Collections/August 2021

Nikos Papatakis: Agent of Chaos

Featuring a new introduction by Athina Rachel Tsangari, in conversation with Richard Linklater Startling, subversive, and explosively controversial, the films of Ethiopian-born Greek iconoclast Nikos Papatakis have long been frustratingly hard to see, but they constitute one of the most radical and neglected bodies of work in all of European cinema. A man of the world who rubbed shoulders with Jean Genet and John Cassavetes (he produced the former’s Un chant d’amour and the latter’s Shadows ), Papatakis began his directing career with the incendiary call to class warfare Les abysses , which nearly provoked a riot when it premiered at Cannes in 1963. The scandal was merely a warm-up for a career that courted controversy at every turn and which includes…

5 films