So many of the dialogues between mortals and immortals in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò end with the gods in agreement that the divines share more in common with the beasts than with mortals. Both wolves and gods concern themselves with only an eternal present, but humans, always aware of their own death, are beings forged by the dual anxieties of a wasted past and an ever-shrinking future. When travelers turn to Greece looking for the birthplace of Western culture, they anticipate the temples of the divine whose relationship with mortals gave us fire and art and politics, but they forget that this culture was equally shaped by the bulls and beasts whose figures also emblazon the walls of these same temples. Alan Bates’s Basil learns of this in Zorba the Greek; Byron learned of it during his participation in the Greek Revolution of 1821; and even Odysseus was, for a time, but a traveler in these lands full of gods and monsters. Our relationship with beasts and the divine helped build the polis, but its fruits, what we call “civilization,” also made us more aware of the one element that differentiates us from both. Little wonder Socrates spoke of philosophy as “learning how to die.”
Rita Azevedo Gomes’s latest film, Fuck the Polis, meditates on such Mediterranean travel and death. Her own voice narrates the story of the Portuguese Irma’s journey throughout Greece’s Cyclades. The year is 2007, and a mysterious diagnosis has encouraged this traveler to board the tourist ships by herself as she visits the scattered ruins of Mykonos and Delos. Along the way, she meets a local named Ion who flirts with her as they travel through the mostly empty islands. Perhaps the zephyrs of these Homeric lands have inspired the two, as they speak to each other almost exclusively in poetic observations. Ion is compared to his mythological namesake (the bastard son of Apollo and the namesake of the Ionian people; though the unrelated Ion, a Greek man who challenged Socrates on the role of poetic inspiration, of Plato’s Ion is perhaps a better comparison), and Irma observes that they’re connected by the initial iota of their names. Irma hugs the ancient statues in Delos’s museum and absorbs their warmth and speaks of appeasing the divine and speaks of the color white, its omnipresence among the buildings dotting the Cycladic landscapes and the clouds above, representing death.
But we see none of this. Or do we? The Irma of the narration both is and isn’t Rita Azevedo Gomes — she reads from a story by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge called “A Portuguesa,” which is a fictional recounting of Gomes’s own 2007 trip to Greece. Fuck the Polis switches between representations of this past trip, evoked by sudden switches to Super 8 and SD video, and the “real” trip of present day where Gomes and her coterie of bardic youngins read texts about Greece to each other as they repeat much of the same journey. The result is a film that uses poetry and prose to blend pasts (recent and ancient) and presents (fact and fiction). The one constant is the sea, Homer’s very own wine-dark, that here subjects itself to portraiture in every format. Then, suddenly, another narrative arises as the group ventures to the home of Greek singer Maria Farantouri whose contralto had once let Gomes know that she had arrived in this mythical land.
As much as the film purports to be about these little odysseys, most of the film’s images are simple beautiful landscapes. Shots of the ship arriving in port or of the wind winding through the grain fields hold so that the landscape may come into better focus. Or the opposite: SD video shots of red kylix-shaped flowers give way to the video’s aliasing, resulting in an impressionistic sea of crimson with no discernible lines. Sometimes these images work like a child’s picture book, giving us literal imagery to accompany the story being told, such as showing a statue when Irma hugs the statue. Others are not so literal, like an extended overhead shot of cars and travelers marching haphazardly onto the ship while a piano plays staccato, as if remaking Workers Leaving the Factory for a mere interlude in the story. Befitting the collective nature of the trip, the cinematography is credited to Gomes herself as well as two of the actors, Bingham Bryant and Maria Novo. At times, it can feel like one has simply been roped into viewing someone’s vacation footage where landmarks made familiar to one’s eyes through Google searches are made only slightly more interesting by the inclusion of recognize people. But most of these images are punctuated by moments of strangeness: the Thanatotic humor of goat skulls arranged before the goats, tourists in their telltale garb traipsing about holy ground, or Maria Farantouri herself singing along to her 2007 broadcast.
Hidden within the two travelogues is a third narrative: a small poetry exchange between Bingham Bryant and Loukianos Moshonas. They both read excerpts from poems that reflect on the outsider’s view of Greece (Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” among others) without context; it may be a battle of verse or an attempt to put these poems in conversation with each other. Regardless, these scenes mark Gomes’ awareness that the inspiration for her travels is nothing new and that she’s following the voyages of many other artists as much as she follows her own 2007 trip. Fuck the Polis, its incendiary title lambasting the notion of Greece’s “rational” civilization, works best when it revives these stories of travel and tragedy and ties them together with her own. When they finally reach Maria Farantouri, their own Oracle of Delphi, she clarifies part of her song: “Where there is death, let’s make love there.”
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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