How I became a world record holder

10 September 2008

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At a Google conference in Rhodes, Matthew d’Ancona finds himself part of a bid to break the world record for Zorba dancing — and to relive one of the greatest scenes in cinema

‘Teach me to dance. Will you?’ Few scenes in cinema have the emotional poignancy and magic of the last moments of Zorba the Greek (1964), as Basil, the young English writer played by Alan Bates, seeks his final lesson in life from Anthony Quinn’s majestic peasant-magus, on the Cretan shore. All around them are broken dreams, and the air hangs heavy with the prospect of their parting: but nothing can repress their joy as that familiar theme, ‘Sirtaki’, by Mikis Theodorakis — slow and stately to begin, but accelerating quickly — transports Zorba and his beloved apprentice to a place of unbreakable friendship.

I can remember vividly when my parents first introduced me to this movie, and the Kazantzakis novel upon which it is based, and I have loved both ever since. Quinn’s Zorba is one of the great, most affecting screen performances, and he delivers the Greek’s famous aphorisms with a perfectly judged mixture of affection and scorn. ‘What kind of a man are you?’ he asks the repressed, bookish Basil as they sail to the island. ‘Don’t you even like dolphins?’

Life, he tells him, ‘is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.’ He has ‘enough fight in me to devour the world. So I fight! Well, do we? Or do we let the mountain win?’ Basil, Zorba says, has ‘got everything except one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.’ It is a story about the sensualist’s education of the intellectual and the refusal of a true man to age gracefully, or to accept that he cannot live for a thousand years. Zorba dances, he explains, to escape grief as well as to celebrate life. ‘When a man is full what can he do?’ he asks Basil. ‘Burst!’

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Suresh Dogra

September 15th, 2008 5:37am Report this comment

Zorba the Greek is an interesting novel.I don't find the movie measuring up to the poignancy of the text.Besides,it is good as a work of fiction but to think that the character or alternative vision of life presented in the novel can or should be emulated in real life
is a serious misunderstanding.Zorba is an unproductive bohemian maverick.Thoreau says be not only good but also be good for something.What is Zorba good for? Kazantazakis' vision of life as reflected in the novel is superficial and the movie based on it is no better.

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