou. We knew we had devised the game, which was Chevalier as a way of exemplifying these power dynamics in a way that was not hopefully didactic, or a direct commentary on patriarchy and the crisis, which is a result of that, of 2000 years worth of patriarchy in Greece. As always, everything I do is just abstracting it to a level where it's almost slapstick, or screwball. As you know, I love screwball comedy. And I also love tragedy. You know, my initial studies were all in ancient Greek tragedy theater, Pinter, Beckett, then, you know, Buñuel came, Ionesco, you know…  so basically, all of these heroes of mine somehow are there. So the important thing– I knew that we're going to be on a boat, we're going to be there for more than a month, astray, and I'm a woman director in Greece—which in itself has lots of social and gender implications—with a primarily female crew. So, casting those men who are going to be the characters, it was very important that their personalities would merge into my characters. So it took about nine months—where basically just the videotaped additions is like the other Chevalier. You know, seeing, I don't know, something like 300 men and they were not actors necessarily, just men who could basically lend their personalities to these archetypes that Efthymis and I had created. And one of them for example, Christos, the guy who plays Christos, he's the biggest pop star in Greece, like phenomenally, probably the most important man in Greece in the last twenty years. He has arrived, all regimes, all crises. You know, so actually putting him into that role of essentially the loser was something that was a big risk, you know. He accepted it, and he really, in a way was loving it.

David Pendleton  15:41  

Yeah, Christos sort of strikes me as a narcissistic loser. And he's the one who has the monologue into the mirror about, “I'm not fat,” and “I don't have high cholesterol.”

Athina Rachel Tsangari  15:51  

I have to say that half of the stuff that's in the film right now is stuff that came out of improvisations with them. So we basically were on the boat for a month before the crew came, and we just developed the scenes together. They knew what the deal was. They knew that once they got on the boat, they just have to completely disrobe and be vulnerable. And part of the audition process was to figure out who of these– And some of them were like, really, very powerful actors or performers. One of them, Yorgos—who is the one who's giving the blood brothers speech in the end—he's a very celebrated film director. So directing another film director was another challenge. Yeah, so they basically just checked their ego at the door. And we just worked for a month trying to figure out how each one was going to play. Each one of us was going to play the game. We all did. You know, actually, the game of Chevalier was something that I was playing first of all, right. I mean, I was just, you know, going with my assistant director to the boat the first day, I was shaking, you know, because I knew that at any moment, there could be a mutiny.

David Pendleton  17:41  

So you set up a high stakes situation, a high drama situation. Can you talk a little bit about the cinematography as well, because I find the film really striking looking with flares into the camera, lots of sort of milky light, this kind of beige palette, or light palette, shall we say? And also the the way that you're able to use the spaces of the boat in these constantly fascinating ways. And then the times where we get off the boat when they're walking around, suddenly you know, there's these beautiful curves on the sea shape too. There's a way in which you use space, or construct space in your films that I find really...

Athina Rachel Tsangari  18:24  

Yeah, I mean, I chose this boat because it was not… The first thing that I liked was the walls. They were white lacquered. You know, I wanted to give that feel of almost like a spaceship. There was nothing like [UNKNOWN] about it. And I mean, you mentioned Kubrick, and you know, he's always someone that before I make any movie, I'm on a Kubrick diet for a couple of weeks before I actually start shooting just to make sure that he's watching after me. And yeah, so the fact that there were all these very reflective walls…  There were a few mirrors on the boat, and then as soon as I saw that, I just asked my production designer to just put mirrors everywhere. And we did all this before I invited my Director of Photography to come and when he came, he started crying, and he wanted to kill himself right there.

David Pendleton  19:43  

They were not tears of joy.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  19:46  

No. I mean, it was a very difficult job for him because every single movement– You know, it was actually a much smaller boat than you think. It's just the lenses that we use that make it look a bit bigger. So, literally, the actors were there. And all of us huddled, we're here, and we couldn't even breathe while we're shooting because there would be shadows. There was nowhere to hang lights; we did everything with practicals. But basically, I wanted it this way. And the way I usually work is that I set everything up with my actors. And you know, in Greece we don't have money, but we have time—and also extreme dedication. So my actors sometimes would, you know, they have full time jobs. I would have to coordinate, you know, they took time off their jobs. Some of them were actually having theater performances at night. So we had to dock, they had to jump on the motorcycles and then go to the theater, and then come back at 5am to sail.

Okay, so we rehearse, and while we rehearse, I usually breakdown the scenes with my assistant director. And I make little sketches–

David Pendleton

For camera setups, camera angles…

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Everything. And then my director of photography just comes for a week before. And then every single thing is absolutely set. There is not even one improvisational thing on the set. Because, as I said, we don't have very much money, so we have to be always on time. We have nine hours a day to shoot; we can’t go over time.

This is my first essentially dialogue film. So one of the main reasons I wanted to do that was [in] my foray [into] choreographing the human face and the human voice, it was all about speech and choreographing speech. And we spent lots of time basically doing sort of like a symphony of voices, we prerecorded them, so then I would be listening to make sure that the cadence was something that I responded to. And then when we actually started shooting, everything was absolutely set. And all of my previous films are quite still. And this is the first time that I actually started working with moving the camera. Since we didn't really have time to move, we just built this sort of device, these things that w built that are very, very long sliders. So all along the boat, where these sliders are like bridges almost, where the camera would just slide back and forth. And in the big sense, there would be two cameras, and I would always operate one of them. It was almost like conducting a symphony between myself and the director of photography. Like trying to compose through the faces.

David Pendleton  23:36  

That's fascinating. It's almost like filming a live performance.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  23:42  

Absolutely. And I have to say, they were amazing, because usually in a film with dialogue what you do normally is you break down the dialogue scene in little pieces and then you just shoot your close-up. Every time is a different setup. You shoot your medium, your close-up, you shoot the master, and it's usually breaking down the dialogue in little pieces, but in our case, they had to do the entire scene over and over and over again. Everyone had to be absolutely present. Usually the time off screen is called like dead time, you know, so it's actors dead times. They didn't have any of that time. It was all on time. So basically their reactions were as important as the actions, so they were working nonstop, and getting drunk at night a lot. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  24:47  

[LAUGHS] It sounds a little bit like actually like a Robert Altman shoot, for instance too, which would often involve having the thing play out and then have the camera moving through the space.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  24:54  

Absolutely. I mean, Altman, you know, studying Altman myself and my editor Matt Johnson, you know... Altman, Buñuel, Kubrick, you know, Cassavetes.... There is a lot of studying of their methods and hoping that somehow we would make something of our own.

David Pendleton  25:23  

Yeah, no, it's true. I guess, because I like to talk to you about the films that you've seen and the films that you'd like, so I'm looking for them in the film, but it's a very original blend, I think. Yeah, absolutely.

Are there…? I don't want to hog... Who wants to be the first person to ask a question in the audience? I know that's always tough. Here, if I cut my wrist, my palm, with a knife… [ATHINA LAUGHS]

Oh, here's a question! Go ahead and take the mic so we can hear you

Audience 1  25:54  

There's kind of this literal aspect to these two—both The Capsule and Chevalier with the literal ongoing game of scoring points here and then in The Capsule, domination by the vampiric Ariane Labed, but then it becomes abstract with them not knowing exactly how the points are scored, except with all the rituals, and then just the general fantastical surreality of that. Is that archness derived or is that literalization kind of made for sort of [to] create that kind of archness of it?

David Pendleton  26:48  

In other words, you're asking, like, is there a sense in which the game starts with these very specific rules, but then because the thing is opening into artificiality?

Audience 1  26:59  

Yeah. But then dissolves into the abstract.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  27:01  

Yeah, that was a decision, you know for good or for worse? I'm not sure. You know, it was a decision that it would have been quite easy actually, to come up with the rules of the game, very specific rules. And actually, in the beginning, we had rules. So you knew exactly who was grading who and why. But then we just got rid of that, because it's basically not about that. It's about just playing the game, whether we want it or not. And we do it anyway, every day, all of us with each other. I mean, Chevalier is just a game that we all play. And also in the end, I left it quite uncertain as to who was the winner. How many people understood who the winner was?

Who was it?

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]

David Pendleton  28:10  

I thought it was Yorgos too.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  28:11  

Yeah. How many people didn't understand who…?

David Pendleton  28:15  

He seemed like the guy who would be on a motorcycle to me.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  28:17  

Yeah. In the first card, I made sure that everyone knew who was the winner, but then I realized that it's really not important. You know, it could have been anyone. It just so happened that this guy made the speech and he was quite the populist, and maybe he won, but maybe it was Dimitris who won because he was the sweetheart or who knows? The most important thing for me was that they all left, and they went back to their miserable lives, and they were absorbed back by the city.

David Pendleton  29:06  

The game is kind of a MacGuffin, really. Or it's just there to sort of put the pressure on.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  29:11  

Yeah.

David Pendleton  29:13  

Yes, there's a question back there. Would you mind just grabbing the microphone that Steffen is trying to hand you?

Audience 2  29:17  

I just wanted to say that the song in the end made it very vague. The Greek song—which is the children's song [UNKNOWN GREEK TITLE]—and this made the ambiguity very clear, that it was not that important actually. And for me, the whole movie was the impossibility of having rules. And I was wondering if this is an allegory for Greece, this unruled Greece, your thoughts about that, and tied to that, I loved your scene with blood exchange, which is a very tough issue as it is related to the Philikí Etaireía national celebration today. Just expand, if you can, on that.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  30:14  

I mean, I made the film as a response... You know, we always filter whatever is going on around us and the Greek crisis in politics, in social issues, in art, has been like our biggest export product. It's our big success as a country; we finally have a big export product. And I didn't really want to respond to that in a pedestrian way. It's not that I started saying,” I'm gonna make a film about the Greek crisis.” People started pointing out the allegory stuff after I started showing the cut of the film. But yeah, I guess something about basically growing up in a lawless society and being ruled by very vulnerable men, middle class men.

And also I always make a movie about something that I understand, that comes from, you know, I am the middle class of my country. Those men are me. The fact that they're men is almost like, you know, this is this spiritual sequel of The Capsule. The Capsule, is, again, about power, about hierarchy, about building yourself within a state of terror. And I don't think this is just the privilege of a woman or a man. And I think that the issue is completely genderless. Yeah, so I guess you can say that it's an allegory maybe, but it's just the way I—you know, I react to everything in a very physical, intuitive way. I try not to think when I write something, so I respond mostly with my senses. This is a very different film, this is like a huge question mark for me. You know, I'm watching it and say, “I made this film, huh? So this film is mine?”

I remember that I was totally in a state of trance as I was making it, trying to be as alive as I could making it. And, the cast was actually doing the same. It was a very, very difficult thing. You know, it's also, it's kind of silly, they're playing this game, it doesn't matter. In the end, there is not like a huge blowout. No one dies. There is not even a clear winner, but that's the fucking point.

David Pendleton  33:47  

What about the fact that the game then passes down to the working class at the end?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  33:53  

Yeah. Well, you know, I had spent a couple of months actually boarding those yachts, and seeing how they work. I had never been in a yacht in my life. So I just started going to see the details: how the food is served, and how are the cabins and what's the relation between upstairs and downstairs? So I knew there had to be a captain and a cook or a chef, and then...

David Pendleton 34:36  

The other one’s like a purser or like a porter or a waiter...

Athina Rachel Tsangari 34:37  

Yeah, yeah. And in Greece, this is a big deal. The yachting companies [are] a big part of tourism. I would hear all these stories, because I was interviewing them in order to figure out the character, so they always had to say all this amazing stuff about the people upstairs. And then when I cast these three particular actors, they started imitating what the main cast was doing, so it was like the main cast were like the A-list cast, and then they were the B-list cast. So they started actually like making fun of them and imitating them and playing Chevalier. So this is something that actually was offered to me—which makes sense, because it's like class structure within every process we're doing. We cannot avoid it. I knew it was going to happen, I just didn't want it to come from me. Because everything that happened on the boat, like, apart from the very basic structure, just came from them, you know, the brothers were developed from them. The two–

David Pendleton  35:54  

Are those actors brothers?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  35:55  

No, they became brothers. And now they're like, really, brothers in real life. They're like, inseparable. [LAUGHS] It's kind of creepy. But…

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  36:07  

I wanted to go back to one thing also in that question, which was maybe to talk a little bit more about the national significance of the blood brother oath?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  36:16  

Oh, yeah. And actually, today, it's strange. You know, it's the 25th of March. We are commemorating the beginning of the liberation of the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire. And one of the main entities that brought this into fruition, was called the—What do you call Philikí Etaireía?—like the Secret Society of Friends, which were basically, Greek intellectuals who were not living in Greece; they were living in the Austro-Hungarian and larger Ottoman Empire.

David Pendleton 37:08  

Because they were exiled from Greece?

Athina Rachel Tsangari

No…

David Pendleton

They’d gone to study, or... ?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  37:09  

Well, you know, usually Greeks do much better abroad than in Greece, and that started 2000 years ago, so! [LAUGHS] They basically came together as wealthy intellectuals educated to align Greece with foreign powers. It was also sort of like the beginning of the western interference in Greek politics. So, everyone knows. We go to school, and we know about the Society of Friends who was basically a brotherhood, who would come together and they would give an oath of blood for the cause of liberating Greece against the Ottomans. So, in a way, this is a very similar… It sort of brings us back to what's going on right now, and different sorts of brotherhoods that are being formed in a very unsuccessful and insufficient way, in a [purely] fascist way, actually.

David Pendleton  38:35  

There was another question or two back there in the middle. There with a woman in red, and then we'll go down the aisle to you.

Audience 3  38:42  

I absolutely loved it. It was really so much fun. You've talked a little bit about it, but I'd love to hear more about the evolution of various parts of the games as the actors started thinking about how to play them.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  39:01  

Again, the evolution…?

David Pendleton  39:03  

Of various parts of the game as the actors started playing, I guess, you know, maybe in a way, what grew, what was the skeleton and what grew out from once the actors came on board?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  39:16  

Okay, I mean, actually there were stages to the game. I mean, it was extremely structured. It was exhausting.

David Pendleton  39:29  

Were there different events?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  39:31  

Yeah, different events.

David Pendleton

Like an Olympics kind of thing.

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Yeah, different events. Maybe like three times more than this in the script. And I don't know, it just felt though that it was going to be just an endless array. You know, you told me you already thought that it's a bit too long. Imagine if I had shot the original one. So what we did is that I brought all of the games, all of the contests. You know, so I had contests. I had tons of contests. And I had, as I said, archetypal characters. It was like the A Type, the B type, the C type, the D type. I had to research that to come up with something that I thought was a cross-section of archetypes. And that research actually happened while I was auditioning, and I saw something like 540 different men. And every one was a conversation that sometimes would take like five or six hours. I really think that the actual true Chevalier would be some kind of edit of this. You know, they're not auditions, they were conversations, because I never audition anyone, giving them a part of the script. It was just conversations; people were so ready to talk.

David Pendleton  41:20  

What were you talking about?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  41:22  

Their lives, just that nothing else. And then, seriously, there were some that I really wanted to have, but couldn't because they couldn't leave their jobs, and I couldn't pay them enough to you know, this is a very low-budget film. It was just really made with us taking off from our real jobs. It's hard to make this film.... So what I started doing is I started rehearsing in couples, so every rehearsal every day would be just with two of them. And I would start suggesting contests, and then the next day, they would come with their own contest. So contest after contest after contest and switching the couples, I started seeing the real couples that evolved. So that's how brothers became brothers. And that's how Yorgos and Josef became partners. And that's how the doctor and Hristos became, sort of, partners in the clinic. And that's how Yanis became the son-in-law of the doctor. This is all stuff that, as I said, that's how it always– In Attenberg, it was exactly the same. In the film that I'm writing now, I'm always working with my co-writers, always working with the idea of archetypes. And then we would go to a level of abstraction where basically there are no characters, and then with the actors, they all become who they are. But, it's because I'm lucky enough to have this rehearsal time. So they started bringing contests, and then in the third week, it’s the first time that we all got together. And they all found out who the main couples were. And then I started rehearsing with all of them together. And they had to bring all of the contests that they had to rehearse with, and then we had to vote, which one was going to stay? So it was just through voting. Basically, my assistant director brought all of the contests, everything that we had rehearsed, and then we just presented them—really quickly, like it was like, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no—and this is what stayed. So in a way, there is a randomness and a futility in all of this that really fit with my idea of this game of power and dominance.

David Pendleton  44:31  

You could have made a reality show out of the casting!

Athina Rachel Tsangari

[LAUGHING] Totally!

David Pendleton

It would have paid for the movie.

Hang on, and then we'll then we'll come to you next, but he's got the mic. Right. He was waiting.

Audience 4  44:42  

Thank you so much for coming. First of all, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the boat and the original idea of having characters on the boat. I happen to have a friend whose father works in the yacht industry and so I know a little bit about the people who work on yachts and also the people who buy them. And that in and of itself is often very much a game of power and the dynamics of power and just wanting to extend your boat two more meters only to, you know, have a bigger boat, a larger boat, than your friend. And so I found the space very fascinating. I find the aesthetic of the boat very fascinating. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that idea came to mind, whether that is maybe something that is also rooted in Greek culture.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  45:30  

That's like five questions disguised in one plus three comments. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  45:44  

I mean, anything that you want to say about the way in which you– I mean, you mentioned yachting, and what an industry it was, ways in which that influenced or inspired…

Athina Rachel Tsangari  45:53  

Yeah, you know, I'm Greek, so the sea is extremely essential in my life, in our life, like, we live for the sea. And, we grow up by the sea. It's usually in the summer. So I wanted to see how it is to be in the sea in the winter, which is the exclusive privilege of men to be out in the sea. And as I said, I come from the Greek middle class. So I want to see how the men from my class were approaching the sea in this winter fantasy, basically. And, those men were not friends, so it is about the movie without the buddies. And it was important that it was not a trip where, you know, men were going to be men doing man stuff. It was almost like they were trapped on this boat doing something that they loved, which was fishing. You know, spearfishing, which is a huge, huge thing in Greece, in the Mediterranean in general. And, what I realized is there's so many ways where I could make a film as a woman talking about men in a gendered way. But, you know, I just loved these men. I just loved them, and I loved how vulnerable and insecure and tender and, you know, just like little boys, which I think we all are. We remain little boys and little girls. And meeting those yacht men, I just realized they just love their boats and they love the freedom of the boat. And they’re basically like nomads, in a way, and they're trying to get away from something, they're trying to escape. And I think no one ever talks about the middle class this way, at least in Greece. So, you know, they're trapped, and they want to get away and they can't quite. So, from my discussions, I just realized that basically, they just want that freedom in the sea. And all there's all these cliches of like, bigger boat, like, you know… but it's not… I mean, at least I have the kind of people that I care to travel with them and talk to them, you know, there's all this surface, all these scales of the snakes that come off and then inside, there's just soft hearts and soft flesh and just scared people who want to be free. But right now we can’t be free; we're completely trapped. And the fact that they went back to Piraeus to the marina, and they all lie to their wives that actually they were still out there because they wanted to play this stupid game. That actually came about just from talking to all of the real people that I had met in my research. That sometimes they dock and they tell lies because they don't want to go back to their real lives.

David Pendleton  50:14  

Okay, one last question. Oh, all right.

Athina Rachel Tsangari  50:17  

Tina, Tina, Tina!

David Pendleton  50:20  

But he's got the mic already. We’ll do two questions.

Audience 5 50:25  

Okay, hi. So the film kind of finds a lot of human institutions, or maybe male institutions to be a little bit silly, or sometimes really silly. And that's part of the humor of it, I think. But I think another effect that the humor has, is that it really makes us feel close to some of the people and really helps us to appreciate some of them as human beings. And, the fact that they kind of bear a lot of their lives to us, a lot of their kind of inner qualms, comes out into the open, I think that that helps us grow close to them even more. And the film really ends with a positive note, I think, when they're all shaking hands and leaving with smiles on their faces. But what I was wondering was, do you see the film as more of a critique of human institutions or maybe male institutions or masculinity? Or do you see it as more optimistic about our species? Or both? Or neither?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  51:31  

[LAUGHING] That's up to you. That's up to you. I mean, I think one of the reasons that I didn't give it my original ending, which was extremely precise, was because I think I was hoping for a question like yours.

Audience 6  51:55  

So I didn't like these guys. The only one I liked was Dimitris. He's the only one that actually didn't care about winning. And I wonder whether—like, maybe that's just my interpretation—but I wonder whether you deliberately kept them all not questioning the game, and then it filtered down to the people on the boat, the staff, and I was just hoping that the people on the boat would see how silly it was and reject it rather than absorb it. And I wonder whether you had any intention at any time, whether you let this flow or whether at the beginning, you decided they were all going to buy into it till the very end, and nobody was going to reject it, or whether Dimitris was in fact, the one person who rejected it?

Athina Rachel Tsangari  52:39  

Yes. Great question. Yeah, I think from the beginning, those guys, like the actual guys who played those characters, are extremely likeable. So it actually took lots of effort to strip that. And, this is something that was a very, very specific, painful decision on my part on why it was important for me that these guys are not likable. And Dimitris was just someone who had to transcend the rest of the crowd, the rest of the group. But yes, it was a very specific decision to have difficulty identifying with either of them or identifying begrudgingly. And you had another part of the question?

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

No, no, as I said, this is something that actually was started by the cast of the staff people. And it also was something that it always came as a commentary from the staff of the actual yachts that I visited. So you can say that it's a social commentary. It's a social reality. Everyone in the end just enters and imitates this very futile game

David Pendleton  54:57  

Athina, thank you so much for sharing this film… Thank you to all of you for your questions and for staying and keep an eye out for the film!

[APPLAUSE]

© Harvard Film Archive

While a 2015-2016 Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow and a David and Roberta Logie Fellow, Athina Rachel Tsangari has been virtually in residence at the HFA over the past couple of years. While teaching classes in our theater as a VES Department Visiting Professor, she also curated two series of radical Seventies’ cinema and screened a program of her work. We are pleased to welcome her back to present her latest film and join us in a lively conversation afterwards.

Pitched somewhere between high-concept art cinema and sociology research, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest precisely detailed miniature focuses on a group of yachters who embark on a nebulous game of macho one-upmanship for which the only reward is the crude victory ring that gives the film its title. The terms of the game are loose and provisional, and revolve around a point system assigned to whatever’s considered “the best” or “manliest” at any given moment by the middle-aged men aboard the vacation boat. But despite its crowd of bumbling dudes and its sublime body comedy, the film hardly has any particular aspirations to gender-specific diagnosis. Instead, Tsangari mines the ridiculous scenario for deadpan behavioral comedy, with her probing camera (a wavy handheld to contrast Attenberg’s static reserve) hypersensitive to the developing thought processes of her characters, to their slip-ups in composure and improvised rationalizations. Floating along with the serene calm of the Aegean Sea until finally resolving on an inconclusive ellipsis, Chevalier adds another tantalizing riddle to Tsangari’s evolving stream of collaborative dramatic experimentation. – Carson Lund