SPOTLIGHT ELENI KARAINDROU
Greece is the word Prolific Greek composer and WSA lifetime achievement award recipient Eleni Karaindrou tells Wendy Mitchell why she loves putting her own spin on traditional music reek composer Eleni Karaindrou fell in love with music and movies at a young age. She grew up in the mountain village of Teichio, where she listened to old ladies singing folk songs, or Byzantine hymns at church. When she was seven, her family moved to Athens, which proved to be just as stimulating. “There was an open cinema next to our house, and from our windows I was watching every night,” Karaindrou, now aged 79, recalls. “I saw Anna Karenina so many times! The music touched me. After they showed the film, I would go to my school’s piano and improvise, to try to find the feelings I had from the cinema.” It was many years later when she made it her profession to compose for the cinema and theatre. Karaindrou — who will receive the WSA lifetime achievement award and have her work celebrated, along with other Greek composers, in a special concert — had studied in Athens (attending the conservatory of music aged just 10) and Paris (where she moved for seven years during Greece’s military junta that started in 1967). She originally thought she would become a classical pianist, but that love for the movies drew her back in. “Things happen because they have to happen,” she says. While also studying archaeology and history, she was drawn into ethno musicology — the study of music in its cultural and social con-
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‘Nobody taught me how to compose for film or for the theatre. But I found a way’ Eleni Karaindrou, composer
texts — which was “a new science then. I discovered many new worlds of music, from all around the world. I think ethnomusicology opened a new horizon for me.” When she returned to Greece after the dictatorship ended in 1974, she created the laboratory for traditional instruments at the Ora Cultural Centre in Athens, as well as working on ethnomusicology projects at Hellenic Radio. At the same time, she was being asked by friends including Hristoforos Hristofis to help them compose for films. “I am an autodidact as a composer. I am a pianist; I know orchestration and how to direct an orchestra. But nobody taught me how to compose for film or for the theatre. But I found a way.” Creative trailblazer
That is particularly impressive as Karaindrou — who has been called “Greece’s most eloquent living composer” by Time magazine — was one of very few women working in the field during the 1970s and ’80s. “When I was first in a studio with an orchestra, I discovered that I needed to be well-prepared and
disciplined,” she recalls. “And then I would be respected. I didn’t really have difficulties, but I do think I made more effort to be prepared than if I were a man.” Karaindrou has worked with great directors over the course of her career, across both cinema and theatre, and says it is always “very important to me to be sure I’m speaking the same language with the person, to have the same affinity intellectually. I was never a person who has done music for cinema just to get money, never! “The way to work is to know the person well,” she continues, “to discuss with him or her, to try to understand the inner feelings and the inner position and the central idea. Why does he or she want to do this film?”
October 2021 | Screen International | screendaily.com
Karaindrou had a particularly special working relationship with Theo Angelopoulos, who is the subject of a full retrospective at this year’s Film Fest Ghent. The pair collaborated on eight films including 1995 Cannes grand jury prize winner Ulysses’ Gaze; 1998 Palme d’Or winner Eternity And A Day; and The Beekeeper (1986) starring Marcello Mastroianni. They had a way of working that would surprise most composers. First they would speak for many hours, then she would compose her music before the film started shooting. She would give this music to Angelopoulos and he could be inspired by her work while shooting and editing. Of course, sometimes a few tweaks had to come in post. “It was a fantastic way to work,
