Sound and the nation: Rethinking the history of early Greek film production

The worldwide debut of mechanically reproduced film sound in the late 1920s changed the technological prerequisites for participating in cinema's ongoing discourse about modernity and had a dramatic impact on national cinemas around the world. In Greece, it initiated an ethological turn in the cinema industry and prompted the nationalization of film content. The ethological turn of Greek cinema reached its resolution with the 1932 release of The Lover of the Shepherdess, the first Greek film to use sound-on-film technology. Through its visual and sonic strategies for representing cinematic space, this film provides insight into the possibilities and problems of the project of national cinema in Greece in the early 1930s. The film's soundtrack, in conjunction with the montage and mise en scene, places Greek cinema's ethological turn within a broader historical context and lends critical perspective to Greece's encounter with a global cinema industry that was changing dramatically as a result of the advent of film sound.