Stavros Tornes / Karkalou

		Cast Stelios Anastasiadis Marios Karamanis Esmene Kariotaki Eleni Maniati Dimos Theos Vasilis Loules Yiannis Eliopoulos Direction Stavros Tornes Script Charlotte Van Gelder Stavros Tornes Cinematography Stamatis Giannoulis Sakis Maniatis Editing Despina Maroulakou Art Director Stelios Anastasiadis Costumes Anastasia Arseni Sound Christos Akalestos Music Charlotte Van Gelder Production Stavros Tornes Greek Film Centre © 1984 16mm, 83 min, color



Karkalou is a fiction film about fiction. Someone, anyone, but quite mature. The man's present is extremely limited. He is excluded from the future and even the past is no more than a source of tender recollections. Without bitterness he is trying to play the final card. A card which perhaps doesn't really exist, but there is some hope for a joker. He leads a young man into the game. A climate of dissimulation is created. Also the relationship between the two is based on their talent to simulate. Various situations can take place, all of them fictitious but verisimilar. The young man, a taxi driver who carries whatever comes up, gets into the game without reservation and manages to give life to a number of scenes from the other one's past. He identifies, though, with the situations and the individuals taking part in them. In doing so he loses the capacity to play. Here ends the game, which turns out to be as limited as the present of our hero. Is this a film about death? That too, but it is also about the game of creativity as the final card. Once the form has emerged, creativity dies. Not because there is nothing else to say, but suddenly, to our surprise, creativity reappears, maybe like death itself. Yes, perhaps the card Karkalou is playing is only a bluff. But fiction and verisimilitude have made it possible to recover madness and idealism. Stavros Tornes


The film participated at Thessaloniki film festival 1984 Awards:The Greek Film Critics Association Prize

If there exists a poet-handyman and an errant radical, that man is Stavros Tornes. At 49 years of age, he is more legendary than well-known, the conscience of the Greek cinema outside of Greece (he has lived in Italy for a long time where he has worked as an actor), a thorn in the side of establishments of all kinds. Stavros Tornes (and his "alter ego" Chalotte van Gelder) have made their film alone, in the course of an eventful life, without waiting for any green light, with the strength of those who have -supreme luxury- the time to think of what they are doing. The annoying thing is that the story of a poet's film cannot be told. KARKALOU reminds one, roughly, of Murnau, of Straub, Antonio Reis or the Taviani brothers. Stone is stone, fiction is fiction, ghosts also die, an old man plays like a child, a young man grows old, children symbolize death, one shot succeeds the other with the imminent (and unprovable) clarity of a dream.

Liberation / Serge Daney


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