From Village Cinema to Cinema Programme Army-Prefectures-RNF: Distribution, programming and the role of the army in the dictatorship’s mobile cinema scheme in rural Crete, 1967-1974

This paper will examine the role of the army in Village Cinema, a nation-wide cinema scheme operated by the colonels’ dictatorship from 1967 to 1974. The paper focuses specifically on rural Crete and Village Cinema’s distribution and programming practices during this period, an area of research that has not featured in the limited, yet developing, scholarship on the history of Greek moviegoing, exhibition and reception.

Village Cinema was introduced in 1957 by the Royal National Foundation. Following the 1967 military coup and King Konstantinos’ failed attempt to overthrow the colonels' regime a few months later, the self-proclaimed Prime Minister, and coup leading figure, Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos replaced the King as the chairman of the Foundation in 1968. Village Cinema, as Spyros Dionysiadis describes, was ‘reformed’ from that point onwards; the fading mobile-unit aspect of the scheme was revived and assigned to local military divisions and conscripts-projectionists who carried out the screenings in collaboration with local authorities (Dionysiadis, 2010). Following those changes the scheme was renamed Cinema Programme Army-Prefectures-RNF.

This paper will use original archival and oral history research, that expand Dionysiadis’ brief description of the cinema scheme under the dictatorship and provide a wealth of new information, to position the scheme within the dictatorship’s unrelenting surveillance and propaganda practices. Reports, letters and screening schedules, as well as interviews, on the army’s role in organizing the screenings across Crete’s four prefectures, reveal tensions between the army and the local communities and raise questions on resistance, compliance and overall reception of the scheme by rural audiences.