The building of Attikon and Apollo movie theatres on fire. Built on 1881 based on the blueprints of the architecht Ernst Ziller.
“Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words – in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity!” F. Nietzsche
What follows is a political comment. It is not an analogy.
So, two of our major movie theaters were burnt down during the Sunday demonstrations. Sorry, three. The memorandum was voted, my country has not officially defaulted. Or should I say seemingly?
Greeks are all children -from the speech of the Egyptian priest in Plato’s Timaeus up to Nietzsche’s laudatio. Tied to the world of appearance, they take everything around them to be true. Tragedy was born out of this profound naiveté, with which the Greeks up until now experience their love affairs. Recently as Europeans –but maybe not for long…
Going to the movies is thus the isomorphism of loving, in a manner analogous to the way Americans have used it for almost a century. It is the redoublement of a constitutive fairy tale, as a way of confirming what you feel. As a way of convincing yourself about the reality of your white lies through watching a fiction with your own two eyes.
One of the movie theatres burnt to the ground was my personal temple for practicing the “silence act” (vs “speech act”) of convincing myself for my love towards the one sitting next to me. From my 18 years up until recently. There was x waiting for me outside, all dressed up on some December night, a vision in red, a promise that everything would turn out just fine. It went terribly wrong –but for a (constitutive) moment there I was convinced that this Tinkerbelle holding my hand, was not that cruel and obstinate bitch she turned out to be. Or y’s white smile as she was holding the tickets, finally agreeing to sit down next to me for a while and enjoy a goddamn movie, instead of wondering whether our social class and age difference should prevent us even from fucking. Or z with her Homeric beauty, lavishly offering her love to me during a youth that most of us tend to forgive for its foolishness. I watched every minute of my love affairs in the Apollo theatre. Until I grew sick of it.
It is not a coincidence that I stopped going to the movies after a personal crisis related to my lovelife. I could not bear the threatening heaviness through which I was experiencing the whole thing. “It’s either truth or false, either you feel love or you don’t. Real feelings demand that you are willing to confess your love at any point to the person you love –otherwise you’re a traitor.” This cinema, this wonderful building waiting to host the bipolar distribution of my most intimate feelings towards the other (constituting thus the sickest relation to myself), this modern temple of Solomon had to go.
Somehow I got emotional when Sunday night I watched it burn.
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