The agony of cosmopolitan love: the Melina Mercouri-Jules Dassin partnership

ABSTRACT

The article explores the role that cosmopolitan love plays in the cinematic partnership of émigré director Jules Dassin and Greek star Melina Mercouri. In defining cosmopolitan love, it employs a conceptual framework informed by Simmel’s theorisation of the ‘stranger’ and Barthes’s analysis of ‘a lover’s discourse’. It offers a detailed and historically rooted understanding of stardom, performance, and aesthetics in the films of Dassin and Mercouri tracing changes in the director’s film aesthetics and in the star’s performance style. It argues that these transformations, demonstrated through a comparison between Never on Sunday and Phaedra, are substantially the outcome of a struggle to reconcile their cosmopolitan positions with love as a cosmopolitan disposition. The article uses this specific case study to propose an agonistics of cosmopolitan love that stands in opposition to ethical approaches such as Levinas’s for whom love is a form of ‘being-for-the-other’.

KEYWORDS:

• Jules Dassin
• Melina Mercouri
• love
• cosmopolitanism
• ethics
• agonistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Jules Dassin’s career highlights include Brute Force (U.S.A, 1947), The Naked City (U.S.A, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (U.S.A, 1949), Night and the City (UK, 1950), Rififi (Fr, 1955). The Dassin-Mercouri films are: He Who Must Die (It/Fr, 1957), La Legge (It/Fr, 1959), Never on Sunday (Gr/U.S.A, 1960), Phaedra (Gr/U.S.A, 1962), Topkapi (U.S.A, 1964), 10.30 PM Summer (Sp/U.S.A, 1966), Promise at Dawn (Fr/U.S.A, 1970), The Rehearsal (UK/Gr, 1974) and A Dream of Passion (Gr/Switz, 1978).

2. There is a wealth of material on both Dassin and Mercouri on the website of the Melina Mercouri Foundation (http://melinamercourifoundation.com/en/accessed 13 February 2023). I have been relying heavily on two extensive Greek television interviews with Mercouri made in 1993 for the state channel ET1: a special issue of the regular Paraskinio arts programme and the special two-hour long programme Melina Mercouri Portreto. Literature on Dassin includes: McGilligan and Buhle (1997), McArthur (1972), Hirsch (2006), Eckstein (2004), and Prime (2008); on Mercouri: Kourelou (2016); and Mercouri’s autobiography I was born Greek (Mercouri 1971).

3. Barthes (2001, 93–94) identifies the declamatory trope as instrumental in the construction of ‘enamoration as drama’.

4. For a survey of the critical responses see Soldatos (1988, 178–184).

5. For example, Duncan (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dimitris Eleftheriotis

Dimitris Eleftheriotis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has been an editor of Screen and of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture. His publications include Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks, Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide and Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement. His recent work includes several articles on film and cosmopolitanism.