Open Air Cinemas and the August Meltemi

With August comes days of the meltemi, the refreshing dry north wind that keeps you from frying your bones in the summer sun. In the shade you feel a delightful coolness. These Aegean sea winds were known in ancient times as the “eitesian” or “annual” winds as they occur regularly every summer. Meltemi, such a romantic sounding name! It supposedly comes from the Italian “mal tempo” but it’s not really bad weather.  In fact the sky shines a bright cloudless cerulean blue and at night, the wind usually dies down and stars fill the sky. It  sounds perfect but after a few days of the wind though you long for it to subside, not to mention that it brings a serious threat of fires. Doors slam in the house. Boats rock back and forth and if you long for calm peaceful seas, you curse the meltemi as it roils up the waves and often brings dirt close to shore. But if there’s no wind, then you long for it… such is life. 

August also brings a city nearly empty of its residents, who have gone to the islands or other areas of Greece to their villages and country homes, leaving wonderful empty streets to marvel over. In August, the city belongs to tourists who wander through the Ancient and the Roman Agoras, meander through the Plaka, eat souvlaki at Monastiraki, trek up to the Acropolis.

And with a loss of Athenians, comes a halt in cultural activities.  If you thirst for a performance at the Herod Atticus (Irodion) theater, sorry you’re out of luck.  Nearly all the cultural events of June and July suddenly dry up.  The Irodion stands silent along with all the other smaller venues; concerts, dance performances, theater, they’re all on vacation.  Everything is on hold until September or near the end of the month.  One cultural event though keeps on going: summer or open air cinemas.

Starting around the end of May, if you pass by one of the so-called “winter cinemas,” you can see a sign wishing you a friendly “kalo kalokairi!” (have a good summer) and promising a meeting in September.  These cinemas close and the summer ones open. While some multiplex cinemas do stay open with air-conditioning, certain summer customs are embedded into the Greek summer experience, with the dry climate and the clear nights that make it a pleasure to be out of doors.

Let’s stroll along pedestrian walkway Dionysiou Aeropagitou to one of the most well-known open air cinemas, the Cine Thission, which usually shows old classic films.  We decided to go and watch Le Clan des Siciliens, a 1969 film with Alain Delon, Lino Ventura and Jean Gabin, touted as three “monsters” of the cinema, a translation of the Greek word “terata”. (I first saw Jean Gabin with his steely sexy eyes in a 1930’s film, an early film noir, “Pepe le Moko” where, as a gangster wanted by the French police, he’s hiding out in the Casbah in Algiers. There he falls in love with Gaby, a beautiful mysterious French woman, which of course proves his undoing). In The Sicilian Clan he’s the soon-to-retire, head of the clan, while Delon, charming as ever, is a tough amoral criminal (of course) and Ventura is what else, a policeman out to get them. It’s light fare, a perfect summer film.

But it’s the venue in summer cinemas that often matters, not so much the film, and if you’re going to see just one therino (summer) film, the Cine Thission is really historic. It makes much of having been chosen by CNN as one of the best outdoor cinemas of the world as well as one of the oldest in continual use from 1935. 

When you enter, you pass through some beaded curtains (where am I headed? briefly goes through your mind) into a huge garden with orange chairs, many of them next to little café tables (these go quickly as it’s great to rest your elbows there or the beer you buy from the kylikeio (canteen). Pots of vassiliko (basil) and geranium encircle the screen. And be sure to sit on the right side facing the screen! That will give you the best view of the Acropolis.

Therina cinemas usually have two showing times, at 9 and 11 pm.  During June when the days are the longest, at times the film might begin when the sky is not quite dark, only in the stage of becoming a darker blue, and you can’t see the picture so well or the subtitles (only children’s films are dubbed; otherwise foreign films have Greek subtitles; at the Thission, subtitles are both in both Greek and English) Some years ago we were watching Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn (Rendezvous a Paris – Greek title) and it opens with Hepburn in sunglasses at a ski resort – you really had to strain your eyes to see the snow!

I’ve heard that some cinema “purists” will not go to summer cinemas as the sound quality can be a problem sometimes – talking and laughing from the street, cars honking etc. Also if the cinema is in the midst of a residential area, in some 11:00 showings, they might turn down the sound. Most people accept it all as part of the experience. At the Thission, you take in the garden coolness, the Acropolis, the cats slinking up and down the aisles.

Not too far away in the Plaka on Kydathinaion Street is the Cine Paris which actually opened its doors in the 1920’s but in the 60’s it closed for about 20 years. Pretty much right under the Acropolis, this cinema has even more of a knockout view.

Unlike the “Thission,” the Cine Paris plays 1^st run films – we saw the lovely film “Yesterday” there. In front of the cinema is a fantastic collection of old posters you can browse through before you take the stairs up to the rooftop.

It’s interesting how open air cinema developed. In the 1930’s, kafeneia or coffee houses around Syntagma Square and the Zappeion had screens set up and they projected films as you sat and drank your coffee.  One of my friends who grew up in the town of Volos in the 1960’s described to me the typical cinema of his childhood, that they borrowed the back walls of surrounding buildings, set up a white screen, a small construction for the projector, and seats for the customers, as well as an area to sell some snacks and drinks, and you pretty much had a cinema.

These were the “golden” years of cinema and Greek films were the rule not foreign films as they are today.  There were hundreds of cinemas in the Attica area and others around Greece.  In the 70’s, however, many of them were demolished to make room for parking lots or other kinds of real estate development. But many more would have disappeared if there wasn’t such an outcry about this cherished summer institution.  In the last 10 years or so, in fact, some old cinemas have been restored and even new ones built in some neighborhoods, like the Cine Flisvos with the sea in the background. I’ve heard estimates of anywhere from 70 to 80 summer cinemas in the Attica area.   

Most of the people who pass by a huge padlocked door and wall at the beginning of Aeropagitou Street across from the Arch of Hadrian don’t realize this door led to the garden of the oldest cinema, and perhaps theater in Athens, from the early years of the 20th century. If you walk as far back as you can, you can see a wooden stage. The locked door always gave me a feeling like I was Mary in The Secret Garden, if I could only unlock this door and see what secrets lay behind the garden wall! The door had always been a pristine white, as if it had just been painted.  However, when we passed by it last week, I was in shock seeing the graffiti.  I guess the amazing thing is that it managed to stay graffiti-free for so many years. I’m still wondering, why this garden has been locked for who knows how many years, undoubtedly there must be problems with the owner and family.

A more intimate theater than the Thission or cine Paris is the cine Athinaia and it’s more of a city cinema; here you can see people on their balconies listening at least to the films featured, if not actually watching them.  I can attest they have the most wonderful tiropitas (cheese pies) that you can buy during intermission, which all the cinemas have, in order to sell their goodies. A lot of cinemas actually have special foods beyond the usual nachos and popcorn. Athinaia is known for its tiropitas. At Thission, they offer homemade vissinada, a drink made from cherries.

Outside of Athens, every neighbourhood has its therino cinema.  In my neighborhood Aghia Paraskevi, besides the old time Amaryllis with its 1^st run films, the municipal cinema opened a few years ago and shows all kinds of movies, old and new. We’re regulars, settling in comfortably in the directors’ chairs, waiting for the “projectionist” to start the film.

We’ve seen recent films of Icelandic, Norwegian, French and Italian directors.  In contrast to the Thission and its cats, two dogs always attend the showings. Okay, it’s not the film but it’s that wonderful buttery popcorn that viewers drop on the ground, and the smell of souvlaki grilling during intermission. The projectionist watches carefully the line at the kylikeio, and makes sure everyone gets back in their seat before he resumes the film. The more crowded it is, the longer the intermission.

For the last nine years Athens has had an Open Air film festival, which shows “cinephile” films at different venues around town: the Roman Agora, Plato’s Academy, the Byzantine museum, as well as theaters and plateias. Sometimes the venue matches the film perfectly. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was in the Theatro Vrahon (Stone Theater) So behind the rock in the film, in actuality huge craggy looming rocks surrounded us!

The projector in the open air cinema festival lies silent too, for a month, from late July to late August, when this year the festival resumed with the 1962 Italian film Il Sorpasso (English title The Easy Life) with Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, surely two “monsters” of the European cinema. The venue was the Numismatic Museum Garden, which yes is  one of the loveliest gardens in Athens and a great place to have a coffee or a drink. But there were two big problems.  It was a very hot evening, the meltemi had died down, and because the museum is surrounded by high buildings, the heat gets trapped there, and the other problem is that the space is just too small. By 8:15 all the chairs are taken. We arrange ourselves on steps, I take out from my bag my essential summer accessory, a fan, and we crane our necks to see. It’s a road movie of road movies, where Gassman plays a Zorba-like character with no thought of tomorrow. There’s a lot of talk, I’m sure I’m missing things as I’m trying mostly unsuccessfully to see if I can understand the Italian while keeping up with reading the Greek subtitles. The film is hilarious but finally very dark. When it’s over, you can hear viewers arguing about the ending.

No worry about getting seats at the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Foundation “park your cinema” on the great lawn with its mammoth screen. You might be able to find a chair a little off to the side, or you can spread your blanket or mat on the ground. Once a week they have films, starting from late may when the weather is still uncertain when we watched The Wizard of Oz. “If I only had a brain” I was thinking, we wouldn’t have come here on this cold wet shivery evening. August has had the theme “It’s a Woman’s World” with such films as Gilda and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. This week it’s Thelma and Louise. We settle ourselves on the grass. Wow. As good as it was back in 1991, it’s such a pleasure to watch these two great women “monster” stars of U.S. cinema. The film is even more relevant today than it was then. And here we are, just by coincidence, another road movie, in fact a matching road movie to Il Sorpasso and you could even say a complement to its machoness.

In what other medium do we share such collective knowledge – think of the movie quotes we all recognize: “Rosebud,” “you talking to me?”,  “here’s looking at you kid”  “we’re not in Kansas anymore” “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” “my precious,” “may the force be with you” and so many others.

Even though today it’s all digital, there’s such an appeal about the idea of the lonely projectionist threading reels of film to show an audience. Think of Alfredo in Cinema Paradiso, the all time cinema nostalgic film. You’re part of this provincial dusty southern Italian town along with Toto, as he learns from Alfredo in the post WWII years about film and life itself.

There’s something about open air cinemas that make viewers particularly nostalgic, as in the lyrics of singer Loukianos Kylaidonis’ song of the 1980’s of “moon-filled nights in the therina cinema, m’agrioklima kai yiasemia” (with honeysuckle and jasmine)                            

The senses make us travel back to the past. I’ve heard so often about the “agrioklima kai yiasemia” that I can almost smell it myself at the cinema and taste snacks of years past like granita and samali (semolina with syrup) popular in the 1970’s. Just ask someone (like my husband for example) about the cinema then and you’ll see the tears in their eyes, recalling the treats sold as they remember munching on pasatempo and drinking “byral” cola in the years before coca cola came to Greece.

What better way is there to spend a summer evening? So let the meltemi blow, let other cultural activities sleep, grab a director’s chair, put your hand in the popcorn, smell the fresh vassiliko. Pame cinema, let’s go to the movies! Open air cinema is thriving in Athens and throughout the country.

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Sherri Moshman Paganos is a writer and former educator, inspired by her life in Athens, where she and her husband are happily retired and enjoying their travels in Greece and abroad. You can check out her writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and articles here.