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ISCC 3 (2) pp. 199–208 Intellect Limited 2012

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture Volume 3 Number 2

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/iscc.3.2.199_1

Keywords

HollywoodGreeceGreek cinemafilm and tourismeconomic crisisAcropolis in film

erato BaseaColumbia University

My Life in Ruins: Hollywood

and holidays in Greece in

times of crisis

aBstract

Through a textual and cultural reading of My Life in Ruins (Petrie, 2009), this arti-cle examines the ways in which the film became implicated in cultural politics and, more specifically, in the commercial image of Greece the tourist industry strives to promote. It is argued that My Life in Ruins directs the gaze of the viewers towards stylized images of Greece and stereotypical narratives well known from older films with an agenda to ‘advertise Greece’ to potential tourists. Further examining the making and promotion of the film, one can also argue that the actual involvement of the Greek state in it was not coincidental. The support offered by the Hellenic Archaeological Committee and the newly founded Hellenic Film Commission Office to the film’s production and promotion highlights the stakes that Greek state policy had placed in the film’s global commercial success. It also seems that, as the first signs of a global financial crisis became visible, a nation’s economic anxieties were expressed and precariously invested in projects such as My Life in Ruins.

This article argues that My Life in Ruins (Petrie, 2009), albeit a US financed film, functioned as a promotional tool for tourism to Greece. My argument develops in three stages. I will start by providing a brief reading of the film, in order to explore how it plays with and draws on two significant and, not

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least, stereotypical narratives about Greece (sunbathed tourist destination and the ‘birthplace of civilization’) in order to raise its appeal to future tourists. My purpose in this section is not to consider the actual involvement of the Greek state, but merely to highlight the narratives about Greece with which the film engages. The argument is supported by a comparison to other films that have iconically produced an image of Greece appealing to global tour-ism: Never on Sunday (Dassin, 1960), Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis, 1964) and Epiheiresis Apollon/Apollo Goes on Holiday (Skalenakis, 1968). The second section strengthens this argument by considering the film’s making and promotion. In this regard, two particular facts merit our attention: My Life in Ruins was among the first films supported by the newly founded Hellenic Film Commission Office (HFCO). In addition, its making was treated as a signifi-cant event in Greece, given that it was the first film after some time to feature famous archaeological sites, including the Acropolis rock, as a backdrop.

In the last section of the article, attention will be given to the economic context of the film’s release. Regarding this, the argument I put forward is that My Life in Ruins reveals aspects of a nation’s film-making policy vis-à-vis the encourage-ment of foreign investment and tourism. As a result, it could also be considered a barometer of the Greek nation’s economic anxieties during a period when the first signs of a country mired in financial crisis started becoming visible.

My Life in Ruins teacHes tHe world How to dance (aGain)

My Life in Ruins centres on the attempts of Greek-American Georgia (Nia Vardalos) to earn a decent living working as a tour guide for second-rate Pangloss Tours. Unlike her mischievous colleague Niko, Georgia appears too forlorn to spice up her tours and, to make things even worse, to loosen up. This is why she is always given the most unbearable, obnoxious, eccentric tourists to guide. Unmoved by their guide’s historical preoccupations, they opt instead for entertainment in the Greece of the four Ss: sea, sun, souvlaki and sex. But neither we nor Georgia know what the future holds for her since she, under the tutelage of a mysterious American tourist (Richard Dreyfuss) and under the shadow of a majestically lit Acropolis, leaves her uptight self aside to let loose, get at last top rankings from the tourists and find true love in the hairy arms of her bus driver Poupi Kakas (Alexis Georgoulis). As for the tourists, they discover their ‘kefi’ (good spirits) in Greece, somewhere amidst the ruins and on the pebbled shore.

It is worth considering this representation of Greece in more detail, and more specifically, flesh out an ambiguity in the very notion of ‘Greece’. On the one hand, the country is the ‘birthplace of civilization’, the ‘land of art, democracy, philosophy and the Olympic Games’, a narrative which Georgia painstakingly repeats to her group throughout. On the other hand, there is contemporary Greece, which is a shadow of its noble, magnificent past: it is a country, for instance, where everybody disregards law, order and work for having endless coffee breaks. It is a country where the citizens cash in on tourists, sell them Made in China kitsch souvenirs, and offer accommo-dation in anything but salubrious hostels covered by tacky wallpapers of Mycenaean wall paintings. In this light, the film makes references to the most characteristic clichés about the country with the plot being structured on the interplay between Ancient and Modern Greece.

But Greece is, above all, the place where everybody in pursuit of self-discovery could have a sensually and sexually enthralling experience on the

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condition that they are ready to ‘let it happen, relax, open up’. Thus, in Greece, one can easily talk to one’s dead wife; the most bad-tempered girl can meet the (Greek) boy of her dreams and finally crack a smile; everyone who, like tense Georgia, has ‘not had sex for years’, can, finally, see the world through a new set of eyes and discover much-deserved love. In other words, everybody could find their kefi in Greece, a Greek word variously translated in the film as ‘mojo’, ‘passion’, ‘joy’, ‘spirit’, ‘life force’. This is exactly, in fact, the point where My Life in Ruins confesses a relation with – and invites a comparison to – other popular films about Greece produced in the 1960s with the aim to advertise the country to international travellers.

The musical Apollo Goes on Holiday is one example of these films. The protagonist Elena is, like Georgia, a Greek tourist guide who falls in love during a bus drive and under the dazzling Greek sun. The similarities between the two films extend far beyond these elements of the plot for, above all, Apollo Goes on Holiday, like My Life in Ruins, teaches the audience what kefi really means: ‘a desire, a mood swing, grief, sorrow’, Elena proudly explains, ‘the painful feeling that becomes a smile, a dance, a song… just like that’. This ‘just like that’, is exactly the type of essentialist, Orientalist even, rhetoric that sees (and shows) Greece as an exotic country; the musical shows its characters enjoy-ing this topography and its concomitant feeling, kefi, through – what else? – dance. Indeed, according to Lydia Papadimitriou, the final scene of Apollo Goes on Holiday, in particular, allows the audience to define kefi as ‘the particular mood, usually a good feeling, which is associated with bouzouki music and syrtaki dance’ thereby associating ‘Greekness with dance’ (2006: 121).

Keeping in mind the relation between kefi and dance in films about Greece, it is worth looking at My Life in Ruins and its use of music. In this regard, one can rightfully argue that the film itself invites, in a sort of self-reflexive way, a comparison with the commercial musicals of the 1960s. It is indicative that towards the finale, everybody sings in unison and in high spirits ‘Children of Piraeus’, the iconic song originally performed by actress Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday. Consider, also, that the film’s closing credits are read on shots of the characters blissfully dancing the syrtaki. It is the very same dance that Elena and her prince perform in the finale of Apollo Goes on Holiday, but, more importantly, the dance which became iconic and part of Greece’s tour-ist campaign after the reception, commercial success and promotion of Zorba the Greek (Papanikolaou 2007: 11, Basea 2011: 124–35). The reference is too clear to miss, and is also evident elsewhere in My Life in Ruins, when the receptionist of a ramshackle motel, instead of welcoming and escorting the tourists to their rooms, watches Anthony Quinn dancing the syrtaki on the TV as he leisurely sips his frappé coffee. The important point here is that My Life in Ruins acknowledges the legacy of such films. It exposes a certain self-awareness in that it is similar to them in scope, even if it casts an ironic eye on the stereotype of Greece that these films have constructed, as the scene at the motel allows us to presume.

From this it becomes obvious that tourism, alongside mobility and inter-cultural encounter, are key elements in the narrative of My Life in Ruins. The film ultimately takes the form of a travelogue, from a tourist’s perspective, to the country’s most emblematic destinations, thus focusing on the negotiation of the tourists’ relation with each other and with the Greek people. That the tourists’ scheduled route includes a variety of ancient landmarks, gives the film the best opportunity to introduce postcard-like long shots of the coun-try’s top tourist destinations. The scene most characteristic of how the film

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frames such destinations is perhaps the one that shows the group of tourists roaming about in the ruins on the Acropolis. In this scene, after a number of shots showing the ancient rock, the Propylea and the Parthenon sculptures, Georgia appears to urge her group to ‘listen to the sound of the wind blow-ing through the columns. That is’, she carefully informs them, ‘the same wind that mankind has listened to for centuries. It’s the sound of nature’. It is ‘pure beautiful, Greek-delicious’, an awestruck tourist adds in his own way as shots show the rays of the sun beaming down, creating variously shaped patterns on the columns. Finally, the visual montage of aerial shots of the landmark sites visited by the tourists, including the Acropolis, Olympia and Delphi, but also of the windmills on Mykonos at one point, delivers a clear message to the audience: ‘Greece is waiting for you’.

Straight from its opening credit sequence My Life in Ruins engages with the audience’s touristic imagination: museum brochures, photographs of the Acropolis and postcards of Cycladic white-washed churches fall one after the other on a table alongside replicas of Ancient Greek coins, Greek komboloyia and bottle-openers with the Greek flag engraved on them. As if the content and easy associations of these images are not clear enough, some postcards also read: ‘Welcome to Greece’. In addition, a narrator, whom the spectator soon realizes is Georgia, meditatively and passionately informs us in a voice-over that this is indeed ‘Greece… People come here from all over to see the ancient ruins… to bask in history, to be a part of the birthplace of civi-lization’. The images connect what is shown with what is narrated: Greece. Soon the camera centres on the last postcard showing the Ancient Agora and reading ‘The Gate of Athena’. Then, the intertitle disappears, Georgia appears on the screen and the audience is led to see that the Greece depicted in the postcard is actually the country where the film itself takes place. Ultimately, the film focuses on tourists who cast their own gaze upon Greece as they visit the country’s tourist attractions.

So far, I have argued that My Life in Ruins invites the viewers to cast a gaze on Greece as a tourist destination, and thus, implicitly to advertise Greece, a fact that is evident both textually and stylistically. I will now look at the film’s context of production and its promotion. It should be noted that this is not a Greek film as such: it was a $17 million production of 26 Films and Kanzaman and was released by Fox Searchlight, the indie studio division of 20th Century Fox (Internet Movie Database 2012). Moreover, being shot outside Hollywood (in Greece and in Alicante, Spain), the film was a ‘runaway production’, in other words a Hollywood production shot outside the United States (Lev 2003: 125–28). The financial advantages of such films are too important to be ignored: shooting in majestic landscapes diminishes the need for expen-sive studio stages, while these films, with their emphasis on the exotic and the touristic, have the potential for particular appeal to audiences who seek pleasure in far-away cultures.

At the same time, the use of Greece’s natural resources in a Hollywood production attracted the interest of the Greek state, and in what follows I will consider its involvement. While there are some grey areas regarding specific aspects of this involvement, such as how early in the production it occurred and how much influence the Greek state had on decisions made by the producers, the fact that the Greek state did have a stake in the produc-tion offers sufficient reason to examine it further. What is most significant here, is to explore the ways in which the film was utilized to serve as Greek tourist promotion.

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1. ApartfromMamma Mia!,theHFCOhadalreadysupportedvariousforeignfilmproductionsincludingTu Peux Garder un Secret?/Can You Keep a Secret?(Arcady,2008),Uri Saengae Choego-ui Sungan/Forever the Moment(Yim,2008)andArcadia Lost(Papamichael,2009)(IliasTasopoulos,personalcommunication).

A film set Among Ancient ruins

The first feature I highlight concerns the film’s shooting on the Acropolis. For the scene shot on the ancient rock, which is only about three minutes long in the final cut, the film’s producers had first to seek and get the permis-sion of the Greek State. This fact was widely used in the promotion of the film; according to many reports, My Life in Ruins was the first Hollywood movie ever to obtain permission from Greece to film scenes on the ancient monument (Smith 2007).

In the past, other films were shot in the Acropolis, including A Boy on a Dolphin (Negulesco, 1957) and The Guns of Navarone (Thompson and Mackendrick, 1961). In recent years, however, the country’s Central Archaeological Council (KAS) imposed stringent restrictions on the grounds that filming in situ would degrade a sacred archaeological site (Smith 2007). This is why perhaps, for protagonist Nia Vardalos, shooting there was a personal accomplishment and, as she herself stated, with a pinch of irony and dry humour, ‘[i]t was not easy. I had to fly to Greece, I had to shake a lot of hands, I had to do dinners, really assure the Greek Government that we would not break Greece’ (Canadian Television Network 2011).

For Vardalos, the film was a matter of her willpower and effective commu-nication skills. But for the Greek state it was an ideal opportunity for promoting tourism, and was exploited as such. This is where the role of the HFCO needs to be examined.

The HFCO was a pilot organization established by the Greek state in 2007 to work within the framework of the operations of the Greek Film Centre – the key funding body of Greek films – and support international producers in Greece. According to the 3905 legislative decree of 2010, the aim of HFCO was fourfold: (1) to promote Greece abroad as an ideal place for film-making projects of any kind; (2) to support any kind of film-making projects that take place in Greece, by providing them with information, service and facilities; (3) to promote the funding programmes of the organization to foreign public and private organizations; and (4) to collaborate with national public organizations to meet its aims (Greek Government 2012). Furthermore, as one reads on the HCFO website, an important prerequisite for support is that the film makes use of Greece’s ‘excellent locations, unique monuments, history and myths that you will not find in other countries, all under the best light of the sun’ (HFCO 2012). Mamma Mia! (Lloyd, 2008), one of the HCFO supported films, perhaps best testifies the orientation that the HFCO aspired to take: filmed on location in the island of Skopelos, the musical was a massive box-office success that brought Greece and its islands to the attention of tour-ists and, especially, those who wanted to arrange their wedding on the island where the film was set (Smith 2008).1

My Life in Ruins – also among the first co-productions of this organization – was perhaps hoped to be a commercial hit in the same way that Mamma Mia! was in 2008. Undoubtedly, the film appealed to the HFCO, as it had what seemed like winning ingredients. First, it starred Greek-Canadian comedian Vardalos, the protagonist and scriptwriter of the huge box-office hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002), a wisecracking comedy about a Greek-American family from the suburbs of Chicago. Moreover, among the film’s producers were Tom Hanks and his half-Greek wife Rita Wilson, known both as co-producers of Mamma Mia! and for their annual and widely publicized visits to the coun-try to enjoy the Greek sea and the sun (Hopewell and De Pablos 2007).

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2. Manyarticlesaboutthefilm’spromotionalexercise,whichexplainstheemphasisonthefilmactingasatouristadvertisement,areavailableonline.

Hence, My Life in Ruins offered a seductive ‘package’ that convinced the HCFO to provide the producers with filming facilities but not support the film finan-cially (Ilias Tasopoulos, personal communication). But apart from the stars and producers, the HFCO was clearly attracted by the fact that the film perfectly exhibited the ‘excellent locations, unique monuments, history and myths’ that it is founded to promote. In short, the film could be a showcase for Greece itself.

This becomes obvious from the series of events that took place on the occa-sion of the film’s premiere in Greece (28 May), which preceded its premiere in the United States (19 June) (Sfentona 2009). The first of these events was the press conference at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.2 The choice of venue, loaded with history, culture and civilization, is the first indication of the intentions of the organizers. Many of the members of the cast and the film crew, including the two protagonists Nia Vardalos and Alexis Georgoulis, were present. It is telling that the film’s contributors referred to the film only once: what seemed to matter most to all was not the film per se but how the film, in director Petrie’s words, would be a ‘love-letter to Greece, which will inspire others to visit the country’ (Petrie in Papapanagiotou 2011). After this, many dignitaries were summoned to the film’s official international premiere at Megaron Mousikis, one of the most highly prestigious cultural venues in Athens. There, the Minister of Culture, Antonis Samaras, made an award to Vardalos for ‘her contribution to the promotion of Greece and Greek culture abroad’ (Samaras, in Anon 2009a). Kostas Piperas, the spokesman for the film’s distribution company in Greece Hollywood Entertainment, expressed a similar sentiment: ‘the film will be a great advertisement for our country’ (Piperas, in Anon 2009a). The film’s promotion in Greece ended with Vardalos, wear-ing a Greek-chic evening gown celebrating, alongside her co-protagonist, her achievement at a bouzouki music venue.

In a similar spirit, the film’s premiere at The Grove cinema in Los Angeles provided the occasion for the promotion of Greece as a tourist destination. The two co-protagonists asked the audience to give their own definition of kefi, spreading their enthusiasm next to men in wreaths who offered them free Greek loukoumades (26 Films 2012). If one puts all these images and cultural references together, one begins to see what Greece was for the producers: an exotic country of the present (‘got kefi?’, loukoumades) and a country which, at the same time, has a rich ancient past (wreaths). This tallies exactly with the way in which Greece is portrayed in the film itself, as examined in the previous section. Similarly, the branch of the National Tourist Organization in Austria and Hungary, in collaboration with Thomas Cook Tour Operator and Skip magazine, organized a Greek night to coincide with the premiere of the film, where the guests tasted Greek food, listened to Greek music and won free airplane tickets and accommodation in Greece (Anon 2009b).

Bearing in mind the potential of the film’s release to mobilize tourism in Greece, it might seem that the timing of the movie’s production could not have been more propitious, as it took place soon after the 2004 Athens Olympic Games and their unquestionable impact on tourism. According to an official at the Greek Ministry of Culture, cited by Helena Smith in The Guardian, ‘[u]ltimately it was decided that a Hollywood film shot in situ after the Olympics would promote Ancient Greek civilization and have long-term benefits for the country’ (2006). One should also remember that the film was released in Greece only a few days before the official opening of the New Acropolis Museum in June 2009, which was hoped to become a magnet for tourists (see, for instance, Mallouchou-Tufano 2010). In this light, it can be argued that the

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3. My Life in Ruins was only relatively successful at the box office. In Greece, it grossed only €492,434 in the first weekend, although it opened in 120 screens (Internet Movie Database 2012). Until February 2010, it had sold only 201,000 tickets in Greece, occupying the seventeenth place on the top 40 among all-time domestic box-office grosses (Anon 2008). In the United States, the film received a $3,223,161 in ticket sales in its opening weekend, opening in 1164 screens (Box Office Mojo 2011).

film was part of a larger cultural policy that aimed to support national revenue from tourism.

As I go on to argue below, nonetheless, if one puts My Life in Ruins in its immediate context of release, it becomes apparent that these high hopes were necessitated by much more adverse conditions than seemed to be the case. The film can thus be understood as emblematic not of the euphoric times of the Olympics, but rather of the ensuing period of decline.3

a nation in ruins

Suggestive of the changing times is the transformation of the tourist campaign of the Greek National Tourist Organization. Only a few weeks before the premiere of My Life in Ruins, the 2005 campaign with the slogan ‘Live your Myth in Greece’ was replaced by the slogan ‘Greece, 5000 Years Old: A Masterpiece You Can Afford’. Various complementary slogans defined Greece as ‘spiritually refined’, ‘divinely lit’, ‘worshiped by the sun’, ‘purified by water’, ‘uniquely flavoured’, ‘enjoyed by millions’ – and still ‘a masterpiece you can afford’. Simply put, for Greek tourist authorities, the country remained the land of fantasies related to both entertainment and culture; only that in 2009 the emphasis had shifted on the cost and affordability of Greek holidays.

The times were changing, and the new tourist promotion could not have rendered this clearer. Certainly, due to the international financial crisis and the subsequent fall in global consumer spending, Greece’s tourist campaign had to adjust to fit into the ‘credit crunch’ era. In 2009, the report of the Eurobank Bank of Greece was alarming: the country would see the revenues from tour-ism plummet due to a 12 per cent to 15 per cent fall in numbers of tourists, ‘the biggest fall of the last thirty years’ (Papaspyrou 2009). The report amplified, of course, a series of numerous other cries over the country’s unstable economic future and hence its need to exploit its historic treasures if it wanted to survive from the impact of the global credit crunch. As the then Minister of Tourism Kostas Markopoulos observed, Greece could not, in this very context, ‘afford to ignore mass tourism and package tours’ since ‘we are a tourist destination, not an industrial nation’ (Markopoulos, in Papaspyrou 2009). Quite evidently, tourism, for him, was considered to be the heavy industry of the country, and history, in particular, played an important role. ‘Greece is not afraid of showing its real face [and] its supremacy’, Markopoulos stated optimistically, ‘[Greece] is rich in history, something that neither gives away nor forgets. It has quality and power, something that does not hide. It is unique, something that does not negotiate’ (Markopoulos, in Papaspyrou 2009). Tourists had to be made aware of this, too.

My Life in Ruins was thus a gauge of the times: it encapsulated the general need of reviving Greek tourism, as the global and local economic landscape were crumbling. The involvement of the Greek state in supporting film-induced tourism and facilitating foreign film producers to shoot in Greece, should be seen in light of this economic value with which My Life in Ruins was invested and the times in which the film was made and released. Thus, on the occasion of the film’s premiere, Marios Holevas, the director of the HFCO, expressed the hope that My Life in Ruins would pave the way for a law to be introduced in order to provide tax allowances to foreign producers to film in the country (Papaspyrou 2009).

But the film was not merely a sign of the times: it also set a precedent for subsequent images of the nation’s ruins. This was the result of the Greek

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State’s concession to allow the Acropolis to be filmed, for economic benefit. Indeed, one can now shoot in archaeological sites, including Olympia, Delphi and the Acropolis, from $1300 (for a photography session) to about $2000 (for filming) a day (Kitsantonis 2012; Smith 2012). This possibility for economic exploitation of archaeological sites has been satirized by the cartoonist Stathis, and has also become a standard reference in global media. Take the example of the alarming front cover of The Economist in April 2010, which depicts the German Counselor Angela Merkel in front of the ancient monument, under the punning title ‘Acropolis Now’. Similarly, the recent campaign of Saatchi & Saatchi for Greece summarizes the country’s current predicament and the role of the ancient sites in it: a Caryatis, one of the emblematic statues on the south porch of the Erechtheion temple, becomes the symbol of a crisis-ridden yet still beautiful nation found in tattered ruins.

conclusions

My reading of My Life in Ruins tried to show that this Hollywood film func-tioned as a promotional tool for tourism to Greece. This was especially important given the times of economic crisis: the film was hoped to become an invigorating injection to national economy, a fact that, I argued, renders the film indicative of its time.

In providing a textual reading of My Life in Ruins, I focused on its repre-sentation of Greece, and demonstrated its relationship with earlier films about Greece. All these films depict Greece as a country that is both modern and rich in cultural history, a narrative that is used to support the country’s tourist industry. This was especially obvious in My Life in Ruins as its plot centres on a tourist visit to Greece. In my analysis of the film’s making and its promotional campaign that followed, I focused on two significant facts: that this was the first film in many years to receive state permission to shoot on the Acropolis; and that it was among the first co-productions of the HFCO, the organiza-tion founded to allure foreign film producers to Greece. This reinforced my argument about the aspirations that the tourist industry had from the film. Finally, the film was placed in its immediate economic context, in order to understand these aspirations, at least at the level of state policy. My Life in Ruins, I have therefore argued, can be seen not only as a film ‘selling’ Greece, but also as a cultural text that mediates the nation in crisis.

acKnowledGments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Re-imagining the Past. Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture Conference in June 2011, University of Birmingham. I would like to thank the audience for their insightful comments and, in particular, Dimitris Plantzos and Eleana Yalouri. Thanks also to Lydia Papadimitriou, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Joshua Barley for their comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as to Ilias Tasopoulos at the Greek Film Centre.

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suGGested citation

Basea, E. (2012), ‘My Life in Ruins: Hollywood and holidays in Greece in times of crisis’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3: 2, pp. 199–208, doi: 10.1386/iscc.3.2.199_1

contriButor details

Erato Basea is a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University. She holds a D.Phil. in Film and Modern Greek Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include European and world cinema, auteur theory, literature and film, transnational aspects of cinema and representation of national identity in film.

E-mail: eb2862@columbia.edu

Erato Basea has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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