I had to wait for two years following the death of Mary Tsoni for a Greek journalist to finally admit in writing that she was indeed a smack addict and that her heroin addiction was a public secret:
People kept asking me after her death, “were they a couple? Was Alex her boyfriend?”. There’s your answer. Yes, they were a couple and he was her boyfriend. They were living together. Alex was the one who introduced Mary to the Filmmakers in the Fog, including Yiorgos Lanthimos who later cast her in his art house breakthrough movie Dogtooth.
This latest career overview ‘s from the same female journalist, Νεφέλη Λυγερού, who had originally published this article:
No one in the Greek media is willing to talk about the family dynamics behind Mary Tsoni’s death. A 16 year old girl who leaves home to go to London to study musical dance (who paid for that?) only to end up doing smack before Alexander Voulgaris in Exarchia in Athens (who paid for that?). What were the family dynamics behind all this?
Several years before her death, Alexander on his Facebook account had referred to Mary Tsoni as “Nico”, a famous female junkie Alex encouraged Mary to model herself after, thus effectively enabling and encouraging the drug abuse that led to her death last May. In the following article you will notice that Nico is described only in relation to the man who made her famous, exactly as happened to Mary after her death with regards to Lanthimos and Alex being the two famous men who made her famous:
“This year’s Summer Happenings program kicks off this Saturday with Warhol Icon, an evening of performances based around the iconic Pop artist and his muse, the actress, model, Velvet Underground chanteuse, and solo artist Nico.”
https://hyperallergic.com/386678/at-the-broad-an-evening-of-performances-inspired-by-nico/
Why refer to Nico as a “Warhol Icon”? I myself for example had never heard of Nico or The Velvet Underground until I saw the scene in Oliver Stone’s The Doors movie where Jim Morrison does heroin at The Factory in New York, has a weird discussion with Andy Warhol about a telephone call from Gawd (basically stupid junkie babble) and ends up in a hotel with Nico blowing him in the elevator and Pamela walking in on the scene. Hence I only knew Nico as a woman who was infatuated with Jim Morrison, somone who had covered the Doors’s song “The End” horribly on a keyboard. So, again, why refer to her as a “Warhol Icon” specifically? Why not refer to her as a Jim Morrison groupie? Why at this tendency to refer to women in relation to the Svengali-male in their lives?
Nico said, “The only one I have anything in common with is Jim Morrison. He was my soul brother, he told me to write songs. I never thought that I could.”, yet they call her a “Warhol icon”:
Will there be another time
Another year
Another wish to say
It is in this same sexist art world that Mary was trying to have a career on her own and couldn’t. Because to have a career in Athens you have to have a Svengali male in your life. Whether he’s a Warhol or a Morrison or an Alex or a Lanthimos. Maybe if the curators of this performance show about Nico had known about Mary Tsoni and the Nico comparrison they might have even included her in their program as a tribute, but they don’t know about Mary. They might have watched Dogtooth and not know that the actress who played the little sister is dead. Maybe it’s better that they don’t.
Horrible things are more likely to happen when you have open drug abuse and alcohol and an unsafe situation. If we go by the lyrics of the song “Mary In A Strapless Bra” and we extrapolate from the lyrics that Mary must’ve have sniffed smack in the presence of Alexander Voulgaris, an event he later included in the lyrics of the song, then the conclusion we can draw is that Alexander Voulgaris failed a basic moral responsibility towards Mary Tsoni, who was 18 years old at the time whereas he as the older person by 6 years had the responsibility to encourage his friend and future band-member to stop “sniffing smack”. Instead of sitting there watching her sniff smack and celebrating her misbehaviour in song, he could’ve walked out of the room and made a simple phonecall to her parents in Crete to let them know what their daughter was doing: that here was a young 18 year old girl abusing an illegal hard drug in his presence, a hard drug like heroin which was apparently readily made available to her. If Alexander had bothered to make that phonecall once, back in 2004 Mary Tsoni’s drug abuse would’ve been over with much more earlier and her life could’ve been spared.
We all know what happened next: Mary went into an early grave and Alex went to Los Angeles:
This American film blog Culture Crypt published an article about the American premiere of Alex’s The Thread (2017)
http://culturecrypt.com/movie-reviews/thread-2016
I meant to post reply in response to their review but never got around to, so here is the response I had drafted at the time:
Alexander is the son of a famous Greek filmmaker by the name of Pandelis Vouglaris, whereas is mother, Ioanna Karystiani, is a Greek book author of some note, and is known for her very outspoken leftwing politics. She is former member of the Greek communist party, and despite what Alex said during the Q&A in LA, everyone in Greece instantly understood that the character of Nik is modelled after Alexander’s mom.
I understand why Alexander would be reluctant to admit to this backstory before an audience in Los Angeles, because he has pretty much grown up in public in Greece (something he concedes but resents to the point of no longer doing any interviews because of being constantly questioned about his family) and having this movie premire in America is a rare opportunity for Alexander to have his work judged on its own merits.
I can see why Alexander responded reluctantly to the question about whether he is into strong women. If you look at Alexander’s top 100 of female interpretations on his sister’s webblog, you will see that these are not necessarily strong female roles. Alexander rather prefers female interpretations that show vulnerability. He wants to see female characters that are breakable under strain.
Now, about Alex being withdrawn and inarticulate during the Q&A… please keep in mind that the American premiere of The Thread occured literally weeks after the unexpected death of actress Mary Tsoni. If you have seen Lanthimos’ 2009 movie Dogtooth you might remember Mary Tsoni as the little sister in that movie. When Alex started out as a young filmmaker in his twenties in Athens, he and Mary were a couple living in a squat and they were in a cabaret-punk band called Mary and the Boy which toured Greece and Europe for years before Mary was noticed by Lanthimos and was cast in his movie. Most people from my generation in Greece knew Alex and Mary as musicians rather than through their films. They both kept performing music and singing their old songs after they broke up and broke up the band. It’s possible that Alex was still emotionally raw over her death and hence withdrawn during the Q&A. Alex is very shy and withdrawn in general, something that has been noted by several Greek film critics. He has been dysmorphic throughout his life, has suffered from debilitating panic attacks at certain points in his life and was eventually diagnosed with and treated for depression in the years that he wrote the screenplay for The Thread. Your claim that the screenplay was written post-hoc is therefore not exactly right. It is possible that Alex rewrote parts of it, but he has stated in a 2013 interview on Youtube that the screenplay was written in 2007 when he was undergoing treatment for his depression.
As for the horse dildo scene in The Thread referred in Culture Crypt’s review, this is I suspect in reference to a short horror story I had written in 2014 (when Alexander was shooting The Thread) in which a character modelled after Alexander attends a vegan BBQ where a vegan girl attempts to flirt with him. The absurdist dialogue I wrote between Alex and the girl concerned the question of whether unicorn horns are vegan and hence acceptable erotic implements for vegans. I suspect that Alexander took this scene from my story and turned the unicorn’s horn into a horse dildo for his film. Not to flatter myself but it would not be the first time Alex and his clique have ripped off shit I’ve posted on this blog.
Synopsis: Political revolutionary Niki and her son Lefteris live in a world bound by memory, sexual nightmares, and the political chaos of Greece in the 1970s. Their existence is a claustrophobic fever dream in which one face merges into the next, meshing fantasy and horror. The result is a head trip that manages to defy the conventions of genre by crafting a savage meditation, oscillating among political aggression, motherhood and violence as protest.
Writer/director Alexandros Voulgaris and lead Sofia Kokkali create an experience unlike any other, challenging the values of contemporary society with a unique cinematic articulation. Both vibrant and horrifying, Thread is Greek cinema at its most brutal and experimental; a burning hallucination that brands your brain and won’t let you wake up.
Another thing that has happened since Mary’s death is that Alex also posted his movie Pink online in full. And I do wonder, would Romanna have even had a career in Greek film if she hadn’t been subjected herself to Alex at such a young age in film? Or is subjecting yourself to Alex a condition for being an actress in Greece? Was Mary Tsoni too subjected to this kind of cinematic predation when she came to Athens at the age of only 16 and became Alexander’s protege? “Mary in a strapless bra” “sniffing smack” in Alexander’s presence while living “the most decadent way of life”, oh yes, it’s all starting to make sense now. What better way for an older fuckboy praying on younger girls to control and manipulate any younger targets he is lusting after that by feeding them heroin and getting them addicted to smack just like a pimp does? I am still waiting for a Greek Amy Berg to stand up and make a Greek version of the An Open Secret documentary in Greece. It is my firm belief that Mary was prayed upon and groomed at the age of 16, and that she wasn’t alone.
No one knows the contemporary female Greek film-makers, not even Greeks themselves. No one knows the FOG group was initiated and led by a Greek female filmmaker.
Because the most promising Greek filmmaker is NOT Lanthimos, or that other Greek sexist Papakaliatis. I dare any feminist reading this to sit through his movie If, or his new one Worlds Apart for that matter. This is for the Greek people posting here defending Lanthimos. Do you know these female Greek film makers? Of course not. The Filmmakers in the Fog group was LED BY FEMALE FILMMAKERS, but NO ONE KNOWS THIS! Every single one of whom has made movies that kick the daylights out of both Dogma-esque Lanthimos AND Ron Howard-esque Papakaliatis. For a while I was hoping that Sofia Exarchou would steal Lanthimos’ undeserved praise, especially when I learned that she was doing the Sundance lab right under your noses, in the end she too sold out and became a Lanthimos clone. None of my friends liked her debut feature Park. I didn’t even bother to see it myself.
Alexander now has a movie out that premiered at Cannes titled Winona. He once said on Facebook that he wanted to be Winona when he was a little boy.
You want to know what it’s like to be stolen from?
I feel just like Winona Ryder
In that movie about vampires
And she couldn’t get that accent right;
Neither could that other guy
This is what it’s like to be stolen from
https://www.facebook.com/events/222821308290757/
I write a single blog entry where I mention the fact that he wanted to be Winona Ryder when he was a little boy, (which is something he himself openly admitted on Facebook) and he immediately names his new movie “Winona”. (There is no doubt in my mind that Alex is simply a closeted autogynephile at this point, all the signs are there.)
This is what it’s like to be stolen from. It’s not cool and you are not the only one psychologically torturing me and gaslighting me about stealing from me. And ridiculing me for getting angry when I discover I was stolen from, WHEN I HAVE EVERY FUCKING REASON TO GET ANGRY ABOUT SHIT LIKE THAT.
I am sick and tired of both you and Alex stealing from me. (Yes, you, other you, you know who you are. I bet you think this song is about you.) If you have no inspiration of your own just come out and admit you two are a bunch of unoriginal fucks STEALING shit from others. But do not steal ideas from me.
I have nothing but my own mind and my own thoughts and ideas. I literally have nothing else. I am as poor as a church mouse, I have never had an arts career like either one of you, and yet you fuckers, you fucking assholes who are supposed to be the professional recognized artists, you come over and you steal from ME, the amateur. The late sociologist Bourdieu once said that the knowledge of the amateur is like a bunch of unstrung pearls (unstrung because it’s knowledge that was haphazardly or incidentally acquired and hence unsystematic), so does it make me a pearl clutcher that I don’t want you two stealing my pearls? Whatever, you two need to stay away from my pearls.
Do you fuckers understand what what you are doing to me is exactly what Andy Warhol did to Valerie Solanas? It is stealing. It is what recognized male artists have traditionally done to unrecognized female artists, thinking they can get away from poor female artists who have always lived in the gutter and in obscurity.
So stop stealing from me.
Stop stealing from people who are poor and have nothing and have never been recognized by anything or anyone and have never been into it for the sake of recognition or fame. I write because I have to. I write because I have no choice, I have to write. I do not write for the money or the fame like you two. Stop stealing from me because watching do that is like watching my own children being prostituted before my eyes. But neither of you cares about that, do you?
YES I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS YOU SICK FUCK.
STOP STEALING FROM ME.
STOP GASLIGHTING ME ABOUT YOUR STEALING.
STOP RIDICULING ME FOR TRYING TO WRITE SHORT STORIES. You don’t even know how difficult it is for me to write these stories. I left Greece when I was seven. My Greek is that of a seven year old. These stories are a way for me to reconnect with my mother language. They look like simple stories but they take me a lot of time to write. For you to make fun of these stories is the biggest insult and the crudest form of disrespect.
STOP STEALING FROM THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING.
I am a woman who never had an artistic career or recognition or anything and I am sick of all you men coming here to steal from me. Enough is enough.
I began writing scripts I wanted to see- which had no hope of being made in the early 1990s- lesbian prostitutes in an 1890 gold mine camp in Colorado; lesbian French poets and writers in the age of France’s magical time in the early 1920s with Natalie Barney, and Renee Vivien; a woman killing her abuser and getting away with it; etc. I wrote what I wanted to write and said I didn’t care about “making it”—I think I knew I was not going to “make it,” whether I cared or not.
After I made the decision to not be the only one protesting stuff like this in classes, I was in a feedback session for another writer and someone in the audience said women have “rape fantasies.” I held my tongue. I was just going to not engage and was going to let someone else handle it for a change. I reasoned that this was so overboard—someone else must feel the way I felt. In the courtyard, a man in my class came up to me and asked why I hadn’t responded to that comment? I said “Well, I thought someone else might do that.” And he said, “We said it specifically so that you would say something.” and he laughed saying he wanted to give me an opportunity to say something about feminism.
I could go on—but you get the idea. And the reality is that I was always thought “nothing horrible” happened to me in film school because I was not raped, or molested by anyone in my school. I was approached and I was confronted, and I fought back.
…
Did I want to make a movie? Did I want to go into the equipment room and be greeted by a woman (or man) who was excited to help me? To help me figure out how to do it, so that I could make a movie?
To conlcude, here are some other articles I found while researching this blog entry:
http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/1479
Το «Νήμα» υπόσχεται συγκινητικές στιγμές και μία πρωτότυπη ιστορία. Εγγυάται όμως ατελείωτους κώδικες που μόνο ο δημιουργός του καταφέρνει να αποκωδικοποιήσει και εικόνες που θα ταράξουν το κοινό. Είναι ταινία για μόνο μία μικρή μερίδα του δυνάμει κοινού και απευθύνεται σε μία ελίτ κατά τα πρότυπα του Βούλγαρη. Αυτό την κάνει μία ταινία που αποκλείει την πλειοψηφία (μαζί με εμένα) να τη δει δεύτερη φορά.
http://feelarocka.com/mary-tsoni-mary-and-the-boy.html
Oh, and BTW, how have you been enjoying all of the #MeToo stories in the media, Alex? Do you think Mary would’ve posted a #MeToo had she still been around? #SinceUBeenGone https://nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html
some thoughts on believing survivors: http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/sam_w/2014/12/09/on_belief
Jo, who played Paulina in A Winter’s Tale, said, “I don’t care how talented you are, it’s your ‘look.’ ” :
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/50082-focus-stasis-my-experiences-with-hollywood-sexism-and-why-it-will-never-change
Uncanny resemblance…
Fascinating Photos Taken by Lewis Carroll Show the Young Girl Who Inspired ‘Alice in Wonderland’
Il corpo delle donne (2009)
Project Keep Staring 