The House in the Film

‘History is a matter of clues and divination — and a kind of luck that is not exactly luck at all.’

On a warm autumn evening in Paris, the author attends the screening of a 1970s cult film, at the centre of which is a house. Within an overgrown garden in a suburb of Athens lies a fin-de-siècle villa in which time itself seems suspended. Haunted by its evocative grandeur, Mark Mazower sets out to locate the building and its enigmatic owner, and to understand the now-vanished culture that made them both.

The House in the Film tells the story of the rise and fall of an elite in twentieth-century Greece. It is also a meditation upon the ways in which the past reveals itself to us. Weaving together fragments of memory, intuitions and images, history becomes a creative act and a form of communion between the living and the dead.