The City of Athens as a Symbolic Cinematographic Setting

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of Athens in cinema from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering architecture and urban space as narrative devices. Drawing on a selected corpus that spans from the classics of Greek neorealism and the golden age of national cinema to contemporary works, it explores concepts such as heterotopia, place/non-place and the performativity of space, among other analytical approaches. The study demonstrates how Greek productions dismantle the tourist image of the city -centred on the Acropolis and Plaka- to reveal a more plural, multifaceted and multicultural Athens, where residential and marginal neighbourhoods coexist with diverse ethnicities, languages and cultures, alongside transit spaces and re-signified monuments. Taken together, these representations construct a counter-cartography that transforms the city into an active protagonist, capable of dramatizing tensions between memory and present, tradition and change, identity and exclusion.