Nikos Nikolaidis

Greek film director

Nikos Georgiou Nikolaidis (Νίκος Γεωργίου Νικολαΐδης; 25 October 1939 – 5 September 2007) was a Greek film director, screenwriter, film producer, writer, theatre director, assistant director, record producer, television director, and commercial director. He is usually considered a representative of European avant garde and experimental art film.

Nikolaidis was born on 25 October 1939 in Athens, Greece, where he lived and worked all his life. He was also the scriptwriter and producer of the movies which he directed and would occasionally, as in the case of the 1965 Orestis Laskos film Praktores 005 enantion Hrysopodarou, write screenplays for other directors. For much of his life he worked in advertising and he managed to direct two hundred television advertisements within twenty years. He studied filmmaking at the Σχολή Κινηματογράφου Τηλεόρασης Λ. Σταυράκου and acquired scenic design skills at the Vakalo College of Art and Design, a highly regarded specialized private art school, both located in Athens, Greece. In 1960 he began to work as a first assistant director for Vasilis Georgiadis and in 1962 he directed his first short film Lacrimae Rerum. His directorial feature length debut was Euridice BA 2037 which premiered at the Thessaloniki Festival of Greek Cinema on 29 September 1975 where it won the Best Director Award, the Greek National Ministry of Culture Award, and the Athens Film Critics Association Best Picture Award. Despite a lukewarm reaction by viewers, critics appreciated the innovative perspective on the classic Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice and noted the originality of Nikolaidis' artistic techniques. Nikolaidis himself believed Euridice BA 2037 to be his best film. For his next picture, The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979), the director studied the transformation of social values using the example of a group of five friends who meet after a long separation and share with each other the details of their difficult lives. The film became the symbol of the 1950s generation and reflected his personal views on the problem of alienation in the modern world. The film was shot in a surreal way with a predilection for the aesthetics of the Marquis de Sade. In it, for the first time in Nikolaidis' filmography, one can see the characteristic elements of film noir which became part and parcel of Nikolaidis' unique approach in the majority of the films that followed. Today he is probably best known for his 1990 magnum opus Singapore Sling, a bizarre mix of film noir and horror with sex being used as a power game. Despite his long career as a film director in his home country which stretches to the early 1960s he was almost entirely unknown outside Greece before the early 1990s and is still less known outside it and it was only with this film, which has immediately achieved cult status, that international fame came to him. From his cinematic works, he further directed Sweet Bunch (1983), Morning Patrol (1987), See You in Hell, My Darling (1999), and The Loser Takes It All (2002). He also published a collection of short stories and wrote three novels, including The Angry Balkan (1977) which has been reprinted many times in Greece. In addition to his career as a filmmaker, theatre director, and writer, Nikolaidis also worked at a recording studio. His films have often divided viewers and critics alike. Due to his methods of filmmaking, screenwriting, et cetera, as well as the themes his films usually deal with, being in stark contrast to standard mainstream ones, his films have received very little publicity though some, especially his lesser known ones, became cult films, both inside and outside Greece. The characters in his films are usually people constrained by limitations or found in absurd and extreme situations while playing with their fate. The themes that one often encounters in his films include the 1950s and film noir, the relationship between sex and death, companionship and love, as well as the struggle against all sorts of powers and ghosts from the past. Nikolaidis filmed much of his work in black and white, a few of his films contained a certain similarity to so called "trash films," and he categorized the majority of his films into trilogies. As an example of the last tendency, the "Years of Cholera" trilogy which deals with the last decades of the twentieth century begins with The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979), continues with Sweet Bunch (1983), and ends with The Loser Takes It All (2002). In November 2005, after the completion of his last film The Zero Years, a tale of perversion and sexual dominance which failed to replicate the earlier success of Singapore Sling (1990), Nikolaidis declared his intention to stop making movies in order to deal with music. From 1970 on, he lived with Marie Louise Bartholomew with whom he had two children. She was also either the producer or at least involved in the production of all his eight feature films and two hundred advertisements. He died on 5 September 2007, aged 67, of pulmonary edema in Athens, Greece. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival held a retrospective in his honor during its tribute program in November 2007 and the Greek Film Archive paid tribute to him between 26 May and 1 June 2011 by projecting his eight feature films. To this day he remains the only Greek filmmaker who was ever awarded the Best Director Award at the Thessaloniki Festival of Greek Cinema or at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival's Greek State Film Awards five times.

The work of Nikos Nikolaidis has had a significant influence on the subsequent generation of Greek filmmakers some of which were inspired by the stylistics of his films and the unusual artistic images containing complex allegories and symbols. His films' protagonists are usually outcasts and nonconformists or the cynics and the marginalized people of society with mental and sexual disorders. The main feature of Nikolaidis' directorial approach was the predominance of form over content. At home, he was seen as an innovator looking for unusual ways to use film language, as well as someone who created a unique aesthetic combining beauty and ugliness. Abroad, Nikolaidis earned a reputation as an eccentric and controversial director. His influence extends abroad too. Ihor Podolchak's 2013 film Delirium was compared by Ukrainian film critics to the works of Nikolaidis after its prerelease screenings.