On SIRENS IN THE AEGEAN I met many actors that I would like to have had for key roles in the series, but the casting director had to recruit a whole battalion of soldiers with its full hierarchy of officers. In an era of mad competition between private channels, when even inexperienced actors were playing simultaneously in two serials as well as the theatre, we had to shoot nightmarishly crowded scenes such as morning, night and extraordinary battalion inspections assemblies, alerts and celebrations, where "all hands" had to be present in the camp and in the scene. This alone would exclude from the beginning the participation of many actors, a lot of them potentially interesting. On the other hand, it was a good opportunity to meet new actors. Eleftheria Dimitromanolaki must have taped over 100 actors, apart from those who remained in the company’s archive from SIRENS and other recent productions. For the final selection I met with only those who gave us priority for the shooting and it was them I had to persuade since not all parts were leading roles nor equally interesting. I have scanned only three pages with frames from Eleftheria’s casting videos.

CAST EPISODES 1-5

SOLDIERS

OFFICERS

CIVILIANS

CREW

 

 

an ERT production
© 2006 ERT

When LOAFING and CAMOUFLAGE was in pre-production in 1984, and I was searching in the public TV archives for material my cinematographer colleagues had shot for Army TV and the cinematography unit of the Army Geographical Service in 1966-68, I found only a few negatives scattered in three lockers. From the Army TV civilian staff that was still there in 1982, when it was renamed ERT2 (National Radio Television 2), I learned that they had moved the Army archives to a basement that had flooded and they managed to save only a few negatives. I borrowed some "suspicious" ones to print and see what they contained: nothing of interest for the film. We applied and were able to do research in the archives of the Press Ministry and there we found quite a lot of newsreels from the period 1966-68. Major topics and key shots were missing from many of them. The archivists complained that in the early post-junta years unscrupulous journalists had borrowed the newsreels, cut out what they needed and returned the remnants. A veteran editor revealed to me that they had simply removed footage of known public personalities. We borrowed some negatives from the period and printed them. The controversial footage was missing, but I had enough material for the film.

Fortunately, when we started the series in 2006, the archives of the contracting channel, ERT, had been organized and we found many Army newsreels that someone had probably "salvaged" from the flood. We even found shots of the nocturnal swearing-in of the coup leaders filmed by Panousopoulos, and the shot of putschist colonel Makarezos with the shadow of a desk lamp handle on his forehead. The gloating of the conspirators was so great that they weren't paying attention to such details and Panousopoulos was spared a court-martial (see SCENES).

The head titles of the episodes, mounted as a teaser for a self-promoting "Army Geographic Service" newsreel, are the most descriptive introduction to the seven-year dictatorship. The excerpts I chose from the five episodes I shot contain scenes I was not able to shoot for the film back in ‘84, for budgetary, but also for duration reasons. Among them there are also scenes I re-shot, trying with great zeal to remake the respective scenes of the movie. In the scene where Papadopoulos returns to his unit in the dawn of April 21, I was even forced to use footage from the film because there was no way to get tanks on the streets or empty them of parked cars. In some shots even Nikos Kalogeropoulos’s back is playing, after we digitally 'stretched' him to make him taller to match Orpheas Avgoustidis, who again had to imitate the gait of the original.

The contracting channel, ΝΕΤ (New Hellenic Television), nursed the series with frequent broadcasts of trailers. After all, we were telling the story of the channel's own dark history, which was destined to grow darker*... In the black and white trailer edited by Thanasis Papathanasiou we used the most «evocative» reports shot by GYS cameramen, and we "embeded" our protagonists into footage of some "historical" events, such as Colonel Katsambelas (Tasos Kostis) at the swearing-in of the "National Government" with co-conspirator General Yeoryios Zoitakis.

* On 11 June 2013 Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s administration shut down all state (ERT) radio and TV stations in order, as he announced, "to purge the establishment and ban meritocracy and corruption".

In 1984 we shot the playback –as we called music clips- of "I love you" at the Philopappos Monument with the general shooting permit issued by the Ministry of Press and Information. In 2006 the responsible antiques authority refused us permission and then we tried to shoot the scene on the neighbouring hill of the Observatory, with its permission and Acropolis in the background. Before the shoot started, the archaeology staff discovered us and forbade us to shoot with Acropolis as background, so we complied and moved to some crags behind Philopapos hill with sky as background, so as not to waste the day moving around. A lady archaeologist rushed over to inform us that the Archaeological Council gives permits only to films that promote culture, that the whole area belongs to the archaeological site, and that she wouldn't allow us to shoot. I asked her to call the police to remove us and hurried to finish shooting before they came. The police probably never came and the Acropolis was added to the “playback” digitally.

"S’agapo" (I Love You) is probably the most popular song composed by Nikos Mamangakis, with lyrics by Nikos Foskolos and sung by Jenny Vanou – at 57:50 minutes – in his movie "The Avenue of Hate" in front of a curtain that could have been hanging in the TED TV studio.

"The Hitch" sung by Aspasia Stratigou is the most "soldierish" song written by Nikos Mamangakis and Yiorgos Kordelas, who was writing the lyrics for the songs in his own episodes while I was shooting the first ones.