LYDIA PAPADIMITRIOU GREEK WAR FILM AS MELODRAMA Women, female stars and the nation as victim

Greek war films were produced predominantly in the period during which the country was ruled by the right-wing dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). This article will suggest that the melodramatic form of these films, and the centrality of female characters and their suffering in them, can be seen as expressing the Colonels’ anthropomorphic vision of the nation as an ailing body in need of rescue. The main ideological tenet of the Colonels was stringent anti-communism – an ideology much more evident in the regime’s torture and oppression of dissenting citizens than in the language used by its leaders to justify the regime. This, instead, was full of incoherent sentences and ideas, violent threats, empty moralistic statements and metaphors of illness.1