the cinematic pedophilia apologetics of Alexander Voulgaris aka The Boy

Expossay:

it’s urban degeneration, ας πουμε ρε παιδι μου ξερω ‘ γω ξερεις – the cinematic pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy of Alexander Voulgaris aka The Boy

by drs. Efthimia Dilpizoglou (c) 2014 all rights reserved

– We’re only making plans for Alex, we only want what’s best for him, Alex just needs that helping hand, Alex is happy in his world.

“The purpose of this blog-entry is not to attack Alexander Voulgaris, really.”, she said, innocently batting her eye-lashes which weren’t half as long as Voulgaris’ own that naturally fan out like the ones in a mascara commercial, gifting him with what the Germans refer to as a Dianenaugenaufschlag. After reading her blog entry he was about ready to “pound her into mascara to colour his eye-lashes with”, an expression used in Saudi Arabia amongst the young referring to the type of man who makes women weak at the knee, melting them, chador and all, into a pool of black ink, the black blood in Voulgaris’ science fiction. All transnational jokes aside and on a more serious note, Voulgaris has said a million times that 1) he doesn’t care about people liking or hating his work and hence doesn’t read any reviews or critiques, even shutting down the comment-section to every video posted to his Youtube account MAVRESTRIXES to prevent people from leaving feedback (yet he seems miraculously well up to date on reviews of his movies, I guess he makes an exception for film-reviews because he really does want to become a famous film-maker), that 2) Voulgaris avoids doing any interviews nowadays unless it’s someone he already knows because he considers interviewers to be generally ill-prepared (anyone who thinks I was ill-prepared to write this blog entry can go ahead and check my list of resources below), and 3) Voulgaris has quit Facebook “for the upcoming months and years”, in order to “watch more movies” and hence to further isolate himself from humanity (update: he’s back on Facebook posting about the movies he’s watching, also complaining that his latest record isn’t selling) and 4) he will only give one single live music show in 2014 in order to further avoid the hassle of having to deal with people. I would say that anyone who is this indifferent to the reception of his work and anyone who is working so hard at fine-tuning his reclusiveness is literally and figuratively beyond the reach of my critique. The real purpose and goal of this blog-entry is to give but one telling example of the way the conservative government of Samaras is blatantly wasting money in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the recent history of the country of Greece. You see, 90 000 euros is not exactly pocket-change in contemporary Greece. It might not seem like a lot of money to film-makers in western countries who are more used to getting 200 000 euros to millions even in funding for their projects, but 90 000 euros is literally crazy money in today’s Greece. 90 000 euros can feed and shelter about 18 poverty-stricken families for a whole year (minimum wage in Greece is about 5000 euros a year). I demand to know why 90 000 euros is being given to a cinematic pedophilia-apologist and advocate of a film-maker, someone who openly but in the most sneaky way demands the right of film-makers to rape children with their cameras in the name of aesthetics and art, someone who because of his familial situation (which in the context of Greece amounts to being left-wing royalty) and direct access to Hollywood via the likes of Martin Scorsese (who is personal friends with his dad, the infamous left-wing film-maker Pandelis Voulgaris), certainly doesn’t need such government support. This person is someone who, despite doing his best to seem apolitical, is basically a free-market libertarian boldly claiming in an interview that “competition makes for better films”, yet he is unwilling to subject himself and his output to that same competition he so openly praises for resulting in better films, instead being all too happy to pocket government funding rather than letting the invisible hand of the market do its magic on his films. Well, I just so happen to think that free blogging makes for better film-makers, so let’s allow the invisible hand of the blogosphere work its magic on this here catastrophuck.

– Boys and girls in film-school, say hello to your new teacher, mister Alexander Voulgaris. “Hiii miiister Voulgariiis!”.

Everyone (outside of Greece who has been spared all the drama all these years and is reading about the creature for the first time ever) say hi to 33-year old Athens native Exarchia resident Alexander Voulgaris, born on the 22nd of February 1981, posterboy and self-declared sex-symbol of the nihilistic transgression-obsessed Greek hipster movement. Alex is a film-maker, a Stavrakos Film School drop-out who claims he “didn’t learn a damn thing at that school” (more on that later), and is also a musician who puts out records under the alias “The Boy”. To people who have never heard his music I would describe him as having the intense obnoxious lyrics of an Eminem and the musical ambition of a Trent Reznor, though it’s pretty obvious that Voulgaris branches out more than Reznor does and has a finger in every genre you’d never think of, everything from hip-hop to spoken word to various styles of Greek music to anti-rock opera. I am the type of person who can happily sit through an entire Cradle of Filth record, but listening to Alexander Voulgaris’ music is literally the most disturbing and frightening listening experience of my entire life. But more on that later. Voulgaris also likes to play basketball. He has a song called “Nerd” but you can tell he’s not a real nerd just from looking at him dance in this video. Nerds are either skinny or fat, they do not have toned bodies from playing basketball. Alexander Voulgaris thinks that wearing glasses qualifies him for nerd status but he’s really just a myopic jock.

Voulgaris however doesn’t really care about music, which he considers, “a walk in the park compared to film-making which for me is a life’s goal”. Voulgaris wants to be a big, famous, internationally known and respected film-maker. He wants to make teen-flicks for Hollywood, teen-flicks unlike anything the world has ever seen before: with adult-child rape-scenes, scenes where the voices of children are replaced with adult voices, and adult-child erotic scenes (because he knows you have never seen that before, and you are salivating at the prospect). He watches teen-flicks obsessively, he knows his Lemon Popsicles and Porky’s Revenges and South of the Borders inside out, waiting for the day he gets his big break-through and is asked to make a teen-flick of his own in English instead of Greek (he hasn’t yet made one in Greek either) which will be shown everywhere around the world to much praise. On his latest album, American Unicorn, he sings “Cronenberg is teaching and Kubrick is in me”, name-dropping his primary influences. This man is certainly not timid when it comes to declaring his film-making ambitions! You’ll be hard pressed though to see those alleged Cronenberg or Kubrick influences in his own movies. Voulgaris’ film-making career looked promising when he broke onto the international film-festival circuit with his 2006 government funded movie Ροζ (“Pink”), a semi-autobiographic feature in the realist veign about an insecure 25-year-old (interpreted by Voulgaris himself) who develops a borderline pederastic relationship with an 11 year old girl who is basically the pixie to the closeted pederast. The movie toured film-festivals all over the world and even won an award, but the film-maker himself suffered a nervous breakdown, became depressed and went into psychotherapy for the next 3 years. It took him another 3 years to make and release his next movie, the science fiction feature Higuita, a movie that received horrible reviews in Greece – excluding a few hardcore The Boy afictionados who liked it and caused a buzz about it on the net prior to its release that quickly dwindled once people got to see the movie itself. I admit upfront I’ve never seen this movie myself, so I am going off of what I read about it on the net and what a friend of mine who has seen it told me, saying it was “disgusting”. Higuita contains mostly ripped off ideas and notions from other obscure science fiction/horror movies you’ve never heard of and will never bother with, such as E. Elias Merhige’s “Begotten”, Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo”, and Andrzej Zulawski’s “On the Silver Globe”. As far as I know Higuita has never been screened outside of Greece (I guess this means even the guys at the Festival voor de Fantastische Film didn’t like it). The failure of the movie to make it onto the international circuit is interesting considering the fact that the government has just decided to fork a huge amount of cash over to Voulgaris for his next feature. Apparently all it takes to get government funding nowadays is to make a movie so unwatchable that no one bothers to see it, distribute it or program it. Things certainly aren’t what they used to be back in the days with Pink touring around the world, but Alexander Voulgaris is still hopeful, and so is apparently the Greek government, opting to generously fund Voulgaris’ next film-making endeavour, “Νήμα” (String of Yarn), which the maker has described as “an adventure”, a film “with a plot” (which he considers a huge deal because he’s so karacult, envelope-pushing and edgy, he never works with plots or in terms of a story arc) and “using techniques in make-up and such I have never employed before, it’s all new to me as well”. The Higuita fans over at Flix.gr are already looking forward to seeing Voulgaris send his make-up department to hell.

Wanna know what it is like to attend a film-class with Alexander Voulgaris, boys and girls in film-school? Something like this (quoting from nostalzi.wordpress.com):

“I had the chance to attend some of the (free) classes he offered in POFPA back in the (good) days. The only thing I got from his lectures was a bucket full of some over the top artistic intellectual soft porn that he used to show us. I don’t know why he chose those movies in particular. I think he doesn’t know either. So, as a reasonable human being I expected his movie to be of the same sort. You know one of those catchy movies with a little bit of skin showing on the screen. But nope. Roz is nothing like that.”

Alexander Voulgaris, pornofying the upcoming generations of film-makers, theorists, curators and critics, one film-course at a time! I will never forget having to watch excerpts from Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books for the New Media introductory course at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1990s. I particularly recall an excerpt of a child-cherub on a swing pissing and pissing and endlessly pissing like it would never stop, me getting increasingly uneasy at having to watch this (I only hope it was a prosthetic) and thinking: “What the hell does this footage of a pissing cherub have to do with the Bolter and Grucin book on Remediation we are reading?!”. The point of those excerpts with regards to New Media theory is still unclear to me to this very day (“On the internet no one knows you are a dog imagining yourself a cherub on a swing endlessly pissing against a lamp-post”?). I now think the Dutch male lecturer just wanted to seize the opportunity to show us something outrageous just for the fuck of it. When another visiting American female lecturer decided to watch excerpts from Deep Throat with the entire class, I was already a budding young feminist so I boycotted it and didn’t attend the session day. I imagine a film-course with Voulgaris being something similar: completely pointless education-wise but a wonderful excuse to watch porno with a bunch of hormonal adolescents. And while Voulgaris is busy watching porn with the kids in class, the Greek government is only making plans for Nigel, it only wants what’s best for him, Nigel just need this helping hand, Nigel is happy in his world.

– Is Alexander Voulgaris advocating a lift on the ban on the sexual exploitation of children in movies? Read and decide for yourselves.

When Alexander Voulgaris released his first feature movie “Pink”, in 2006, the orientation of the protagonist was ambiguous enough for people to question whether it was a pedophilic character or not. At the time Voulgaris insisted that his main character was not a pedophile, and that the reason he interpreted that role himself instead of hiring a professional actor to do so, was out of a sincere concern that an actor would misunderstand the character and perform him as an overt pedophile. However, the movie and the main character were so close to home, addressing frustrations and conflicts that were not fictional but deeply personal, that Voulgaris suffered a major depression and went into counseling, not making any movies for years, only releasing music in the meantime. Six years and a whole lot of psychotherapeutic sessions later, Voulgaris feels fully confident to come out of the closet as an outright pedophilia-apologist and advocate. The tension, subtlety and ambiguity that was once there in his work are  completely gone. Nowadays it’s all in your face with Voulgaris, as per Higuita. In retrospect it should be clear that the main character in Pink was not ambiguous out of alleged ethical concerns on the part of the film-maker, but purely for selfish reasons: in 2006 he was still afraid of being found out. In 2013, he no longer gives a fuck and openly demands the right to rape children with his camera in the name of artistic freedom. He no longer blames himself for having no concept of consent or respect for personal boundries, instead blaming society for repressing him as a film-maker by preventing him from sexually exploiting children in his movies.

On the second of February of this year (2014), Alexander Voulgaris posted the following message on his Facebook wall (and don’t you dare delete this, don’t even try to gaslight, because I have backups and printscreens in triple), ridiculing Woody Allen’s adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, daughter of Mia Farrow, for coming out in the media with her story of truly predatory and depraved sexual child-abuse at the hands of Allen. In a letter to the New York Times, Dylan Farrow detailed how Allen repeatedly molested her at age 7. Farrow specifically refers to feeling abandoned by Hollywood in her quest for justice, and asks actors who worked with Allen to finally speak out against him:  “that torment was made worse by Hollywood. All but a precious few (my heroes) turned a blind eye. Most found it easier to accept the ambiguity (…) What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me? Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.”. The perpetrator, just like every perpetrator faced with a victim so destroyed by the experience of abuse she’d take the ultimate step of both naming herself and her tormentor in the media to set the record straight that the court couldn’t or wouldn’t, went into full denial mode and did what every abuser does to deflect attention away from his actions: blamed the celebrity mother who supposedly is maintaining a legal vendetta against him. What, you mean a mother would actually split from a man she caught raping her child and take it to the courts, despite the possibility that the courts are likely to go soft on the rapist because of the systemic relaxation of rape-laws in the US following that fraudulent Kinsey study in the 1950s? In this Facebook entry Alexander Voulgaris not only diminishes the coming-out of a female rape-victim by erasing the victim altogether from the equation, thus implicitly defending Woody Allen’s supposed “right” to rape his own child as a father, in Voulgaris’ truly sick and warped unreasoning the right of a father to rape his own daughter somehow extends to the artistic “right” of a film-maker – inevitably a male one – to rape children with his camera by having children perform sexual scenes with or without adults before the camera. According to Voulgaris’ warped unreasoning, film-makers should claim the right to symbolically rape their child-actors the same way a father rapes his daughter, and Voulgaris sees nothing wrong with either form of abuse, exonerating both as each being the logical extension and result of the other.

Now, lest anyone ever forget what Alexander Voulgaris actually said in defense of fathers raping their daughters and film-makers raping children with their cameras by having them perform sexual scenes, I have translated his entire Facebook entry from Greek into English, line by line so everyone can check the translation. I want anyone and everyone who ever programs a single Alexander Voulgaris movie at a film festival, anone who ever books this guy to perform at thier venue, anyone who puts out his records, anyone who buys or reviews or listens to his records, to know exactly what they are endorsing: Someone who thinks that a man raping children, either symbolically on screen or incestuously in the attic, has an inherent “artistic” right to do so.

αλεξανδρος βουλγαρης has shared a link
2nd of February 2014.

ΤΑΙΝΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΗΜΕΡΑΣ 164:BILITIS του DAVID HAMILTON (1977).
Film of the day 164: Bilitis by David Hamilton (1977)

Διαβάζοντας το γράμμα της κόρης της Μια Φάροου για τον Γούντι Άλεν
Having read the letter by Mia Farrow’s daughter regarding Woody Allen (Note: Voulgaris never uses the name of the rape-victim, thus dehumanizing her as if she doesn’t exist as an individual and erasing her altogether from the equation. He refers to Dylan Farrow as “the daughter of Mia Farrow”, suggesting that she’s a dependant little girl under the spell of her vengeful mother, when in fact the coming-out letter was written by a mature woman.)
και μετέπειτα τις κατ εμε ως επι το πλείστον μπαμπουινικά ηλίθιες απόψεις ανθρώπων για το συμβάν,
and having subsequently read the ad nauseam and for the most part baboon-like opinions of the public regarding the issue, (Note: what Voulgaris refers to as “the issue” is the public coming out of an abuse victim in the media and naming the abuser, a coming out that carries a huge price for any professional woman doing so. This is of no concern to Voulgaris, who only cares about his hero Woody Allen and doesn’t even bother to name the victim. This erasure of the victim herself is dehumanization at it’s worst. It’s discursive fascism.)

μπήκα στον πειρασμό να κάνω ενα τοπ-50 ταινιών για την παιδεραστία.
I felt inclined to put together a top-50 of movies dedicated to pederasty/pedophilia. (Note: Contemporary Greeks use the word “pederasty” and the word “pederast” to refer to adults who sexually pray on children, terms which are only used in the West in medical texts on the topic of sexual degeneracy. Western countries prefer to use the word “pedophile” to refer to an adult who sexually prays on children, a term which in Greek literally translates as “a lover of children”, but is not in use in contemporary Greece. Suffice to say, no one in Greece would ever make the mistake of refering, say, to a friendly nursery-teacher as a “pedophile” because she happens to sincerely like children. I think this explains the disuse of that term within Greece itself. All in all, Voulgaris was clearly saying here that he wanted to assemble a top 50 of child pornography movies. Is this an implicit admission on Voulgaris’ part that he is actually in the possession of 50 pieces of child pornography? Doesn’t he know or care that the possession of child pornography is a criminal offense throughout the European Union? Any Greek law enforcement reading this blog entry please take note. I am not suggesting that the police should go ahead and raid Voulgaris’ home in search of child pornography, I do want to highlight the intentionally sneaky and nebulous way Voulgaris states what would otherwise be blatantly obvious: he really does want people to be able to freely watch criminal child pornography, and preferably loads of it.)

Δυστυχώς όμως οι καλές ταινίες σπανίζουν εκεί
But unfortunately good movies are rare in that genre
μιας και ο εξωφρενικά σκοταδιστικός τρόπος που αντιμετωπίζει η κοινωνία το ζήτημα
considering the infuriatingly obfuscatory way that society is tackling this concern
δεν αφήνει στους ίδιους τους δημιουργούς να είναι όσο τολμηροί χρειάζονται
it[=society] doesn’t allow the creators themselves to be as brave as need be (Note: Voulgaris apparently thinks it is “brave” and that it takes “guts” to sexually abuse defenseless children before the camera. He laments the fact that aspiring child pornography film-makers can’t be as explicit as they would like to be.)
και να πουν αυτά που πρέπει να υποστούν.
and to say whatever needs to be said. (Note: Voulgaris doesn’t say “what needs to be said” either, but instead is always hinting at the obvious: according to Voulgaris, adults should be “free” to rape children, in the name of art, to film the rape, in the name of art, and to show the rape to other adults, in the name of entertainment. What “needs to be said” is what child-rapists have always said to their defense: children supposedly enjoy getting raped by adults and are basically “asking for it” by supposedly “seducing” the child-rapist into raping them. Blame the victim, all in the name of film-making, art, entertainment and aesthetics.)
Αυτά ίσως ειπώθηκαν μόνο μια φορά στο σινεμά.Στην τελική σκηνή του Happiness του Todd Solondz.
These things [that need to be said) were possibly said only once [in the history of] film-making. [They were said] In the final scene of the movie Happiness by Todd Solondz. (Note: [Warning, Spoilers] the final scene of the film Happiness involves a 12 year old boy who watches a blonde with big breasts sunbathing topless below his balcony. The boy begins to masturbate (his back turned “discreetly” to the camera) and shoots cum onto the railing of the balcony. His dog runs up and laps up the cum, runs over to the boy’s mother sitting at the family table with her sisters and parent, and licks the mother in the face. The mother coos appreciatively at the dog licking her face unaware of what the dog has just lapped up and is now smearing all over her mouth. The MILF connotations of this scene from Solondz’s film should be obvious to anyone who knows what the acronym MILF stands for. Is Alexander Voulgaris suggesting that “what needs to be said” is that 12 year old boys want to rape their mothers in the mouth, and that film-makers should be able to freely portray such scenes of mother-son incest? All in the name of film-making, art and aesthetics? IMO, “what needs to be said” on the topic of child-rape was said “only once in the history of film-making”, namely in the final scene of the movie Hard Candy. Too bad we never actually heard the neck of the bastard snap, that would’ve been really beautiful.)

Ο David Hamilton είναι μετά τον Lewis Carroll ο διάδοχος της τέχνης που αφορά την παιδοφιλία.
Following Lewis Carroll, David Hamilton is the heir of the art of pedophilia. (Note: this is the most explicit admission on Voulgaris’ part that he considers the sexual abuse of children to be but an art-form that everyone should be “free” to aesthetically contemplate.)

Εξαιρετικός φωτογράφος και σκηνοθέτης,
[David Hamilton] is an excellent photographer and director,

πασίγνωστός για το ρομαντικό soft focus του,
[He is] world-renowned for his romantic soft-focus (Note: this slippery slope from the romantic to the erotic to the sexual to rape is very typical of Voulgaris’ pedophilia-advocacy and apologetics. Suffice to say he makes no distinction between what people would consider a romantic scene versus what people would identify as a rape-scene. As far as Voulgaris is concerened, the one effortlessly blends into the other. According to Voulgaris, scenes involving the raping children can be perceived as “romantic” as long as they are done in soft-focus.)

αγαπημένος του δικού μας Πανουσόπουλου
Beloved by our own (Greek film-maker) Panousopolos
(Note: the name-drop reference here is to George Panoussopoulos, maker of Greek smut-films.)

και βάζοντας την κοινωνία διαρκώς σε ενα ντημπεητ να αποφασίσει για το αν αυτό που κάνει είναι τέχνη ή πορνογραφία
he puts society constantly in a mode of debate trying to determine whether his work is art or pornography

(όταν η ερώτηση είναι λάθος δεν μπορεί να υπάρχει σωστή απάντηση).
(when the question itself is wrong there can be no answer) (Note: this kind of koan-like absurd nonsense is typical of the obfuscatory pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy discourse of the likes of Voulgaris. Debating whether a film crosses ethical fault-lines that coincide with cultural fault-lines is a totally legitimate question to ask and to explore, but it is exactly this line of questioning that pedophilia-advocates and apologists like Voulgaris fear like garlic to a vampire because they rely on people not questioning the ethical implications of sexual acts, let alone the ethical implications of depictions of sexual acts, to get away with advocating with what otherwise would clearly be a closeted pedophile’s rant in defense of the sexual abuse of children.)

Το Bilitis, η καλύτερη ταινία του στην οποία συνυπογράφει το σενάριο με την Catherine Breillat, έρχεται απο μια εποχή που γυριζόντουσαν ταινίες με ερωτικές σκηνές που παίζαν ανήλικοι πρωταγωνιστές.
Bilitis, his best film co-writtten with Catherine Breillat, comes to us from an age when films were shot involving erotic scenes featuring underage lead actors. (Note: this is the most blunt admission on Voulgaris’ part that he really does want adults to watch scenes of children getting raped, and basically laments the fact that he doesn’t get to have the same license to rape children with his camera that film-makers once had in the 1970s. I am reminded here of what Voulgaris said regarding the 15-year old teenager, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, who was shot in Exarchia by a cop: “At the age of 15, no one is a ‘comrade’, and this kid was certainly no one’s ‘comrade’.”. Alexander said this in response to anarchists and communists using the “comrade” appelation in order to ideologically appropriate the murder. Doesn’t Voulgaris understand that under-age children are NEVER “actors” supposedly “performing” a sex-scene? No child being forced to perform a sexual scene, no matter how “soft-focus”, is ever an “actor”. It is a child being raped with a camera.)

Την εποχή του Maladonescenza και των φωτογραφιών της Eva Ionesco.
[This was the] era of Maladonescenza and the photgraphy of Eva Ionesco. (Note: It’s actually spelled Maladolescenza, but the misspelling could be deliberate in order to avoid web-spiders picking up something this criminal, contraband and illegal –> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladolescenza#Controversy This movie is officially and formally and judicially considered to be criminal child pornography (an oxymoron, I know) and hence illegal to own, view or screen, even by judges in an otherwise pedophilia-friendly country like The Netherlands. That tells you all you need to know about the content of this movie; go ahead and read the Wikipedia entry if you feel like throwing up. To me, already shocked at the sexual abuse of children in this movie, truly horrifying are the descriptions on Wikipedia of the sheer cruelty of the main character, who at one point resorts to animal torture; any child would’ve been irreparably compromised just being on that film-set, let alone being asked to act out those scenes. As for Eva Ionesco, she was one of the children raped with cameras in this particular movie, and was basically handed to the Italian-German 1970s porn movie-industry by a “mother” who lost custody over her children, as this woman saw no harm in taking blatantly pornographic pictures of her own child. Eva Ionesco and her un-mother are still in the courts over that child abuse, with the mother’s house being raided and the offending pictures confiscated by authorities –> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ionesco Alexander Voulgaris’ references to Maladolescenza and Eva Ionesco aren’t just random picks. Voulgaris is referencing this specific movie because he has seen it. You can rest assured Voulgaris has gotten an eyeful of an actual child being raped with cameras, or he would never bring up these two as examples. In this Facebook entry, Voulgaris does not bring up Maladolescenza as a negative example, as something that he condemns, but instead as a positive example, as the type of “liberated” cinema he himself aspires to. This is as close as possible he has ever gotten to an admission on his part that he too would be making or incorporating this type of child pornography into his own movies, if only he could get away with it. By referencing Maladolescenza as a positive example, Voulgaris openly longs for the good old days in the 1970s that derranged parents could rape their own children with cameras or hand them over to others to be raped with cameras. Voulgaris would have no objection to us going back to those dark-ages of sexual abuse of children by means of cameras, because according to Voulgaris doing that to children, that type of blatant abuse, to him that’s real freedom, and we are all so damn stiffy nowadays that we have made it illegal for adults to rape children with cameras. I don’t know about Greece but I do know that owning or screening a copy of Maladolescenza is considered against the law in the Netherlands because it’s now officially considered child pornography (“In 2010, a Dutch court ruled that the movie qualifies as child pornography because it depicts the sexual exploitation of children”) and it’s against the law in The Netherlands for anyone to own or screen such movies. We have to ask this question: Alexander Voulgaris has apparently seen this child pornography movie, but is he in the possession of it? If Alexander Voulgaris does actually own a copy of this contraband movie, next we have to ask where he managed to get a copy of such illegal material. Is there a supplier of child pornography in Athens who sold a copy to Voulgaris, or did he download a digital copy from the net (wherefrom? PirateBay? A Tor-enabled darknet .onion website?) I am truly shell-shocked that Voulgaris’ Facebook followers are allowing him to pop off the hook with something so blatantly illegal as de facto child pornography without saying anything about it. Of all the people who read this entry (if the likes are anything to go by, it was over 60 people), not a single one stepped back and said: “What the fuck Alex, are you saying you’ve been watching criminal child pornography? Dude, that’s seriously sick shit right there.”. In Greece it’s apparently cool hipsterdom to endorse child pornography.0

Τότε που ο Polanski ζαχάρωνε την 15χρονη Kinski
Back when [film-director Roman] Polanski was spicing up his 15 year old Kinski. (Note: The reference to Kinski is to the following controversy: “In 1976, Polanski started a romantic relationship with Nastassja Kinski, who starred in Tess. She was between 15 and 17 years old at the time and he was 43.” What Voulgaris doesn’t mention here is that Roman Polanski was actually charged with sexual child abuse in the 1970s, as with almost every sexual crime known to man: “rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor (…) Polanski fled to France in February 1978, hours before he was to be formally sentenced. Since then Polanski has mostly lived in France and avoided visiting countries likely to extradite him to the United States.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case It’s telling how Voulgaris deliberately leaves out this part of the story with regards to Polanski getting into the pants of minors. Polanski is a de facto child abuser, and is one of Voulgaris’ favourite film-makers.)

και που η Jodie Foster του Ταξιτζή γινόταν το νεο role model των κοριτσιών.
and a time when Jodie Foster in Taxi-driver was becoming the new role model of young girls.
(Note: Consider this comment in reference to another comment Alexander Voulgaris made on his Facebook wall where he lamented: “Once upon a time, Americans used to watch movies like Taxi-driver. Nowadays, Americans are watching movies like Homeland. Don’t even get me started!”. Voulgaris apparently thinks that American cinema was so much better when it was still about child-prostitutes, junkies and postal-going raging homicidal killers, and that America has apparently strayed from these cinematic tropes which according to him were the stuff of American cinematic greatness: “και στην αμερικη των [19]70ς υπηρχε τρελη ελευθερια στους κινηματογραφιστες και τωρα δεν υπαρχει ουτε κατα διανοια.”.  In other words the Saw franchise never happened, or Alexander Voulgaris was too busy assembling his top 50 of child porn master-pieces to notice it. Hey folks, you know how once upon a time Americans were watching the likes of Happy Days and the Love Boat? Nowadays Americans are watching Glee, Suckerpunch and that castration scene in The Hostel! See how backass backwards those damn Americans are? How can they betray their cinematic tradition of exporting shock-shlock violence and out-there-outrageousness so traitorously? Don’t even get me started…)

Δείτε επίσης και τα Tendres cousines,Laura,Un ete a Saint Tropez.
Make an effort to also watch Tendres Cousines, Laura, Un ete a Saint Tropez. (Note: I will address the fact that Voulgaris is referring exclusively to French movies here later in this essay.)

Δείτε το όλο στο βίντεο.165 κάποτε.
See the entire video. 165 sometime.

Thus went Alexander Voulgaris on Facebook. He writes all this in Greek, and you will never catch him saying any of this in English, because he knows that coming out as a pedophilia apologist would damage his transnational ambitions. I translated it so that all the festivals that will be booking his next movie, assuming he’s next big thing after Dogtooth and Attenberg, can read what he has to say on the topic of pedophilia and child pornography when he is speaking amongst friends. I cannot think of a more blatant example of pedophilia advocacy and apologetics. I cannot think of a more blatant example of a film-maker so shamelessly demanding the right of adults to engage in cinematic pedophilia, in other words, to rape children with their cameras. Anyone who ever dares to screen or program his movies, I want you to face the fact that this is what you are booking: someone who suggests he would be making child pornography, if only he could.

I would like to extend the question to the parents who have allowed their children to star in the movies of someone who so obviously demands the “right” to rape children with his camera: why did you and how could you? What kind of parents are you? Did you not know who you were dealing with? Were you innocent bystanders? Were you duped by this man? How much more obvious does it have to get than the above Facebook entry for you parents to realize that the moment you let your children on the set with Alexander Voulgaris, you are handing your children over to someone who would be raping them with his camera if only he could get away with it? Someone who admits that the only thing holding him back is not a completely atrophied and absent sense of ethics on his part but “society”? Would you parents be proud to see own children “ζαχαρομενα” by Alexander Voulgaris and possibly even featured in a future version of his imagined top 50 of pederastic master-pieces?

– Alexander Voulgaris takes on “feral faggots fucking little boys in Latin America”

A mere month after the Woody Allen comments Voulgaris tries to outdo himself and succeeds effortlessly, publishing a Facebook rant complaining about movies about the Beatniks. Several such movies have been made to date, but not a single one (with the exception of, how predictably, Naked Lunch) is up to Voulgaris’ smut-standards. Voulgaris describes the Beatniks as “feral faggots fucking little boys in Latin America” (“Ηταν άγριες αδερφές που πηδούσαν αγοράκια στη λατινική αμερική”), who “traveled to wherever the drugs were present and the pigs were absent” (“ταξιδεύανε ανάλογα με το που είχε ναρκωτικά και δεν είχε μπάτσους”), who “killed everyone and anything they were in love with” (“σκοτώνανε ότι και όποιους αγαπούσαν”). In reaction to all the flabby-assed Beatnik movies, Voulgaris posts the prerequisite link to a Youtube movie of gay-nirvana meditating cymbal-clanging homo pedophile Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl”, and claims that the ultimate Beatnik movie has to be “an advocacy of pornography, pedophilia and any type of perversion”(“υπερ της πορνογραφίας, της παιδεραστίας και οποιασδήποτε διαστροφής.”). Voulgaris also pompously and ridiculously claims that the Beatniks changed the world (“αλλάξανε και τον κόσμο.”). Assuming he means the US with “the world”, (“the world” has obviously never heard of some bunch of obscure American junkies who could somehow still pick up a pen), I would like to posit the following corrective and reality check: the only time mainstream America directly encountered the Beatniks was when they saw a TV advertisement of, to quote Mark Hosler from Negativland, “a homosexual white killer selling you tennis-shoes; this is the cutting edge of advertising!”. The same advertising company that delivered that ad featuring William Burroughs also tried to rope along Negativland, but they courageously refused with Hosler explaining: “Someone just has to say ‘NO’ to those people.”, and that is exactly how I feel about the government funding Alexander Voulgaris. Someone just has to say ‘NO’, and let this blog entry be exactly that.

Reading the above insanity once again, I am inevitably reminded of the following Youtube video I saw a while back:

PAEDOPHILIA IS DOMINANT IN HOLLYWOOD – ex Child Star Speaks Out

This is the mainstream entertainment industry that also created this monster, Jimmy Savile, and covered his child-raping ass for years:

Pedo Sex Scandal: BBC Caught Red Handed Covering Up

This is the mainstream entertainment industry that Alexander Voulgaris supports and wishes to break into, even though he’s an outsider and an onlooker at present. Asked whether he’d like to make a mainstream movie in English, Voulgaris said: “If that meant everyone could see my movie, I’d consider it.”. Ah yes, let the whole world have an eyeful of contemporary Greek pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy in action under the guise of hipster transgression.

Every time I write these blog entries I wonder, why am I the only one speaking out? Why isn’t the Greek blogosphere exploding with bloggers denouncing this creep? Then I listen to Emilie Autumn’s Gothic Lolita, and I remember why I do it. For the same reason she wrote that song:

My life was emptied by your hand
The kind of murder where nobody dies
But I don’t suppose you understand

If I am lolita then you are a criminal
And you should be killed by an army of little girls
The law won’t arrest you
The world won’t detest you
You never did anything any man wouldn’t do

Thank you kind sirs
You made me what I am today
A bundle of broken nerves
A mouth full of words I am still afraid to say
I don’t mind telling you
Now that I’m old enough to love
I couldn’t begin to even if my pretty life depended on it
And funny thing it does

This song serves to remind me what it’s all about. Who knows, maybe one day little Romanna will stop listening to The Boy, start listening to Emilie Autumn, hear these songs, read the lyrics and realize what was she was participating in when she was on the set of Pink. So what he didn’t kiss the underage girl in the final scene of movie? Everyone in the audience understood exactly what was implied but was never shown. Does anyone doubt the pedophile is really dead at the end of Hard Candy too?

UPDATE 08APR2014: In an earlier entry on his Facebook wall Voulgaris again mentions the criminal child pornography movie Maladolescenza (again misspelling the name so as to avoid it being picked up by web-spiders) and again brings this up as a positive example, not as a movie he condemns but one he praises. What is particularly disturbing about this instance is that Voulgaris falsely and misleadingly refers to Maladolescenza as a “teen movie” and as “soft porno”. Maladolescenza is neither a “teen movie” or “soft porno”, it is de facto criminal child pornography. By falsely and misleadingly referring to it as a “teen movie” and as “soft porno” Voulgaris is deceiving his Facebook followers as to the content of this movie, and it is very likely that his followers might have unwittingly incriminated themselves by downloading or otherwise obtaining this child pornography, taking Voulgaris at his word and thinking it was “merely soft porno”, or worse, “merely a teen movie”. Below is the Facebook entry in question, translated from Greek to English:

αλεξανδρος βουλγαρης
12th of November 2013

TEEN MOVIES THREAD…
Ισως το αγαπημένο μου είδος στον κινηματογράφο.
Possibly my favourite film-genre.
Μια αναδρομή στις 50 καλύτερες για μένα ταινίες.
Listing what I consider to be the 50 best movies.
Οταν λέμε teen εννούμε (13teen-19teen) οπότε μην ψάξετε παιδικές ταινίες.
When I say teen I mean 13 year olds to 19 years olds, so don’t go looking for children’s movies.
Επίσης προσπάθησα να κρατήσω τις ταινίες που η βάση τους είναι η teen θεματολογία και προβληματική
Also, I made an effort to include those movies based on teen themes and the problems of teenagers
απο το soft porno του Maladonescenza
from the soft porno of Maladonescenza (Note: It’s spelled Maladolescenza, but since he consistently misspells the name in this way I now seriously think he does so deliberately to fool web-spiders in order to avoid being caught referencing child pornography.  Also, the girls in Maladolescenza are under 13; Eva Ionesco was only 11, yes, only 11 years old when she was raped with cameras in Maladolescenza.)
μέχρι και την επιρροή της βίας στην νεολαία του Benny’s video
to the influence of violence upon the youth as seen in Benny’s Video
και να αποφύγω ταινίες με teens που όμως το θέμα της ταινίας είναι κάτι πέραν απο αυτό οπως π.χ τα Carrie,Harry Potter,Christine κλπ.
and to avid listing movies with teens the thematics of which are beyond such subject matter, such as Carrie, Harry Potter, Christine, etc.

In the following top 50 list of teen movies, Voulgaris puts the criminal child pornography movie Maladolescenza at number 24:

24.Maladolescenza του Pier Guiseppe Murgia

This is the closest admission on Alexander Voulgaris’ part that he really has seen this contraband movie, that he considers it to be one his favourite ever movies, and is very likely in the possession of it, ie, it is now more likely than not that he is literally in the possession of de facto criminal child pornography. There is no margin for ambiguity or interpretation in this instance: Voulgaris has seen it and he loved it and is recommending it on his Facebook wall while misleading his followers as to its actual contents and the legal status of the movie.

In his top 50 Voulgaris also ridiculously lists the likes of Risky Business and Kids by Larry Clark as examples of “teen movies”. Suffice to say, no one in America would ever mistake either Kids or Risky Business for a “teen movie”. Voulgaris clearly doesn’t have a damn clue how this term is used in the American commercial film-industry: a teen flick is not merely a movie featuring teenagers in leading roles, but is a movie specifically made to cater to a teen audience, which means it is subject to a rating system to determine appropriateness for certain age-groups. Voulgaris doesn’t understand that the word “teen” in “teen movie” is about the intended audience of the film, and is not just referring to the cast. Basically when American parents read the word “teen movie”, they know that such and such movie is appropriate for their teenaged son or daughter to be looking at. Does Voulgaris the supposed film-buff understand the difference between an R-rated movie and a PG-13 rated movie and how this American rating system affects the size of the target audience of a movie? Oh, that’s right, mr “free market competition” Voulgaris is himself a government funded artist, so he need not be bothered with how ratings affect the way a movie is marketed, which affects the size of the audience, which in turn affects sales. As a government funded artist Voulgaris need not recoup the money that was sank into his movie, something he would have to do in the case his of beloved free market competition, where he would be answerable to sponsors and producers expecting to see a profit margin. Oh, the shameless hypocrisy of advocating free market competition of films from the relative safety of your government funded situation which affords you the luxury of not having to consider audiences, teenaged or otherwise.

– PRICELESS! The 2013 Youtube interview with Alexander Voulgaris

What does Alexander Voulgaris have to say regarding his own attempts at cinematic pedophilia? Voulgaris gave a Youtube interview in 2013 where he spoke at length about his feature “Pink”, a movie he directed and in which Voulgaris himself interprets the protagonist, a friendless 25 year old who is woeing an Irish woman, while at the same time developing a “relationship” with an 11 year old girl. I put the word “relationship” in quotes because it’s intentionally set up to be nebulous in that way. I have never seen the full length movie, but some short excerpts are available on Youtube here, here, here and here. I couldn’t find the screenplay online either. If anyone out there reading this expose has a copy of the “Pink” screenplay that they would like to part with, paper or .pdf, specifically if you have one of a raw spec, or one of the other undeveloped/uncensored early versions of the script, please get in touch with me. I sincerely want to buy your copy.

Other than the “Pink” excerpts on Youtube, there are a handful of stills, here –> http://www2.rizospastis.gr/getImage.do?size=medium&id=169635&format=.jpg and here –> http://www.filmfestival.gr/2006/photos/film046.jpg. This picture –> http://www.kviff.com/cache/7330-default-katalog_2007_file7330.jpg of Voulgaris with the young girl at a swimming pool speaks volumes and is IMO the reason the Dutch invented the term “zwembadpedofiel”. Very telling is this picture –> http://camerastyloonline.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/roz1.jpg from the movie of the main character alone in a room sitting at a type-writer. I know the picture is kinda hazy, but pay close attention to the view outside the window in the background; it’s a painted backdrop of a fair. A classic tell-tale sign of an author who is extremely anxious about the big bad outside world intruding upon his universe.

Quoting from the Youtube interview:

“Look, let me tell ya, I like writing the screenplay myself. I like the fact that it’s something that is already within my head. As for the production, I can’t say I particularly enjoy that part of film-making, I take on that task, as we say, out of necessity, because no one else is available. I deliver the score because music is aready something that concerns me (…) another thing I did in the movie Pink is that I interpreted/play-acted. Because it was a part that was walking the fine line of what it was and what it should be, I had this anxiety that if someone else interpreted this part it wouldn’t have the finesse it should have, [instead] he would come out as an all-out pedophile or something else of this sort. (…) I knew that I wasn’t good enough of an actor to be able to perform the part on text, for example, but this balancing-act between the two, I considered myself capable of getting that out. And also because I already know the little girl, Romanna [Lobats], I felt like I could command this part better than someone who is a stranger, who doesn’t know her. Look, I really don’t enjoy play-acting. For me that was shocking. Mainly I enjoy directing, working with the actors, mainly that.”

“[Interpreting the leading role in Pink] I had no ambitions whatsoever, it never occured to me that I would perform it well enough to win a prize for best acting or whatever. No ambition in that regard. It was purely practical. But it was a very bad experience for me. It was crazy. I did not want to have the movie screened anywhere, I would go into panic and start weeping every time there was a screening, I went into therapy for three years, it took me 5-6 years before I made another movie, and other such issues.”

Before I quote another segment, I want to point out that it’s a typical diversionary tactic amongst pedophiles to claim that they are suffering their pedophilia and are themselves victims of their vicious actions in order to erase the actual victim, the child.

“My co-workers while making Pink were all teenagers. Because it was a children’s movie, at least in my head, I wanted to get people onboard who were still children themselves, so that the child-actors would not feel like they were acting amongst adults. The sceneast was 19 years old, the make-up artist was 18, another was 16, she was still going to school. They were all exceptional for their age, but they were all young. Because of this there was bit of a party-atmosphere on the set.”

Once again, Voulgaris goes on a slippery slope and conflates 18 year olds with 11 year old children. According to Voulgaris, there is no substantial difference between these age-groups, they are all children. Nevermind the fact that 18 year olds are considered full adults under law and are of voting age. Voulgaris conflates adolescents, teens and children once again in the following excerpt:

“The difficulty of working with child actors is that if the child does not want to do something, or if it has gone tired, you cannot push it, there is nothing you can do, so the production grinds to a halt. I had some difficulties shooting the movie, but it was OK, it was to be expected. The most problematic part was the ethics of it, I freaked out over “Pink”. If you are interested in doing something queer, because I really do love children’s movies, my favourite movie-genre is that of the teen-flicks, anything you can imagine, field-trip movies, junior high movies, everything. I love all these things, I’d love to do a teen-flick of my own, however if I were to do such a thing, it goes without saying that I would incorporate pedophilic elements, someone would be raping a child, a child would have an erotic scene with one of the older girls, all these kinds of things. But to be able to do all these things, the context here [in Greece] is too delicate. Because they are children, they might be traumatized, they might see things on set that might be too much for them. I don’t think I traumatized anyone in “Pink”, but for example, the little boy had one or two scenes where he was performing with me which in the screenplay were more hardcore than on the screen, his mother took me aside and asked whether it would much of a hassle to change these scenes, because it might put her son in a difficult position, for example if his class-mates were to see the movie. She was right, and the same thing happened with the scenes involving the little girl. Then he had some scene where the kids went on a shooting spree at school. The kids had a great time during those shoots, it was just a crazy party. But it’s a delicate situation. If I ever did such a movie again, I would use teenagers, you know, 16 year olds, by that age they have done everything, there is no issue there of traumatizing a 16 year old. But with children the current state of affairs is sensitive.”

Honestly, what more proof do people need than the above excerpt from the Youtube interview that Alexander Voulgaris would be raping children with his camera if it weren’t for “society” (the children’s own parents asking him to take out scenes from the script) holding him back? This is why I am willing to pay to get ahold of a copy of the original uncensored script. Because that original script is the only documented proof we have of what Voulgaris would actually be doing to children if he could get away with doing so.

Regarding the outrageously ignorant comment about 16 year olds who have supposedly seen and done it all and are hence unflappable, I know people in Greece from Greek Orthodox families and other conservative families who never had any sex whatsoever, not even kissing, well into their twenties. These very modest, hardworking, disciplined and dedicated Greeks (in other words, people who just never had any time for sex, which is widely considered a practice primarily premised on having leisure time to spend by sociologists Western and Eastern, ie, “if you’ve got time to masturbate, you’ve got time to meditate”), of which I am sure are many more around Greece who only began to have sex in the context of dedicated monogamous relationships as adults, apparently do not even exist in Voulgaris’ universe where everyone is screwing like dogs the moment their hormones kick in but preferably long before that. It is a classic example of a pedophile-apologist trick, him assuming that children, teenagers and adolescents are more sexually active or sexually curious than they really are – Voulgaris spending more time watching teen-flicks than spending time with actual teenagers probably reinforces this entirely self-serving over-sexualization of children. (I myself never kissed anyone before the age of 17. In fact, one of the most sexually active women I have ever met in my entire life who has done things most people would consider outragerous admitted she never had any sex before the age of 18.) Reading Voulgaris comments about wanting to have scenes in his movies where a child has sex with an older girl, I am thinking of certain scenes in the movie Die Blechtrommel, which my German teacher in Amsterdam (a racist asshole from Hell and the reason I never learned proper German) forced us to watch when I was 16 under the guise of adding the book (not a single page out of which was ever read in class) to our compulsory canonial literature reading-list. She couldn’t teach me or anyone else proper German (she was even surprised when I scored better on the final tests than she had expected of me, the racist), but she sure did not mind showing the whole class this kind of sick German not-quite-but-still-pedo-pr0n. The main actor in Die Blechtrommel has a rare genetic condition which keeps him from aging, in these particular scenes he is 16 in the story but looks like a 12 year old onscreen, which is extremely disturbing and confusing to watch then you are a teenager like we all were at the time. In an ideal world, that racist bastard of a German teacher, whose name I wish I could name-drop here to shame her for ever and ever – I am saving this blog-entry for when that woman dies, I will definitely be naming her then – should’ve gone to jail for child-abuse and neglect of her students for making the class watch that movie. Yes, I was 16, I had never done anything of what was depicted in those scenes, and yes, I consider myself forever traumatized by being forced to watch Die Blechtrommel in German class. But Amsterdam being Amsterdam, a German teacher who cannot teach her class German but is spending valuable class-time showing them creepy softporn is considered a sound education.

All in all I cannot escape the impression that Voulgaris conflation of children, teenagers and adolescents, and the supremely ignorant comments about when people are supposed have “done and seen everything” and what this supposedly suggests regarding their sexual development is the product of someone who is privileged, had copious amounts of time to spend stroking himself (I am only paraphrasing his songs here), and never had to work hard to get anywhere – which is the main reason most of us plebs put off having sex: it’s time-consuming and there never was much time to do it. It’s wonderful that Voulgaris is able to have a career despite being a film-school drop out thanks to his already established film-maker of a father – the Greek term used in these instances is oikogeniocratia – the rest of us who had to work hard to go to school and then work hard to get a degree, then work hard to maintain an actual job, not to mention those trying to run families under difficult circumstances, and put off having sex all the while, well, us hard-working plebs just ain’t photogenic enough for the pedophile, so he has decided we just do not exist. “I cannot have anyone before the camera who is not already a part of the imaginary world as I envision it” he says in the Youtube interview. He still wants to be able to rape our children with his camera though, and get 90 000 euros in government money doing so.

The Youtube interview with Alexander Voulgaris reaches the zenith of insanity when Voulgaris decides it’s time to show his groupies what a sensitive compasionate animal-lover he is:

“I have a problem watching movies in which animals are being killed. I don’t think that’s cool, huh huh! I have a problem watching someone get raped who hasn’t consented to it. But other than that, go ahead and show whateverthefuck, wherever your mind takes you.”

Voulgaris doesn’t care about Woody Allen’s daughter being raped as a child, in fact he openly jokes about it, but he cries like a mother over dead puppies. I have often wondered why Voulgaris is so dismissive of fantasy-powerhouse director Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson. If there is anyone who has shown whateverthefucks on screen (a convincing Urukhai, or how about THE GOLEM people!) allowing the hive-mind of his CGI team to take him further and further into faraway fantasy-land, surely it must be Jackson interpreting Tolkin’s books? Apparently not. Jackson is the type of film-maker who donates money to get people off of death-row in the US, which is certainly the most sensitive, most compasionate act anyone can do for another human being (the US forces wrongful death-row convicts to pay for their own DNA research to prove their innocence, which is a whooping 250 000 dollars, and that’s where multi-millionaire Jackson steps in to help fight the injustice), but I am now beginning to suspect the smear campaign against Jackson for supposedly killing a bunch of horses on set might have something to do with Voulgaris’ disdain towards Jackson – only those horses were not killed, they died from natural causes, but we all know the animal rights movement doesn’t care about such details, details, details. Maybe Peter Jackson can add some extras to the DVD where, oh, I don’t know, Viggo Mortensen is getting friendly with his horse, so that might appease the animal-lover in Voulgaris? As for the absurd suggestion that someone might consent to being raped on-screen, has anyone ever anywhere on the planet consented to being raped, with or without any nearby cameras rolling? I am really starting to wonder about Voulgaris’ alleged therapist and the supposed 3 years of psychotherapy he claims he underwent…

– Alexander Voulgaris and the “φασιστάκια” at the Short Film Festival of Drama

I particularly LOLed at the following comment by Voulgaris towards the end of the Youtube interview:

“The tragic thing about cinema is that you have these young people who are engaged in film-making, and instead of doing the completely crazy WTF movies that no adult would understand, the way it happens in music, the way 20 year olds make a type of music that a 40 year old just doesn’t understand (…) [t]his does not happen in the world of film. Young people in the world of cinema are more conservative than 40 year olds. In the cinema, it’s at the age of 45 that people are acting out. And that is unfortunate, seeing all these people who are very conservative. And you can see this conservatism particularly in the short films. You attend an edition of the Short Film Festival of Drama, and the films there are more conservative than the ones shown at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. That’s tragic, these people who are 20 to 25 years old, they don’t have to answer to anyone, and their movies are more conservative than the movies made by those whom you’d expect to be either tired, settled, who have to recoup on their expenses because they have a family with kids to feed, you’d understand the need in those people to compromise, the same way you understand that your dad trying to run his business just cannot afford to change its product every single time and sell hamburgers on the one day, t-shirts on the other and coffins on the next, it has to be a single product so that consumers know what’s on offer.”

Voulgaris, for all his talk about wanting to work with young people (may we read: unpaid interns? access to children?) nevertheless has a very low opinion of the next generation of up and coming competitors. He considers them all without a single exception to be uptight stiffs, and his strategy is to nip their emerging careers in the bud by discouraging people from attending the Short Film Festival of Drama to discover these young film-makers, sending everyone instead to the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which interestingly enough was being boycotted several years ago by Voulgaris’ buddies from the so-called Film-makers in the Fog group, a group to which Voulgaris still belonged back then (for evidence, see page 52, Monter Magazine, November-December 2008 issue). As soon as the Thessaloniki Film Festival added his own movie to the bill, all was well again. Voulgaris’ relation to the Fog group, a group he is now clearly trying to distance himself from so that he can profile himself as an autonomous director-author, is worthy another essay altogether, and will be all the evidence you need to see of his sneaky opportunism. Could it be that young people are too conservative for Voulgaris’ liking because 1) they don’t like pedophiles, 2) do not consider it an act of transgression to engage in the same pedophilia-apologetics Voulgaris himself does, and 3) they just don’t want to rape children with their cameras? As for his comments about the Short Film Festival of Drama, I have attended almost every edition of this festival since 2009 and I can confirm that his claims are entirely untrue. Over the past 5 years I have seen short films on almost every topic of interest to transgressive poseurs like Voulgaris, including but not limited to staples of Exploitation cinema such as drug abuse, pedophilia, rape, human trafficking, domestic abuse, prostitution, police violence, you name it. For those who like it arty-farty and weird, at last year’s edition (2013) there was, for example, the sadly ignored student-short “The Circle, The Scarecrow and The Silence”. Young people aren’t labled conservative by Voulgaris because they are not addressing touchy issues or because they aren’t busy making weird movies, they are labled conservative because they are treating these issues in a serious manner, and being serious about something is about the worst thing you can do as a film-maker according to Voulgaris. I know this because I have studied Voulgaris’ Facebook wall, and while he’s busy name-dropping American film-makers like it’s going out of style, the following three are always absent from his Facebook wall: Stone, Bigelow, Soderbergh. What do these have in common, boys and girls in film-school? That’s right, they make serious realistic films about serious topics and that in and off itself bans them from Voulgaris’ carefree pederastic universe. (UPDATE 08APR2014: he has referred to a Bigelow movie once in a list, but that movie was the science fiction movie Strange Days, never her latter more overtly political/hardcore realist stuff.) (UPDATE 15APR2014: The only Stone movie Voulgaris has ever positively mentioned is The Doors which he included his list of the 50 best biopics. This is a movie which according to real Doors fans is, to quote one of them, “25% truth, 75% fiction”, and which the Doors themselves have described as: “Oliver Stone pretending to be Jim in a pair of leather pants”. Yet it’s the only Stone movie Voulgaris considers worth mentioning, which says more about Voulgaris than it does about the movie.)

– Alexander Voulgaris and that kinda nice song at the end of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove

Who was Stanley Kubrick, boys and girls in film-school? He was a Jewish-American film-maker in the 20th century, and, according to his assistant: “He [Kubrick] was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject.”, but he died before he could make the movie he had been working towards all his life. In other words, Kubrick was a man deeply concerned about fascism, who made anti-fascist movies in order to warn the public about fascism. Note, boys and girls in film-school, that the Kubrick worshipped by Voulgaris is always the one who did “cool sci-fi” such as 2001 Space Odyssey and above all else the Kubrick who did that censored anti-Illuministic orgy-movie, Eyes Wide Shut. Voulgaris claims he saw Eyes Wide Shut movie “on a daily basis for a week” when it first came out, yet he doesn’t understand he has been watching an anti-Illuministic and hence anti-fascist movie, or that Kubrick was trying to give the sleazy Paul Verhoevens of this world the middle-finger with that movie (the movie is pro-fidelity and commitment), that Kubrick (despite his limited sexist and hence limiting perspective) really was trying to warn the general public about the democratization of fetishism and kinky sex (I even see this movie as a subconscious death-bed confession of sorts, Kubrick having second thoughts about his own Lolita even), confronting the public face-on with the fact that their sexuality was not their own or natural but directly affected by the sexual practices of the elites and hence just another top-bottom implant, or that the movie was meant to be cautionary and that this is the reason it was posthumously censored and no one has ever seen the uncut Eyes Wide Shut, because he showed the public how supposedly “liberated” sexuality is used as a conduit for fascism, group body&mind-control. Voulgaris doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to understand any of this, he just thinks Eyes Wide Shut is uber-creepy and uber-hawt, but in that tasteful way that befits a mature “seminal master”, and that’s all there is to it, there is no sociosexual critique to the movie, it’s just “untrue but interesting”. The Kubrick that Voulgaris praises is not the Kubrick who made the black&white canonial piece Dr. Strangelove, which exposed the general public to the geopolitical implications of something as top secret as Project Paperclip, possibly for the first time ever since the end of the 2nd World War – the character of Dr. Strangelove is modelled, all the way to the haircut, after the Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun who was smuggled to the US from Nazi Germany under the top secret project Operation Paperclip. The US government was so freaked out by what Kubrick exposed to the general public in Dr. Strangelove that it made a movie to counter it. Dr. Strangelove just so happens to be my favourite feature movie (as someone who generally hates features), possibly my top number one feature movie ever. I have no evidence for this, but I would assume Dr. Strangelove was what Alan Moore had in mind when he went totally cracking paranoid in the 1980s and was convinced they were gonna drop the big one on the UK, so he wrote The Watchmen in order to make peace with the idea of total annihilation. Voulgaris never mentions Dr. Strangelove when he talks about Kubrick, and that is very telling and significant. Voulgaris will at best refer to the song at the very end of Dr. Strangelove, Vera Lynn’s recording of “We’ll Meet Again” playing over the “nuclear detonation ballet” ending the film, and that kind of discursive timidity is all I need to know about Voulgaris: Dr. Strangelove scares the pants, the balls, the pubic hairs, the hairs on his arms right off of Voulgaris because of what it implies, and Vougaris is too much of an intellectually impotent chicken-neck coward to truly ponder this movie. Voulgaris said on Facebook that his encounter with Kubrick was an all-in but that was just a braggard’s lie, Voulgaris never had an all-in with Kubrick, because he has never let Dr. Strangelove all-inside of himself, Voulgaris has never allowed the true weight and horror of Dr. Strangelove – the annihilation of human kind and the perverse banality of the act – to truly enter his bloodflow. It’s another one of those self-serving erasures that is so typical of Voulgaris’ impoverished and impoverishing discourse. You can dislike him for the pedophilia-advocacy and apologetics all you want and you should, but the erasure of Dr. Strangelove, and hence the erasure of Kubrick as an anti-fascist artist, is just another one of Voulgaris’ unforgivable crimes against humanity, nature and all that is good and right on this planet.

Back to Voulgaris’ ignorant comments about what’s on offer at the Short Film Festival of Drama, I have seen short films at this festival that were completely abstract and borderline unwatchable, the very definition of what people generally mean when they use the term “experimental film-making” pejoratively. If Voulgaris was looking for visual precedents to base his concept of a “film-roll made from human entrails which results in an entirely new colour palette” in Higuita, he would not have been disappointed. I have to wonder, when was the last time this guy actually attenend an edition of the Short Film Festival and actually watched the actual films themselves instead of just the trailers on Youtube, to be expectorating such blatant nonsense about its programming? Browsing through my archive for the sake of writing this blog-entry, I even discovered that I first heard The Boy’s music in a submission to the 2009 edition, without even realizing it was his music I was hearing, namely in the short film Mesecina by Sofia Exarchou, which features the song “Cool” from Voulgaris’ 2009 album. Nevermind young film-makers featuring his music in their films, it’s all very conservative and backass backwards, I am sure. Maybe Sofia Exarchou can put some child-rape scenes in her next submission to the Short Film Festival to satisfy Voulgaris?

Voulgaris’ complaints about young film-makers in Greece who are more conservative than their 45 year old colleagues brings to mind an internet flame-war I was once involved in as a budding young feminist in the Netherlands. A Dutch pedophile troll, upon discovering that I was a hardcore anti-rape anti-pedophilia feminist, tried to engage me (after I pointed out that young people in the Netherlands overwhelmingly hate pedophiles) by saying that young people are “allemaal fascisten (all fascists)” because they read shock-jock libertarian-oriented websites such as Fok.nl and Geenstijl.nl, both websites frequented by young people that vehemently speak out against online pedos. Is it any wonder that Voulgaris has written a song (“Μακρηγορούμε” from Ηλιοθεραπεία) where he paints a scene of himself at an outdoor Greek summer festival where he ends up insulting everyone around him,  because they had the nerve to try and enjoy the performance, by referring to them as “little fascists (smiling little girls), little fascists (vamished little boys)”, saying that “their teenage hormones are overwhelming me” (it’s only competition, baby), and that he’s “gonna cut away your smiles with a razorblade”? My point being that basically anyone, of whatever age or gender or political orientation, who has understood and accepted the concept of consent and hence has rejected fascism at the personal level is considered a “fascist” by pedophiles and their advocates. It’s the world on its head! Note also the sheer irony of someone who erases the fact that Kubrick was an anti-fascist artist referring to the next generation as “little fascists” (no one there he feels any responsibility towards), falsely declaring himself a-political while expectorating libertarian cliches about the wonders of the forces of free market competition just as he pockets that government funding. Is it any wonder kids are susceptible to fascism? So fucking what it’s Saturday? It’s either features where they can watch themselves getting raped with cameras by artistically “liberated” left-wing pederasts, or the Autonomoi Ethnikistes rallies.

– Alexander Voulgaris and the French connection

“I don’t even know what the word sexism means” – Alexander Voulgaris on Facebook. Yes, he literally said that. Remember here that a while back president Samaras did an interview where he said: “I don’t even know what a fascist is, I have never met one.”. Isn’t it funny how Voulgaris and Samaras kinda tend to align when it comes to the structure of their discourse? As a feminist I am not particularly amused at Voulgaris claiming in the Youtube interview that he did his science fiction movie Higuita “all by myself without any co-workers”, when it’s abundantly clear from the credits that there was a female artist by his side, a woman by the name of Βανέσσα Φερλέ or Vanessa Ferle, who did the costumes, the make-up and the artistic direction (while I myself have never been on a film-set in any capacity, I’ve been on theatre sets in a supportive capacity, and I know for a fact that “artistic direction” is no small contribution to a performance or a negligable one, I would imagine this is not unique to the theater and is the case for films as well). I guess the only woman Voulgaris is comfortable to have with him on set is one that he can completely erase afterwards, a woman who is so submissive, unassertive and bashful that she is perfectly comfortable with her erasure, and doesn’t even protest his denying her contribution to his work by claiming he did it all himself. In other words, Voulgaris is apparently in the possession of what amounts to an artistic slave who touches every aspect of his work (because that’s what an artistic director does, boys and girls in film-school) but essentially moves through his work like a ghost. I wasn’t very surprised to discover that this female artist does not seem to have much of a career of her own outside the work she has done with Voulgaris. I only found two other references to this Vanessa Ferle, one in the credits of the movie Dogtooth on IMDB and another reference to an atelier that bears her name in a publication about Athenian graffiti artists. Does this Vanessa Ferle even exist or is she just another of Voulgaris’ many alter-egoes (since he has several others besides The Boy) and was the claim about doing it “all by myself with no co-workers” a freudian slip on his part? Having proven time and again that Voulgaris is a liar who omits information, persons and events just as it suits his agenda, I would say that anything is possible, any level of deception. For those who know me personally and know my backstory: remember that one person in my life who had invented an entirely fake co-worker because they were too concerned about attributing too much of their work to their own self, because they knew that their production was basically a one-person show and that it would show in the credits with all the functions attributed to a single name? Such liars do exist, boys and girls in film-school, and unless I am given credible evidence that this Vanessa Ferle exists as a living breathing person I am assuming whatever it is my right to assume. (I note here that Voulgaris seems to have this anxiety about being mistaken for gay, a single guy, or both, hence the references to this mystery-girlfriend, using interviews as an opportunity to properly heterosexualize himself. The anxiety apparently has something to do with a rumour that has proliverated on the internet about Voulgaris and his close musical collaborator, the electronic music artist Felizol, supposedly being a gay couple). Besides Vanessa Ferle there are other French individuals in the Voulgaris milieu, for example a Helena Berde who is credited as the producer of his upcoming government-funded movie. On the cover of his Higuita OST Voulgaris thanks the aforementioned Vanessa Ferle as well as a Christo Ferle (who according to Youtube is a visual artist and is credited with doing the costumes and sets for Higuita). Then there is the fact that in the Youtube interview, Voulgaris significantly uses the French term “pede” and not the Greek term “παιδεραστια”, when talking about his movie Pink – why would Voulgaris suddenly drop a French term when he could just as well use the Greek term? Obviously because he has been speaking French and has ended up adopting French terms. I do find it rather telling that all of the supposed pederastic master-pieces of the cinema that Voulgaris lists at the end of his entry on Woody Allen, just so happen to be French: “Tendres Cousines, Laura, Un ete a Saint Tropez”. Yet in the Youtube interview Voulgaris claims he never watches French movies, “because I have an issue with that” ” (he also made a statement to that effect on Facebook) – here we catch him at what is clearly another lie, becaue earlier in the Youtube interview Voulgaris admits he has studied the Nouvelle Vague movement and has seen the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, to the point of discovering that some of the scenes in Hal Hartley’s movies were references to Godard. Who introduced Voulgaris to these French movies, thus wetting his appetite to where he’d sit down and watch Godard movies picking out the Hal Hartley references? We have to ask: how is it that Voulgaris, who falsely claims he never watches French movies, nevertheless has such an obvious and undeniable French connection through these three French fellow-travelers? Remember, boys and girls in film-school, Eva Ionesco, the child who was raped with cameras in one of Voulgaris’ favourite nostalgic examples of unabashed child pornography, the contraband movie Maladolescenza, is also French, and her legal trials and tribulations are notorious in France and reported in the mainstream press there. We have to ask this question: did Vanessa Ferle, Christo Ferle and/or Helena Berde introduce Voulgaris to the child pornography of Maladolescenza and Eva Ionesco? Did they introduce him to all the other French movies he mentions in his Facebook entry on Woody Allen? Recall here that another one of Voulgaris’ favourite film-makers, Roman Polanski, initially fled to France in the 1970s to escape arrest in California for raping a 13-year old American girl. Polanski has since admitted guilt but his admission is hollow because he refuses to go back to California to be tried, and hence his rape-victim is seeking justice for over 30 years now. Is Voulgaris deliberately maintaining a link to France through the individuals I have dubbed “the French connection” just in case he ends up like Polanski and likewise needs to seek refuge in a pedo-friendly country?

So, Voulgaris claims he has a mystery- girlfriend that no one has ever confirmed, but oh well, afterall even Hitler had a girlfriend, and that didn’t make Hitler less of a Nazi or a genocidal killer. So did the notorious “monster of Chaleroi”, Marcel Dutroux, and his wife Michelle Martin played an important role in enabling his serial child-abuse and molestation as well as his white slavery ring. Whoever Alexander Voulgaris’ mystery woman is, I imagine this woman having a lot in common with the previous two madammes. I have dealt with female pedophilia-apologists many times in my life, and I can tell you they are the most lying, most deceitful, most cowardly, most vicious, most rabidly anti-feminist women on the planet. IMO women who are pedophilia-apologists and advocates are the female face and personification of fascism. What about award-winning actress Sofia Georgovassili, and the rest of the women (most of them pseudonymous, of course, fellow traveler cowards) who enable the pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy of Voulgaris by joking along with him, urging him on and generally not protesting? It is so typical that the women who enable Alexander Voulgaris on Facebook seem to feature as their Facebook avatar or banner that promo still from the dumbest Paul Verhoeven movie ever, Turks Fruit, where Monique van de Ven is jumping right on top of Rutger Hauer lying on the bed (I myself would’ve picked the other promo still, of Rutger Hauer in the car getting his foreskin stuck in the zipper). Apparently they all agree that Turks Fruit is the ultimate underground sex-movie, not realizing that this film is now considered so tacky and kitsch in Holland, it’s broadcast almost every year on the public TV channel around dinner time so that the whole family can sit around and watch it as they lap up the boerenkool met worst. The book by Jan Wolkers was already on our highschool readinglist when I was a teenager in Amsterdam in the 1990s. One of my fellow students, whose name coincidentally was Olga, made me read the anal scene and needless to say I never read the rest of the book – oh, but that part of the book was never shown in the movie because the book was so much more harcore and macho that Verhoeven had to tone it down, like the smart Dutch businessman that he is, in order to get himself an international career and into Hollywood. Dutch cinema is shit for the most part anyway and has been for decades, but if anyone insists I can  recommend last year’s Ushy Must Marry with my favourite Dutch yellow-face actress, Wendy van Dijk.

– nightmares, anorexia and acute suicidal tendencies – spending a month with Alexander Voulgaris’ music.

In order to give Alexander’s work the attention it deserves – just to be fair to someone who has no concept of fairness – I spent a month sincerely making an effort at listening attentively to his music, which seemed prudent since I lack any access to his films or screenplays. The first time I heard Κουστουμάκι (I started with thatone for no other reason than the fact that I have a cat named that way), I had a nightmare. The next night I couldn’t listen to Ηλιοθεραπεία, I turned it off following the spoken word introduction to Σιωπηλή, the most explicitly pederastic song on the album. The only way I can describe the feeling of listening to Voulgaris music is that of acute poisoning, toxic overload. It’s that sickening feeling when you know you are going to vomit, and you are just helplessly waiting for the vomitting to start to get it all out of your system. I wondered what on earth would happen to me if I kept listening. The second time I listened to Κουστουμάκι I couldn’t stop crying for hours, I literally cried myself to sleep. The next morning I kept on crying (why? The guy is a total jerk who certainly doesn’t deserve any sincere emotional investment on my part, so why was I crying so hard?). After I got a bit desensitized to his music, I ended up translating the song Ellada into English so that I could sing along to it. I tried listening to Ηλιοθεραπεία again, trying to ignore the obnoxious lyrics. “Λευκό Σκουπίδι is Violently Happy by Bjork, and Δεν Πονάει is Bills Bills Bills by Destiny’s Child.” I reasoned, trying to keep the lyrics at a distance. I ended up losing my appetite, everything became tasteless and I had to force myself to eat 3 meals a day for almost a whole week. The story told in the first song Κόψε το Χέρι was intriguing enough to force me to listen to the obnoxious lyrics again. I ended up translating the song Ξαπλώστρες Φέρετρα into English (“Everybody’s coffin is a bed under the sun / No more use for umbrellas / Much too pricy for us baby / So hot about faith he melts everything away now he can see all of me / He’s over there beyond the bright sun / He hates everybody / You and me and we and each and everyone of us together and individually”) in order to make sense of the underlying science-fiction story about a government mercenary/cyborg hitman OrpheusBA2019 whose blackops assassination assignment is to take out the cult-leader of a religious Heaven’s Gate/Branch Davidian style suicide cult the members of which sun-bathe themselves to death under the soaring hot global warming sun of the future. I can literally hear him gasp for breath inside his full-body armour. Or at least, this is how I tried to make sense of the story, which is revealed in a fragmentary fashion throughout the record. Later I read that Voulgaris is into comic books and would like to publish one of his own in the future; this made sense because I had envisioned the world of Orpheus entirely in terms of cartoons/Manga, because the sense of motion and choreography conveyed by the plethora of imagery presented here is not one can adequately convey with living human beings. I ended up writing an essay on the OrpheusBA2019 story that I might or might not probably might not publish on this blog. The OrpheusBA2019 story is truly fantastic and worthy of extensive analysis, but it won’t be me performing this analytical task, because I do not want to endorse pedophilia-apologists, regardless of how intriguing their artistic output is. Researching Ηλιοθεραπεία I was surprised to discover that people had NOT uploaded Das Nachtkabarett style websites analyzing the OrpheusBA2019 story the way Marilyn Manson fans hairsplit over Manson records, admittedly I was a bit disappointed. Voulgaris has inevitably chosen to make the main character into yet another pedophile, sooo… (Later addition: Alexander Voulgaris posted an entry on Facebook after I had already completed this expossay about the conception of Ηλιοθεραπεία. While he doesn’t go into the songs in as detailed a fashion as I would’ve preferred, it’s abundantly clear now that several songs I assumed were part of the story were not part of the OrpheusBA2019 story at all and were just added as filler, one example being the song I transated about the sunbed coffins, and which I wrongly assumed was a center-piece in the story due to its musical-stage grandiosity and rising speed urgency – Voulgaris says that song was just a toss off conceived during a commercial break to a basketball match, and that the urgency I heard in the song was just him anxiously waiting for the match to resume, not something inherent to the substance of the song. I have to admit now that my fascination with Ηλιοθεραπεία is very much due to the fact that I tried to read the story into songs where it is not present, indeed, due to the fact that I was seeking a story line where there is none to be found. Voulgaris claims that only the first 5 songs of the record form a coherent whole, whereas I personally read the story all the way into and including track 12, excluding only the last 3 tracks because I assumed those take place in the present.)  I downloaded the OST to Voulgaris’ science fiction movie Higuita and was confused at the lack of continuity between the Orpheus story on Ηλιοθεραπεία and the one told in Higuita. On Ηλιοθεραπεία” Orpheus is already a seasoned agent who has taken a bullet in battle and is dispatched by his handler speaking directly into his earpiece, in Higuita Orpheus and Euridice are still young students who end up committing suicide while exiled to an island where people are bred like cettle. I downloaded Voulgaris’ NTOST (Not the original soundtrack) to a stupid 1990s romantic flick called Before Sunrise which takes place in 1984 (ie, before the world wide AIDS epidemic became huge news and casual relationships became a little less spontaneous). There were songs on that NTOST I could not believe were The Boy songs, and I wondered why it takes such a stupid movie to coax such songs out of him. One song was so beautiful, listening to it one night I was struck like lightening with suicidal feelings, it was so strong I panicked that very moment and rushed out of my chair to pick up more tissues to wipe my runny nose because I was crying again. “Why am I feeling like this?” I wondered, “I have never had a song do this to me before, I have never heard a song that made me feel like I should kill myself.”. Voulgaris’ 2009 The Boy album makes me feel old because it puts you on a roller-coaster of pure mania and urgency I can only barely keep up with 5 years later. Weirdly, to me The Boy’s music feels more healthy and wholesome in his younger incarnation when he was being “punk”, just plain manical rather then when he’s “being Lou Reed, just there”. The bifurcation of his voices on Ηλιοθεραπεία – ie, the way he is screaming the theme of the song pushed way to the back of the mix, at the same time as his singing voice is proclaiming the lyrics in an almost nonchalant, uninvolved way in the foreground – to me would suggest a bifurcation of personalities, the repression of the manical younger self, which nevertheless is always there in the back, screaming the same melody that the contained adult voice calmly conveys to the listener. The effect of this vocal bifurcation is deeply unsettling. It’s like staring at someone before you but at the same time as you are staring at this person quietly sitting there, you are simultaneously witnessing their most intense uncompromising self. No matter how calm they remain, no matter how contained and neutral they appear, you are always seeing them unravel. I had a second nightmare. I wondered whether I was going to end up like the psychiatrist played by Richard Burton in Equus, if I kept listening to his music and trying to understand the work of someone I consider to be so thorougly loathsome.

Richard Burton as Doctor Dysart in EQUUS (1977)

Yes, this is kinda how I felt spending a month with Alexander Voulgaris’ music. And as fate would have it, literally a day after writing this, I read the following in a rare English interview I discovered on the net with Voulgaris: “I was wondering if maybe film critics (good film critics) could be a kind of director’s psychoanalysts.”. I froze on the spot. I decided that his music is at best an enticing trap one can get lost in forever. Later, during a more lucid moment I thought to myself: “What a great way to wipe out your critics, by writing songs that drive them suicidal.”, and laughed wryly. Cameraboy almost had me there. But the nightmares didn’t stop, eventhough I assumed myself desensitized to his music. Apparently I was wrong. This was nightmare #3:

I had a 3rd nightmare yesterday because I was listening to Voulgaris’ music again. My cute little kitties were together devouring another cat. I heard the cat screaming out in agony and ran over to the olive tree in our back yard to see what was going on. By the time I found them, the poor gray cat they were praying on had already had half his face eaten off, and his entrails were already hanging out of a small hole in his lower body. My cats were growling like wild tigers, in a vicious way I have never heard them growl like before. To escape my ravenous cats, the poor gray cat jumped into the dirty water of a pool that had magically appeared nearby. The dirty water of the pool reminded me of the water I often saw in Amsterdam, where every single body of water is contaminated. I thought the cat was going to drown, but his head was still sticking out of the water, and his cries were so loud and agonizing, I stood there frozen with horror and did not know what to do first to save this poor cat from the water or from my own cats. Should I try to remove him from the water? Should I chase away my cats? What will I do with his mortally injured body? What can I do to save him? Will I catch something from him? Should I just let him drown? Should I just let my cats have their way with him and put him out his misery? Should I get an axe and put him out his misery myself? I didn’t know where to start, and was overwhelmed with impotence.

– please make me watch feature movies… NOT!

I would say it’s impossible to research Alexander Voulgaris without being enticed into spending some time watching the movies he likes, a feat for someone like me who hates almost all feature films. I am not exaggerating, I disliked most of the movies I have tried to watch in my lifetime, and it takes a great deal of effort and concentration on my part of make it to the end of a DVD. I remind myself that every year, about 145 to 180 major studio flicks are made in the US alone, American indies make even more movies. You’d think that with such a level of output every year they would be putting out nothing but perfect movies by now, but no. When I signed onto Facebook and had to list my favourite movies, I had an extremely hard time coming up with 50 feature movies I like. I marvel at people on IMDB who are able to list 100 or 200 or even 500 movies they like. I consider many of the movies that are part of the Western Canon unwatchable crap (how on earth can anyone sit through a Hitchcock movie?!). I am the type of person who can barely make it past the 3rd chapter whenever I try to watch a feature DVD. Every time I attempt to watch feature movies, I am reminded of how I am wasting my time and how I’d rather be watching a documentary, any documentary, even a completely mainstream Discovery Channel one. As a Media Studies post-grad I volunteered for 5 editions at a big documentary festival and have seen literally 100s of documentaries in my life; I’d prefer a documentary over a flick anytime. Sometimes I end up watching the Director’s Commentary instead of the feature itself because the commentary makes me feel as if I am watching a documentary about a crappy movie rather than the movie itself. With regards to my Voulgaris research, not only did I end up watching movies I’d never spend a second of my life looking at, like Roderiguez’ Planet Terror (which was actually pretty decent, the gore was so obviously fake that even I was able to watch it without too much discomfort, plus as a European who has actually visited California I really appreciate the in-your-face white vs. Latino racial politics) or the Greek cult horror-classic O Drakoulas Ton Exarxeiwn (the Exarchia Vampire) – Voulgaris never explicitizes the fact but he is very much a heir of everything shown in this trashy cult-film by means of direct cultural pedigree; Voulgaris’ first solo recording ever, the 2002 EP “World Waits”, was recorded and mixed by someone featured in this cult-film who was part of the Jimmy Panousis entourage, namely Johnny Vavoyra. I watched an ambiguous to the point of really creepy anti/pro death penalty movie, The Life of David Gail by Alan Parker, the man who directed one of Voulgaris’ faves, Bugsy Malone, a movie that had served as a reference for Voulgaris’ Pink. Eventhough I too was disappointed in and offended by the suckerpunch ending of The Life of David Gail, it didn’t even occur to me how truly offensive this movie by Alan Parker was to Americans themselves until I got on IMDB and read all the comments from American anti-death penalty activists who condemned the movie for depicting opponents to the death penalty as manipulative psychopaths. For the sake of informed opinion I even ended up watching 3 Roman Polanski movies – a man I thorougly hate because of his pedophilia and whose movies I’d otherwise boycott based simply on the fact that he is a de facto child abuser and sex-offender – in order to better understand Alexander Voulgaris’ aesthetic orientation, basically because those were the only movies by one of Voulgaris favourite film-makers that I was able to find in our family collection at home. I watched The Pianist, a movie which surprised me and which I sincerely love despite it’s pedo maker, and The Ninth Gate and Bitter Moon, both utter just utter crap. At least The Ninth Gate makes me laugh with that “WTF is this fuck?!”-scene at the very end. It’s one of my favourite examples of an unintentionally funny meant to be serious sex-scene. That terrified bug-eyed look on Johnny Depp’s face, just priceless! As for Bitter Moon, it’s just a crap 9,5 weeks rip off (a movie I already consider to be crap, so Bitter Moon is double-crap) with an even crappier premise: “What if Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke got married and began stalking a frustrated unflappable stiff upper lip British couple instead of just breaking up after 9,5 weeks and sparing us their marriage woes?”. Having made it to the end of Bitter Moon I literally never want to see another Polanski movie ever again in my life. A French lesbian is shot dead, an American cripple shoots himself in the mouth after muttering “Maybe we were just too greedy, baby!”, but lo behold, BRITANNIA LIVES and outsurvives them all! They are on their way back to India too the bastards! Who would’ve thought Polanski’s supposedly romantic supposedly apolitical Bitter Moon was secretly praising global Empire? All in all, I can say that spending more time than I would generally give to feature-movies for the sake of this blog entry hasn’t aroused in me a new-found love for features. Quite the opposite in fact, I have seen my very low opinion of features confirmed in spades: these movies are overwhelmingly the product of filthy-rich sexist white-supremacist racists who overwhelmingly use these feature movies as a means to have their class-privileges, sexism, racism and white-supremacy confirmed in every scene and every frame. All their attempts at making their movies slightly less sexist (a lesbian scene here, a domineering sadist female there), slightly less racist (a black sidekick here and there, who is killed in the next scene), slightly less domineering (even Rambo is no longer acting alone against the world, he’s now got a crew of younger shit-talking tatooed mercenaries helping him kill rice-grinders in Burma by the bunches), are ultimately all in vain, because never sincere and always tokenistic. Yes, I consider the feature film a hopeless case and a waste of time, and I am glad I was never involved in the making of one lest I contribute to the waste. I realize all over again that it’s all lookism, that we really don’t need more images, that no matter how gritty and supposedly real and immersive it gets it’s always Baudrillardian hyperrealism, and I am angered that he got to have the last word. Watching feature movies by Alexander Voulgaris’ favourite film-makers I am reminded once again (and entirely superfluously because I already knew why) why I almost never watch feature movies and would much rather be watching documentaries. I feel more convinced than ever that fantasy and story-telling are the command and control-media of dominators who use fantasy and stories to dominate and maintain their dominance; documentary might not be as such at the moment, but it is logically the medium of the poor and destitute, who have nothing but reality itself to face on a daily basis. It is there that those silenced by the stories of the dominant should be demanding that the camera be handed over (to be smashed to pieces, though you can bet that someone else will be shooting that to be made into yet another image).

– Breaking news: Pendeli Schwaben take over Exarchia with their government funded hippy child-porno companies.
This part of the Alexander Voulgaris story in relation to the urban gentrification of Exarchia, or what I refer to as the Bohemianization of Exarchia, reminds me of the first time I visited Berlin in 2007. The East German neigborhood of Prenzlauer Berg was at the last stages of urban gentrification and I remember reading a rant on an old faded xeroxed poster stuck onto a lamppost, written up by some anarchists (who have probably since given up and just moved to Neukoln) complaining about “the hippy porno-film companies of all the Schwaben moving here”. Voulgaris might not technically be a Schwaben in Athens (he says he was born in the relatively upper-class outskirts of Palia Pendeli and moved to Exarchia later), judging from the comments in an Athens Indymedia thread dedicated entirely to discussing him, Alexander Voulgaris is considered the Athenian equivalent of the “Schwaben-run hippy porno-companies” taking over Prenzlauer Berg. I firmly believe that it is in this context that the generous funding that he has received from the Greek conservative government should be interpreted. Voulgaris is considered a part of a culture industry that the Greek government plans to use to gentrify inner city Athens. The Greek government has apparently decided that Greek pedophilia advocates who are left-wing royalty because of their family-background are basically preferable Athenian citizens to all the immigrants who have “taken over” inner city Athens. That these people are paying rent, doing their shopping, providing dirty-cheap labour and more is never considered in this equation. I must point out that when Voulgaris moved into Exarchia he did not actually buy or rent a flat. Instead he moved into a squat that was already occupied by other artists on the Themistokleous Blvd that connects the notoriously disreputable Omonia square to Exarchou square. (UPDATE 15APR2014: Voulgaris has since moved from Themistokleous and is now living on Emmanuel Benaki Blvd, still in Exarchia.) I happened to find myself on Omonia square after dark in the summer of 2009 (I had discovered a great juice-bar there, and was drinking juices all afternoon to replenish myself before the next leg of my trip), and while I am too much of a badass feminist to cause anyone to think twice about messing with me, I can see why other people would rather avoid Omonia after dark or even during the day. I can also see why the Greek government would like to unleash urban gentrification on the area. Voulgaris is not only associated with the urban scape of Athens because of his songs – he makes regular references to the urban landscape in his songs the way a rapper would, making sure everyone knows he’s hailing from Athens – more importantly, he has shot all his movies in the city, with the exception of Higuita which was shot on the island of Andhros, with Voulgaris making clever use of the fact that his dad was already on the island to shoot his own movie, Little England. Recognize this scene from Higuita, boys and girls in film-school? –>
http://www.jumpingfish.gr/uploads/photos/main/xigkita.jpg That is  actually Vori beach on the eastern coast of Andhros –> http://androslocation.com/wp-content/flagallery/andros-vori/vori-andros-3.jpg It certainly helps to have a film-maker dad who gets you access to such scenetic places to shoot your own movie. What’s a little nepotism if it makes for such karacool karacult film-scenes in the end, n’est pas? Voulgaris has stated many times in interviews that his relationship to the capitol is a love-hate relationship and that he’d like to move out. I am speculating here, but I would assume the Greek government is turning a blind eye to his pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy, and giving him all this money, not necessarily because they are looking forward to suffering his films, but primarily to keep him in Athens, and to get him to do something mr. Alexander “competition makes for better films” Voulgaris the post-libertarian libertarian has never done out of his own free will: pay rent, and under the guise of making cinematic pedophilic masterpieces, basically get film-permits and rent property all over Exarchia, everything from apartments, to studios, to yards, to roads, rent equipment, rent people, rent children, just make sure you rent, rent and rent some more, and bring in estate specialists willing to manage it all. Anyone who follows Hollywood players and Hollywood player-wannabes on Facebook knows that they have several real estate agents following them like sharks waiting for an opportunity to bite. The question that the Facebook real estate agent is waiting for goes something like: “Hey guys, we need to film X, does anyone know a place Y that looks like this and this?”. Your friendly Facebook real estate agent always does know such a place, and that is the beginning of a courtship between the culture industry and the real estate business that makes the conservative Greek government salivate. The gentrification trick goes something like this: the government-backed renting artist leaves his squat behind and moves into a nice recently refurbished apartment, let’s say on the corner of Stournari and Patision (you get the reference), which he rents on the basis of free market value prices (ie, how much the house would fetch if it was sold on some entirely imaginary market, with no consideration for the actual economic context), thus driving up the rent for everyone else in the neighborhood, thus forcing out undesirable social groups, which means anyone and everyone who is poor, immigrant or both, and is unable to keep up with the rising rents. A famous film-maker of a pedophilia advocate with his 90 000 euros government-backed film-project will be able to afford the increasingly rising rents, everyone else who can’t keep up with rising rents is scattered to the four winds. Entire neighborhoods have been blasted out of existence in this way. It happens to this day in New York, it is happening in the Bay Area, the population of de Jordaan in Amsterdam was blasted out of its homes in this way (you know who else has been “dropping bombs on the Netherlands”), and it is coming to Exarchia and other inner city hoods in Athens, with Alexander Voulgaris and his equally vapid entourage of nihilistic fellow-travelers that includes people like Sofia Georgovassili who is herself a pedophilia-apologist being flippant about Woody Allen abusing a 7 year old child, all of these government-backed renting hipster nihilists being the tip of the spear that will drive out “social garbage” undesirables from inner city Athens.

The Greek government doesn’t care about the ramifications of perpetrating this injustice, but it should be confronted with the fact that when you consider a pedophilia-advocate film-maker more desirable a citizen than a poverty-stricken family, it is ultimately this climate that you are bringing about and contributing to:

The developers attending the meeting are expected to discuss strategies for how to best deal with the growing wave of resistance that one developer describes as “not just anti-development, it’s anti-tech. It’s anti-job growth. It’s anti-shuttle bus. It’s anti-chain stores. It’s anti-gentrification. It’s anti-anti.”
…
Opponents to the development surge claim that builders are catering to wealthy tech workers and the like, with luxury developments that leave the middle class and low-income residents on the outside looking in.

San Francisco’s real-estate developers collude to deal with a growing wave of local “anti-everything” resistance http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/12/05/developers_meet_to_discuss_growing_san_francisco_development_backlash.php

To conclude, I have no desire to debate anyone of you people who might come here defending Alexander Voulgaris. There is nothing to debate, because there is NO excuse whatsoever for someone who advocates sexual child abuse under the guise of film-making, full stop. “Is adult entertainment killing children, or is killing children entertaining adults?”, you Athenian nihilists have already answered this riddle in spades with your Facebook pedophilia advocacy. If you do not understand this simple fact – and from what I have seen on his Facebook wall with the lot of you cheering him on, not a single one of you understands – I don’t want to debate you creeps. You scare me and I hope you never find yourselves in the proximity of a child, ever. I demand to speak to the people at the government funded institution that gave Alexander Voulgaris the 90 000 euros. I want one of them to debate me, and to explain how they plan to justify giving 90 000 euros to a pedophilia advocate while families are literally dying in the cold and are driven out of their homes which will only become worse when the upcoming wave of urban gentrification is thrust upon them. I don’t care about your hipster posterboy of transgression and nihilism, I don’t think anything will make him realize what he is perpetrating. I only care about those people in the government who take the food literally out of the mouths of the poor to give it to a pedophilia advocate so he can make movies where he rapes children with his camera, because to him that is artistic freedom, and to them that is urban gentrification. I can only hope that this blog entry contributes to the government realizing its wrongdoing. As I said above, I am cynical enough to know that it is pointless for authorities to persecute Alexander Voulgaris over his inciteful statements on the sexual exploitation of children in movies, and not just because he’s never as explicit on the topic as I’m sure he’d like to be, thus never really meeting the threshold for outright incitement. First, because he is now a government-funded artist he has the official seal of approval from the government for virtually anything he says or does. There is also the simple reason that his dad is basically the cultural equivalent of left-wing royalty in Greece, so all that Voulgaris the elder statesman of the Greek film-world has to do to save his son from the talons of authorities is to snap his fingers and there is an army of left-wing attorneys ready to lawfare to the bitter end. Then there is Alexander Voulgaris’ history with mental issues, counseling and psychotherapy, which means Voulgaris can always convincingly plead insanity, and get off any charges that way (this is the legal strategy that Courtney Love employs every time she punches someone in the face and gets sued) – say, he just went bonkers one night and began downloading every movie on PirateBay he could find in an effort at breaking his marathon movie-watching record, he thus “accidentally” happened upon some kiddieporn, but he was so out of his mind he watched it in a feverish stupor amongst dozens and dozens of other movies not even realizing what it was – this, I would assume, is the way he actually watches Kubrick movies, given his statements about them. Recently Alexander Voulgaris disclosed on Facebook (somewhere in a post easily lost and burried amongst other many other posts) that he moonlights in the commercial Greek underground porn industry as a film-maker of violent bloody S&M porn; hence the cover art for his NOST (Not the Original Soundtrack) for the movie Before Sunrise, which apparently is a screenshot from one of his S&M porn movies: a gruesome picture of a woman whose head as first seems chopped off and bleeding at the neck, but upon closer look has been dyed black and has simply disappeared into the black background creating the optical illusion of a beheaded corpse – remember the part in Manson’s autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, where Manson describes an early live-show where he performed the same scene with his then-girlfriend Missy? You can rest assured Voulgaris has read Manson’s autobiography and noticed that part. I have obviously never seen Voulgaris’ pornographic output (I pray to the Gawd that doesn’t exist I never have to) but from the above it should be clear that he basically makes exactly the type of extremely harmful and dangerous S&M-appropriating pornography that S&M practitioner Stacey May Fowels warned about in her essay “The Fantasy of Acceptable Non-Consent”. Voulgaris’ S&M porno movies aren’t mentioned anywhere on his IMDB profile, and I believe this omission is deliberate because he knows what would happen if his name were ever associated with the commercial Greek underground porn industry on an industry-resource like IMDB. His career would be over, so would be any transnational Dogtooth-esque aspirations on his part, and he could spend the rest of his life making S&M porn. Why he would come out all of a sudden with this admission on Facebook is beyond me; I guess this means he really no longer cares how he is perceived now that he’s a government subsidized artist.

Many people on Facebook are under the impression that Voulgaris knows what he’s talking about, or worse, knows that he’s doing, not just because of his familial situation but because he watches a lot movies and posts endless lists of all the movies he has seen. While I myself have never been on a single film-set in my life, I’ve made the following observations about Voulgaris: Eventhough Voulgaris claims he considers himself mainly a screenwriter, and claims he only shoots his scripts himself “out of necessity because no one else will do it”, curiously Voulgaris does not seem to study actual scripts. I haven’t once seen him post about or reference an actual script eventhough I went months and months back into his Facebook timeline. Voulgaris clearly doesn’t sit down to read produced features, he only watches as many movies as humanly possible, thinking he can cheat that way. Unsurprisingly, he then admits that his movies have no plot and only commence on the basis of the viewer’s aesthetic contemplation of each scene. This suggestion that an aesthetic progression can make up for or even replace the plot-driven progress that viewers have come to expect from a feature is merely a veiled admission on his part that he really doesn’t know how to write a screenplay, ie write a story, and neither does he care to take the time to learn how to write one. A picture according to Voulgaris is literally just a series of pretty pictures. And indeed, having studied his Facebook wall closely, Voulgaris clearly doesn’t read Ted and Terry’s column, which is considered practically The Bible for aspiring screenwriters in the US and beyond. He doesn’t seem to read John August’s column either, eventhough Voulgaris has repeatedly claimed that “Edward Scissorhands is the perfect movie” – doesn’t Voulgaris know the pivotal role John August has played in Tim Burton’s career? If he did, and if Voulgaris was serious about considering himself a screenwriter first and a director second, he would be reading John August, but he doesn’t. I never got the impression that Voulgaris has sat down and read even a portion of the 150 best screenplays made available by the Writer’s Guild of America for personal study. I am sure he will say he has occasionally read his friends’ broken scripts, but as a supposed screenwriter he seems very reluctant to want to learn from scripts that were actually made into movies. Good writing is not invisible in Voulgaris’ scripts, it is simply absent. This unwillingness on his part to study the craft of screenplay writing IMO says a lot about Voulgaris’ bluff on Facebook, and all the people who fall for it. I openly dare him to have the screenplay for “Νήμα” translated into English and sent to an American talent agency, I am sure it will come back with the reader’s signature under the words “fuck you”. So, boys and girls in film-school, what do you call someone who claims to be a screenwriter but apparently never reads screenplays and never reads those who’ve made a career writing screenplays and freely share their screenwriting wisdom with aspiring writers, someone who hides their incompetence by claiming that their plotless, storyline-free scripts are about aesthetic contemplation? You call such a person a poseur, an amateur and a wannabe, and you can go ahead can loudly condemn them as such, regardless of their surname, family background, government support or number of “poutsomezedes koritsakia” groupie followers on Facebook.
I think I know why Voulgaris can’t write stories, or a screenplay with a plot. Because in order to do so, you have to sincerely care about people other than yourself, sincerely care about what drives them and have sincere empathy for their predicament, understand things like consent and personal boundries and how these are drawn and redrawn in social interaction, regardless of how fluid and permeable these lines and spaces between people might seem. Voulgaris the pedophilia apologist and advocate is the exact opposite of an empathic person, and his punishment is not being able to tell a single damn story while falsely claiming himself a storyteller. I still suspect that his debut movie Pink was not a feature, it was rather a pseudoegomentary disguised as a feature, and Voulgaris sank into a depression because he dreaded being caught in the “act” with his pants down while at the same time openly courting “discovery”. Now that the government has officially “discovered” him and taken him under its wings he no longer cares, and is hence truly liberated by his own unhinged and dangerous artistic standards.

 

List of resources and references:

Primary texts used:

Alexander Voulgaris IMDB entry:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0903838/bio

Pro-Woody Allen comments on Facebook, with Alexander Voulgaris openly making light of incest and child-rape:
https://www.facebook.com/boy.voulgaris/posts/10152576003560299?stream_ref=10 and

Interestingly enough, and somewhat paradoxically, despite his obsession with children Voulgaris nevertheless fully identifies himself with the main character in Harold and Maude (1971)! –> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152608920765299&set=a.10152608883340299.1073741831.526025298&type=3&theater Anyone who remembers my work before the gag-order knows I made a huge deal about this movie allegedly being Julian Assange’s favourite film.
His recent admission about moonlighting as a film-maker of S&M porn movies: “Το πρόχειρο εξώφυλλο το έφτιαξα εγω βασισμένο σε μια φωτογραφία απο μια s&m τσόντα που είχα τραβήξει και είχα χρησιμοποιήσει σε μια μικρού μήκους ταινία.” (“I was responsible for the cover art [for the Before Sunrise NOST] which was based on a screenshot from an S&M porn movie I had made and had incorporated into a short film.”)

As for Voulgaris’ “French connection”, it goes even further back than initially thought; by his own admission he was already performing at the French Institute of Greece back sometime in 2006 as a member of the band Sportex: “Λίγες μέρες μετά το τέλος των γυρισμάτων με πήρε μια φίλη μου και με ρώτησε αν θέλαμε να παίξουμε συναυλία στο Γαλλικό Ινστιτούτο ως Sportex (μουσικό σχήμα που είχα παρέα με τον Felizol και τον κομίστα Έκτωρα).”

Top 50 teen movies thread where Voulgaris falsely and misleadingly  describes Maladolescenza as a “soft porn teen movie” and puts Maladolescenza at #24, thus admitting he actually obtains and watches criminal child pornography:

http://flix.gr/news/53o-festibal-thessalonikhs-h-ert-yposxetai-na-sthr.html “Το Νήμα: σκηνοθέτης Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης, παραγωγός Ελένη Μπερντέ, 90.000 €”

Youtube interview with Voulgaris (conducted in the summer of 2013, so relatively current reflecting his most recent sentiments on his work):
Δημοσιεύθηκε στις 4 Οκτ 2013
Συνέντευξη με τον Αλέξανδρο Βούλγαρη (The Boy) στην Ταινιοθήκη της Ελλάδος. Η συζήτηση έχει ως θεματικό άξονα τον κινηματογράφο.
Συνέντευξη : Γιώργος Τσάπης & Λευτέρης Αναγνωστόπουλος
Οπτικοακουστική Παραγωγή και Επεξεργασία:Γιώργος Τσάπης
30-7-2013 για την Ταινιοθήκη της Ελλάδος

This is The Boy’s upcoming movie that the Greek government forked 90 000 euros to: “Επιστημονική φαντασία σε δύο χρόνους. Κατά τη διάρκεια της δικτατορίας παρακολουθούμε τη Νίκη, μια ηρωίδα της αντίστασης που καταρρέει σωματικά και ιδεολογικά. Σε μελλοντικό χρόνο βλέπουμε τον γιο της, Λευτέρη, που προσπαθεί να απαλλαγεί από κάθε είδους δεσμά ανελευθερίας.” source: http://www.mixtape.gr/ellada-echis-talento-2/
he makes a government-funded science-fiction movie about a character who “απαλλαζεται από κάθε είδους δεσμά ανελευθερίας”, but in the mean time he allows himself to be instrumentalized by the Greek government for urban gentrification purposes? Where is the “liberation” in that type of instrumentalization?

Dylan Farrow. FEBRUARY 1, 2014, 3:04 PM
An Open Letter From Dylan Farrow
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Anne Theriault. How To Undermine a Rape Victim: Woody Allen Edition
Posted: 02/04/2014 12:35 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/anne-theriault-/victim-shaming-woody-allen_b_4717989.html?utm_hp_ref=tw “Above all, never, ever, ever think about the ways that you might be complicit in this. I stand with Dylan Farrow.”

Reviews of Voulgaris’ work:

Greek Movie Night Aug 21 2011 by nostalzi

Greek Movie Night

HIGUITA (2012) του Παναγιώτη Παναγόπουλου

HIGUITA

«Χιγκίτα»: ο Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης βρίσκει το «Paradise City»! ΦΕΣΤΙΒΑΛ / ΒΡΑΒΕΙΑ 06 ΝΟΕ 2012 / Μανώλης Κρανάκης
http://flix.gr/news/xigkita-o-aleksandros-boylgarhs-briskei-to-paradis.html

«Ο Εφιάλτης είναι ο Πατέρας μας»: Τρέιλερ για το «Χιγκίτα» του The Boy
25 ΟΚΤ 2012 / Γιώργος Κρασσακόπουλος
http://flix.gr/news/o-efialths-einai-o-pateras-mas-treiler-gia-to-xigk.html

Δώσε «Higuita» στο λαό. (#not)
του Δημήτρη Δημητρακόπουλου

Δώσε «Higuita» στο λαό. (#not)

#tiff53 Higuita. Και εννοώ κανονικά, “πράμα”.
http://gkoultoura.gr/post/35267666111/tiff53-higuita

53ο ΦΚΘ: Χιγκίτα – The Boy..Oh Boy!
GIMLI ΝΟΕΜΒΡΊΟΥ 11, 2012 4
Χιγκίτα: Η πολύ κουλτούρα τρώει τον αφέντη κύριε the Boy ή «κατά κόσμον» Αλέξανδρε Βούλγαρη!
http://cinepivates.com/2012/11/%CF%87%CE%B9%CE%B3%CE%BA%CE%AF%CF%84%CE%B1-the-boy-2012.html

ΧΙΓΚΙΤΑ σημαίνει ΦΩΤΙΑ
Είδα εψές τη νέα ταινία του Boy, ονόματι Χιγκίτα.
http://athenianrhapsody.com/798/the-boy-alexandros-voulgaris-film-higita/

Higuita review

Click to access FREECINEMA_MAR_14TH_2013.pdf

Review: ‘Crying?’ OCTOBER 5, 2004

http://variety.com/2004/film/reviews/crying-1200530522/

Λίγα Λόγια από τον Σκηνοθέτη για την ταινία: “Το Ροζ είναι ένα χρώμα που χωράει πολλές αναγνώσεις.
http://www.klg.gr/roz.html

ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ ΒΟΥΛΓΑΡΗΣ
Θέλω η ταινία να ψάχνεται από μόνη της
23/04/2004
http://www.athinorama.gr/cinema/article.aspx?id=1242

The Boy Κουστουμάκι(Inner Ear) 30/04/2010
http://www.mic.gr/cds.asp?id=34186

The Boy Ηλιοθεραπεία(Εξώστης) 19/07/2011
http://www.mic.gr/cds.asp?id=37637

Interviews with/by Alexander Voulgaris read for the sake of this blog entry:

1) Το συγκλονιστικό εναλλακτικό ζεϊμπέκικο του Έλληνα μουσικού The Boy που είναι επίκαιρο όσο ποτέ άλλοτε [βίντεο] | iefimerida.gr http://www.iefimerida.gr/node/123535#ixzz2v16Zq8kZ

2) 15.2.2012 | 14:48 Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης
Διήμερο νέου ανεξάρτητου ελληνικού κινηματογράφου, Six d.o.g.s, Τρίτη & Τετάρτη 7-8/2/2012
http://www.lifo.gr/mag/columns/4620

3) 19.11.2009 | 00:20 BLAST FROM THE PAST Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης (The Boy) Πηγή: http://www.lifo.gr
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LcOGkNa2d8kJ:www.lifo.gr/mag/features/1858+&cd=1&hl=el&ct=clnk&gl=gr

4) Οι συναυλίες πρέπει να επιστρέψουν στα στάδια, τα πράγματα πρέπει να γίνουν και πάλι υπερβολικά 08/07/2009
http://www.mic.gr/interview.asp?id=18205

5) Έκδοση Ελευθεροτυπία, Παρασκευή 12 Φεβρουαρίου 2010
Γουστάρουμε να ζούμε μ’ έναν Μεγάλο Αδελφό από πάνω μας
Της ΙΩΑΝΝΑΣ ΚΛΕΦΤΟΓΙΑΝΝΗ
http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=131414

6) Συνέντευξη του Γιώργου Λάνθιμου στον Αλέξανδρο Βούλγαρη για τον “Κυνόδοντα” (2009) που προβάλλεται από τις 22 Οκτωβρίου στις αίθουσες. Posted on Οκτωβρίου 24, 2009 by camerastyloonline (δημοσιεύτηκε στο 17ο τεύχος του ΜΟΤΕΡ)

Συνέντευξη του Γιώργου Λάνθιμου στον Αλέξανδρο Βούλγαρη για τον “Κυνόδοντα” (2009) που προβάλλεται από τις 22 Οκτωβρίου στις αίθουσες

7) Πάτερ ημών… πανκ. Ο σκηνοθέτης Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης αποκαλύπτει στον «Σταυρό του Νότου» τη μουσική του πλευρά, με ένα ανατρεπτικό πρόγραμμα Του ΔΗΜΗΤΡΗ ΚΑΝΕΛΛΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ
http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=118578

8) http://stopthatsound.blogspot.gr/2010/04/boy_28.html This blog entry is actually an article authored by Voulgaris himself. IMO the most direct and unpretentious text he has written about himself.

9) Interview between Felizol and The Boy. Posted to Facebook by Exploding Plastik. 11 november 2013
αλεξανδρος βουλγαρης

10) Αθηνά Τσαγγάρη, Αλέξανδρος Βούλγαρης: «Πειραματικό σινεμά είναι πλέον η Pixar» ΣΥΝΕΝΤΕΥΞΗ 15 ΜΑΡ 2013

11) Our fear of growing up. A conversation with the director Alexander Voulgaris. 14/8/09.
http://aindanaocomecamos.blogspot.gr/2009/08/our-fear-of-growing-up-conversation.html

Urban gentrification in Athens:

On the urban gentrification of the center of the Greek capitol, see “Rethink Athens: Athens at the Center”. This urban gentrification project reaches well into Voulgaris’ neigborhood, with the gentrification of Omonia square and Patision Blvd – both are mentioned in Voulgaris’ brooding songs on Ηλιοθεραπεία, Παγωμένο (Frozen) as well as his song about the Golden Dawn rallies, Τι κι αν είναι Σάββατο (SFW it’s Saturday). The Greek government’s decision to generously fund Voulgaris’ stalled film-making career just so happens to coincide with this urban gentrification project targeting his neigborhood. I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence, but I rather suspect a Bourdieuian homology at work here.

Η Αθήνα του αύριο. Μαρτίου 10th, 2014. Της Μαρίας Γκέκα
http://www.naturanrg.gr/%CE%BA%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%BD%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%AF%CE%B1/life-in/%CE%B7-%CE%B1%CE%B8%CE%AE%CE%BD%CE%B1-%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%85-%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%BF/

RETHINK ATHENS
Ετσι θα γίνει το κέντρο της Αθήνας
http://www.ethnos.gr/article.asp?catid=22768&subid=2&pubid=63965452

Η υλοποίηση του «Rethink Athens»
http://www.onassis.gr/onassis-magazine/issue-60/project-initiation

Ανοίγει ο δρόμος για την ανάπλαση Πανεπιστημίου-Πατησίων
http://egiakoumis.com/index.php/society/item/5174-2014-02-13-04-46-19

Misc:

The following is the most hilarious and most critical thread on Alexander Voulgaris, ever. Athens Indymedia readers lambast him for being a-political, for knowingly performing at an establishment associated with the Greek mob and proceed to debunk his claims in the mainstream media about having performed at an anarchist autonomous space in Exarchia (no evidence of him ever having done so) as pubic image management:

Athens IMC FORUM. “έχω παίξει από το Cavo Paradiso της Μυκόνου μέχρι το αναρχικό στέκι των Εξαρχείων”
από σάπια λόγια 12:04, Τρίτη 12 Ιανουαρίου 2010
https://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1120436

To understand the context in which Alexander Voulgaris is able to freely expectorate his pedophilia-apologetics and advocacy on Facebook without any objections whatsoever being raised, consider the following:
From Nymphomaniac to Stranger By the Lake, is sex in cinema getting too real?
In this article, Emine Saner, a feature writer for the Guardian, asks different actors and actresses about being asked to perform increasingly graphic sex scenes in their work. By Emine Saner
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/21/nymphomaniac-stranger-by-the-lake-sex-cinema February 21, 2014, the Guardian
Also very relevant in the context of Alexander Voulgaris lamenting the ban on the sexual exploitation of children is the following. The *age-related* regulations these smut-advocates (who misleadingly call themselves the “Free Speech Coalition”) are attacking were specifically put in place to
stop child pornography by allowing authorities to check the real ages of individuals who participate in pornography: “Under 2257 [Federal Government 18 U.S.C. §§2257
regulations], identification records must be kept for all nude or sexual
images, and those records must be available for inspection “at all
reasonable times.”

Free Speech Coalition Mounts “Full-Scale Attack” Against child protection act.
http://carnalnation.com/content/34775/10/free-speech-coalition-mounts-
full-scale-attack-against-2257-regulations

For more information on the government-funded Greek film-making context, see:

Amid economic crisis, a silver lining for Greek filmmakers
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite4_1_11/03/2014_538071

Quoting from the article:

Before all fell apart, the industry relied on state funding from the Greek Film Centre (GFC), and ERT, the state broadcaster.

But over the past five years, the GFC’s funding has fallen by 35 percent while domestic ticket sales — another key money source — are down 45 percent.

And last year, the government axed ERT.

The shutdown was designed to trim the state payroll — one of Greece’s obligations under its multi-billion EU-IMF bailout — by more than 2,000 jobs.

A downsized state broadcaster was set up to replace ERT, but in the interim, scores of productions including documentaries and short films were crippled for lack of funding.

This acted as a wake-up call to the industry, unlike the past when many were content to wait for the next state payout.

“Before the crisis, Greek filmmakers wanted 300-500,000 euros ($200,000-$360,000) to make a movie,» said an industry source who declined to be named. “Now they do it with 100,000 euros,» he said, adding that movie production is now better targeted too.

“When the money was flowing, 15 Greek movies would be made in one year but only two would be shown in cinemas. The rest would never see the light of day, and some of their creators didn’t even care,» the source said. [Note: Recall here that Voulgaris’ Higuita essentially tanked, with critics bashing the heck out of it. In the Youtube interview Voulgaris said he did not care much about the negative reviews of Higuita and that not a single one of the critics managed to hurt his feelings. Yet despite making a movie that was almost unanimously considered below par, the government decided to give Voulgaris more money than he has ever received in his life. Why? Is this good-ridance-fuck-off money, or is the government, as I would suspect, making plans for Nigel?]

With less domestic funding, Greek film-makers have been searching for new contacts and sponsors abroad. [Note: IMO this is where Voulgaris’ French connection comes into play.]
…
“There’s very little room for Greek films”, said Corraface. “So it’s necessary to make films that are a bit shocking, that wake people up. And I think (Greeks have caught onto that),” he added. [Note: Shock, outrage and controversy is exactly the type of product that Voulgaris sells. Not wonder he’s got government backing.]