On paper, his name was Michalis Dimopoulos, but everyone called him “Michel” because of his extensive knowledge of French and his studies in the birthplace of cinema. Because Michelle Dimopoulos, who passed away yesterday at the age of 74, was exactly the kind of person whose identity should be spelled “cinema citizen” somewhere. Fascinated by the seventh art from a young age, he stayed in Paris to delve deeper into it and associate with it forever. On his return to Greece in the mid-1970s, he took on the role of critic for Avgi, as well as for the legendary magazine Synchronos Kinematographos, where he was editor-in-chief and director from 1975 to 1982.

His next station was ERT, where until 1991 he worked as a manager of foreign programs, making sure that in his selections to acquaint the most anxious part of the public with other cinema from around the world, which was practically inaccessible earlier in our country. In the same period and until its end, in 2010, he was the developer of the also iconic “Cinema Club”where, together with Giannis Bakogiannopoulos, they raised generations of viewers in the nouvelle of uncertainty, in Italian neorealism, in the cinema of Bergman, Eisenstein, Orson Welles and other giants of the big screen.

great names

He internationalized the Thessaloniki Film Festival and introduced to the public such creators as Kiarostami, Varda, Bertolucci, Sambrol and others.

His longest – in fact, life – relationship was with Thessaloniki Film Festival, whose internationalization he virtually signed off on when he took over the reins in 1992. As its director for 12 years (until 2004), Dimopoulos led the festival on a path of unparalleled extroversion and, together with Dimitris Epidis (the man who created the restless Open Horizons section), gave the event the character and special weight that it still has today. day. With a focus on the creators’ first films and “hunting” for trends emerging on the international film scene, a tactic largely adopted by his successors. Of course not, since he was also… allergic to celebrities. During his stay in Thessaloniki, the great names of world cinema came, such as Abbas Kiarostami, Anies Varda, Bernardo Bertolucci, Claude Chabrol, Isabelle Huppert, Faye Dunaway and many others.

Perhaps most of all, Michel Dimopoulos enjoyed writing about all these “heroes” behind the scenes and in front of the camera. In a special edition of the 44th FKTH dedicated to Wong Kar-Wai, he himself, demonstrating his artistic erudition, prefaces it as follows: “His own cinema comes from Scorsese’s America and Nicholas Ray, Godard’s Europe and nouvelle vag, Jean-Pierre Melville’s darkness , the explosion of rock, the density of Borges, the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the subtle sensibility of Manuel Puig […] opinions may differ, but no one can dispute the fascination stemming from this formal excess, an excess of image, scene, movement, an excess of frame and memory, an explosive use of space and time, a spiral narrative that unearths an excess of the world, an alternation of melancholy and catharsis, the sensuality of meteor encounters and eroticism, piercing like lightning through the heroes.

The above almost poetic formulation belongs not only to a connoisseur, a deep connoisseur of cinema, but above all to a convinced film fan, a viewer fascinated by the charm of the screen, which he continued to remain until the end of his life.

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Dear and rare friend

Telis Samandas*

First of all, we are talking about a dear, rare friend that we have lost. And I consider my words: “rare”, because it is rare to find in one person the sum of real knowledge, the critical ability to analyze and separate the worthwhile from the unnecessary and at the same time possess all of these qualities reflexively in order to transform them directly into a written text or an organized act. . In other words, what Michel has been doing all his life, either as a critic – in Avgi or in Synchrono Cinema – or as the initiator and organizer of the ERT foreign program, the Cinema Club of Public Television, or his great achievement, recreating catwalks of the Thessaloniki International Festival. And “expensive” because the value of spreading all this knowledge among so many people is incalculable, along with the sensitivity that distinguished him and which has allowed many today to say that “thanks to Michel Dimopoulos, we have learned to really watch movies. “. As for the personal loss of a dear friend who is more than half a century old, it is simply incommensurable.

* Mr. Telis Samandas is a journalist.

He had the right words

Maria Katsunaki

“The cinema was and remains an industry of escapism, painless fantasies, false dreams, a mass seducer. At the same time, it was and is art that increases social sensitivity and expands the boundaries of individual life experience.

He could best describe the art of cinema. Analyze (mostly) but also sum up, focus on one frame and then step back, see the whole, combine, reconstruct. And above all, find the right words for it. In his lexical palette there were all color tones and semitones.

His view, his criteria, his ability to discern talent even before he shows himself, take risks, suggest, educate. This, the last, he sought. Not only because he said it, but also because he did it.

Out of embarrassment, I offered an excerpt from his text dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Thessaloniki Festival in 1999. the lives of those who have been shaped by cinema through its own choices.