KAPETAN MIHALIS AND THE CRISIS OF GREEK CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION

 

To adapt Kapetan Mihalis to the screen is to attempt the impossible. Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, part epic and part metaphysical treatise, is among the most difficult works of modern Greek literature to transpose into visual language. Its conflict is neither purely historical nor political,  is eminently ontological, the struggle between freedom and necessity, body and spirit, the inhibited and uninhibited self, Eros and Thanatos, an inner drama articulated through external revolt. The 2023 cinematic adaptation directed by Kostas Haralambous, though clearly motivated by reverence for its source, fails to render that interiority visible. What emerges is a lifeless transcription, a film paralysed by its self-conscious devotion to the text.

From its opening sequence, a panoramic sweep of a sunstruck Cretan landscape accompanied by sombre strings, it is evident that the film aspires to solemnity rather than vitality. The mise en scène is composed with painterly care yet devoid of movement or moral tension. The island of Crete, which in Kazantzakis’ prose breathes, trembles and suffers as a living organism, is here a decorative surface. The camera contemplates rather than explores the topography of conflict. In the sense used by André Bazin, who saw film as the ontology of the photographic image, this adaptation confuses representation with revelation. The world is shown yet never truly disclosed.

The problem here is both aesthetic and structural, with the film’s narrative appearing fragmented and curiously static. Dialogues are woodenly declaimed rather than spoken, drained of subtext and rhythmic variation. In one of the central scenes, Mihalis stands before a candle and delivers a solemn reflection on Crete and the meaning of freedom, a passage composed in Kazantzakis’ idiom but not quoted directly from the novel. The moment, intended to be epic, collapses under its own theatrical weight. There is no tension between the man and the idea; only an actor reciting a line. The camera remains reverent, unwilling to question or interpret. In adaptation theory, this constitutes what Linda Hutcheon calls a hermeneutic deficit, a failure to translate not just the content but also the mode of meaning of the original. There are no new insights to be gained here.

Kazantzakis’ writing burns with ambivalence. Every gesture of faith conceals doubt, every act of heroism contains futility. This film offers certainty in the place of struggle. Its tone remains uniformly exalted, with its visual grammar governed by symmetrical compositions, diffused lighting and choreographed solemnity. The result may be rhetorically grand but at the same time, it is emotionally inert. Battle sequences, intended to evoke the collective sacrifice of Crete, are staged with illustrative literalism, clumsy camera movements, abrupt edits and digitally augmented imagery that adds scale without therequisite emotional immediacy. There is no spatial logic, no sense of danger or contingency. Montage, as Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein taught, should think; here it merely records.

Regrettably, the film’s performances are undermined by an absence of psychological nuance and tonal modulation. The actor portraying Mihalis oscillates between stoic detachment and exaggerated fervour, never quite discovering the inner rhythm of Kazantzakis’ protagonist, that fusion of moral torment and ecstatic defiance. Supporting cast also display a limited emotional palette that remains confined to archetype: the grieving wife, the tragic lover, the zealous priest. The characters function as emblems rather than beings. In semiotic terms, they are signs emptied of referents, images that signify a localised type of Greekness, sacrifice and honour without generating new meaning. The acting is stilted, measured in diction rather than emotive. Even in moments of supposed passion, gestures are rehearsed, gazes fixed and movements appear curiously weightless. There is no sense of inner life beneath the dialogue, no fissure through which humanity might escape. Instead, the viewer is left with posture and arrangement, actors placed before the camera like figures in a static frieze or a tableau vivant. This absence of vitality accords with Vrasidas Karalis’ observation that Greek cinema often oscillates between didacticism and paralysis under the weight of national symbolism, where emotion can lapse into quotation and performance into simulation. The tragedy of such acting lies in its lack of necessity. Nothing in it feels compelled, urgent or true.

This literal approach stems from a misunderstanding of fidelity. Film adaptation is translation across media and across ontologies. As Robert Stam observed, obsession with faithfulness often leads to paralysis, since the film medium must externalise inner states. Kazantzakis’ theological and philosophical meditations, his fusion of Nietzschean struggle and Orthodox asceticism, resist direct visualisation. To reproduce them verbatim annihilates their ambiguity. The director, unwilling to reinterpret, confines himself to reverence. The result honours Kazantzakis’ text while betraying his spirit. Karalis has argued that Greek cinema frequently bears the burden of its own national symbolism to the point of immobility, a pattern confirmed here. Rather than confront the metaphysical audacity of Kazantzakis’ vision, the filmmakers retreat into solemnity, equating stillness with depth. The film’s inertia, physical and emotional, may be symptomatic of a deeper anxiety about interpretation itself, a fear that to reimagine the sacred is to profane it.

This failure belongs to the larger condition of Greek national cinema. Since the decline of the New Greek Cinema of the 1970s, with its daring experimentation and political allegory, contemporary Greek filmmaking has alternated between minimalist existentialism and heritage spectacle. Kapetan Mihalis belongs entirely to the latter. Its imagery, from the meticulously arranged costumes to the sentimental orchestral score, aligns it with the French “tradition of quality” derided by Truffaut and with what contemporary criticism often labels heritage cinema: works that replace artistic inquiry with aesthetic piety. It is a cinema of preservation, not discovery.

Such films arise from a culture that venerates the past yet seldom interrogates it. Greece’s literary and historical inheritance becomes a monument to be maintained, never a dialogue to be renewed. In this sense Kapetan Mihalis exemplifies a broader malaise, a reluctance to risk meaning or to offend the canon in order to transform it. The fear of irreverence produces homages that erase.

Even in technical terms the film reveals such conceptual exhaustion. The editing is languid and the pacing inert. Scenes linger long after their emotional climax, mistaking duration for profundity. The lighting, alternately overexposed and funereal, drains the landscape of vitality. The score, insistently melancholic, dictates emotion rather than accompanying it. There is no space for silence, that essential dimension of cinematic time which allows the viewer to think and to breathe and the overall impression is one of suffocation through absence. As Karalis observed, the Greek screen often mirrors a society exhausted by its own symbols. Kapetan Mihalis becomes such a mirror, a film unable to believe in the reality it depicts.

Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the movement image and the time image is instructive in understanding the film’s failure of dynamism. Kazantzakis’ novel is movement, a relentless ascent toward spiritual liberation. This film represents time without becoming: motion arrested, meaning immobilised. It is a cinema of repetition rather than revelation.

The tragedy of Kapetan Mihalis lies in its renunciation of struggle, the essence of Kazantzakis’ vision. The novel’s protagonist is consumed by an inner fire, a holy restlessness that defies both God and death. The film, by contrast, is marked by passivity. The camera watches where it should wrestle, venerates where it should question. What could have been an titanic existential confrontation becomes a museum exhibit, polished and silent.

The boredom the film induces arises not so much from pacing as from ontology: the weariness of an art form that no longer believes in its transformative power. Until Greek filmmakers recover the courage to interpret rather than preserve, to risk sacrilege in the service of truth, their images will remain trapped in the endless rehearsal of a history that no longer believes in itself: the art of a nation circling its own reflection, unable to move beyond the echo of what it once was.

Kazantzakis once wrote, “Reach what you cannot” (Askitiki, 1927). This latest adaptation reaches for nothing. In its failure to strive, it exposes a deeper cultural crisis, a society that venerates its past precisely because it has forgotten how to imagine its future, the very negation of Kazantzakis’ Kapetan Mihalis. Nonetheless, as a symbol of a creative cul-de-sac, it is compelling viewing.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 November 2025