The works of George Hadjimichalis (The Famine in Athens in the winter of 1941–1942) and Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Untitled [In Plato’s Cave], 2008) are not, and do not claim to be, documentary works in the sense of a non-fiction filmmaking. Rather, they are linked by their use of video and archive material. Superficially, they both draw on moving images of the World War II to draw attention to contemporary issues. Both use archive footage as repositories of collective memory in order to create a vantage point in order to critically examine the present. These images are re-contextualised both within the projections themselves (classical montage) and through the works location and the spatial relation of its constituent elements (spatial montage). [i]

Hadjimichalis’ starkly titled The Famine in Athens in the winter of 1941–1942 consists of a large matt-black box, about the size of two kiosks with a door, a sign and a vandal proof glass screen through which one can see a small dark space in which a TV monitor is playing. The TV plays a short edited loop of harrowing footage of the famine in Athens during the Nazi occupation in the winter of 1941–42 filmed by amateur and professional filmmakers and gathered from archive libraries. The ‘box’ has moved around various central Athens locations, as mobile ‘window’ in to images of this suffering. This footage has to be seen in relation to three things: the work’s title (that places the events to a nearby spatial location but somewhat distant temporal one), the object itself (that clearly tries, through its minimalist sombre bulk, to claim a degree of severity and monumentality) and the installation’s position (out in the streets of Athens often in view of cafes and restaurants). It is this latter juxtaposition that is the works prima facie strength, an ‘etape’ to the amnesiac consumers of central Athens. This form of spatial montage attempts to provoke a painful memory of a relatively recent past and thus question the hyperactive consumerist evocation of history as something we can choose to forget.

The filmic experience that Hadjimichalis’ installation, where the video loop is less than 2 minutes long, is clearly very different from re-edited documentary films such as Peter Forgác’s Angelo’s Film [ii] and the demands that a public video installation can make on its viewers are more limited. It must, first of all, draw viewers’ attention by its sculptural presence, and only then, will anyone who carefully looks at it see the graphic ‘truth’ of the recorded image of acute suffering in Athens 60 years ago. However, the images themselves are not, to the unfamiliar eye at least, identifiably local: there is something in the cliché that the past is a foreign place. Here, however, it is only other information, from the works’ title and accompanying text or prior knowledge of the reality of this trauma that actually locates the images of suffering as Athenian.

Untitled, (In Plato’s Cave) consists of two video projections viewed in series, in two similar spaces on the first and second floor of the AD Gallery. The projections are set up to mirror each other with identical floor plans and the artist specifies the order in which they are to be viewed. The first video loop shows a man in World War II German military dress (in a painstakingly convincing recreation of a period editing laboratory) using images of the war to create a sequence of aerial footage and parachutists over landscapes. The second projection shows the same actor editing video footage from a contemporary Middle Eastern war on a digital editing suite. The actor, music, set up, length and format of the two projections encourage comparison and, through the juxtaposition of the two screens, create a spatial montage completed by the viewer’s movement between the spaces. By seeing the action of a Nazi propagandist in sequence with that of contemporary broadcast news editor there is an implied moral, or at least, practical connection: the heavily negative semiotic weight of a man dressed in Wehrmacht uniform affects the meaning of the second projection and carries an implicit call for its re-examination.

The question is, however, what this juxtaposition creates? What is new about the crafted reconstructions shown one above the other? The activity — editing or montage of non-fiction material — is clearly central to the question that the artist wants to explore. However, the use of World War II iconography, and in particular, Nazi regalia is highly weighted and over-determined. Rather like a teenager’s petulant accusation of ‘fascist’ parental authority, there’s a sense that you need rather more in terms of what exactly is wrong with the said activity before damning it by association. That Nazi propaganda became highly achieved visual and political products doesn’t actually say anything about how they worked or about these product’s relations to the crimes that these regimes committed. Similarly, that both Nazi’s and modern TV journalists use montage doesn’t really tell us anything new about either.

The work’s subtitle (In Plato’s cave) broadens the scope of the work from a narrow technocratic critique of news editor’s relation to propaganda and suggests that Tsivopoulos’ interest extends to the relation between the moving image and truth and/or reality beyond the lens of the camera. Plato’s cave has been used as a metaphor for photography and film since the development of the technology. Susan Sontag used it as a title for her 1977 introductory essay on photography. [iii] Here she argues that photography has changed our relationship to imagery and iconography and that the ‘very insatiability of the photographing eye has changed the terms of confinement in the cave, our world.’ Indeed, there is a sense in which Plato’s metaphor for knowledge of the Good, in which a fire, a screen and shadows form a rather cumbersome mechanism of an obscured reality, is more complete since the invention of photography.

The only part missing from Plato’s cave is the idea of montage, of a controlling mechanism for which secondary images reach the cave dwellers. On the other hand, looking at Book 7 of the Republic more closely, it is clear that the striking image of ‘prisoners in a cave’ is only a visual metaphor about our perception of the moral world and of the true object of Plato’s work: the Good. Light, sight and images are an analogy for an ethical sense that can only be described elliptically. As such, it is unclear who exactly is “in Plato’s cave”: the editors, the viewer, the artist or everyone?

Both works approach historical traumas and use art in order to say something about their representation. The difference between them however is the degree to which they examine the relationship between image and event. For Hadjimichalis, properly presented moving images are enough to ‘remind’ an audience of a historical happening: the link between image and historical reality is not problematised, indeed the work depends on the viewer accepting the veracity of the archive material for its effectiveness.

Tsivopoulos’ work, on the other hand, is morphologically more televisual in that it essentially consists of two re-enactment documentaries or ‘docudramas’. These, however, examine the media itself and the process through which images of traumas are edited to become media images, or to put it another way, of how events are mediated. This self-referential twist further highlights the extent to which the role of the artist has been overshadowed by that of the mass media that, though unrecognisable in today’s world of the 24-hour news cycle, developed from the cinema newsreel films of the past.

There is a sense, however, in which Tsivopoulos, by focusing on editing, misses the full extent of this change. As Boris Groys powerfully argues, in contrast to the past, when heroes (and villains) required artists and poets to immortalise their deeds in art, today’s warriors are, in a sense, their own artists. Disturbing as it sounds, most of us know Osama bin Laden primarily as an extreme ‘video artist’, through recognisable video documents of terrorist ‘happenings’ disseminated by the media. It is not so much that contemporary media is making propaganda (though it is), but rather that in today’s media-saturated reality ‘the act of war itself coincides with its documentation, with its representation.’ [iv] That’s not to say that war doesn’t include real violence and real death, but rather that such brutality also serves to validate these images as being ‘more real’ precisely because they are icons of the real thing (death). In a political culture in which violent posturing and icons of torture compete as images of effective power, these documentary images reinforce fear and the political status quo, by supporting the link between terrible image and terrible reality. It is this ‘documentary mechanism’ that power relies upon and which iconoclastic art must question if it is to create art in the tradition of the avant-garde.


George Hadjimichalis’ The Famine in Athens in the winter of 1941–1942, curated by Daphne Vitali, inaugurated IN & OUT , a series of presentations of new works by Greek and international artists, commissioned by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. The project’s duration was from 18 January to 15 March 2009.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ second solo exhibition in Athens, entitled The Real The Story The Storyteller, was held at AD Gallery from 2 February to 21 March 2009.


[i] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT, 2002, p. 18 “322. Spatial montage represents an alternative to cinematic temporal montage, replacing its traditional sequential mode with a spatial one. Ford’s assembly line relied on the separation of the production process into sets of simple, representative, and sequential activities … Cinema followed this logic of industrial production as well. It replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots that appear on the screen one at a time. This type of narrative turned out to be particularly incompatible with the spatial narrative that had played a prominent role in European visual culture for centuries”.
[ii] Archive material from the streets of Athens comes from the ERT archive and draws on the clandestine footage shot by the Athenian patrician Angelos Papanastassiou (some of which was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials following the war). This material was edited to create a documentary by the Hungarian experimental filmmaker Péter Forgács. Angelo’s Film, shows centres on Papanastasiou who risks his life in order to film the victims of the war whilst at the same time living as well as the situation allows him. Here the contrasting scenes of bourgeois life, in which birthday parties are celebrated, whilst on the streets of Athens, people are dying of starvation creates an uneasy contrast but compelling film. Forgacs Peter, Angelo’s Film, 2002, see http://www.forgacspeter.hu/english
[iii] Susan Sontag, On Photography, chapter 2, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, Penguin, 1977, pp. 8–24.
[iv] Boris Groys, Art Power, MIT, 2008, p. 122.