Ioannis o Viaios/John the Violent is a 1973 black-and-white film written and directed by the renowned Greek auteur Tonia Marketaki. It was made just before the fall of the Greek junta (1967–74) and in line with the modernist aesthetics and politics of New Greek Cinema. This chapter explores John the Violent in the breach between Gilles Deleuze's movement-images and time-images, and attempts to make readable the intersection between the neo-noir aesthetics and the existential and political power of the film. I argue that the neo-noir sensibility of the film lies not in the classic noir presentation, investigation and solution of a crime, but in the multiple fascination with the ‘powers of the false’ (Deleuze 2005b: 122–50) in crime and cinema. John, the psychologically troubled but charming protagonist, seems to have murdered a woman, as he willingly confesses to the police. While this might or might not be true in the fictional narrative, I will attempt to illustrate how Marketaki undermines narrative verisimilitude and how John the Violent is less the story of a psycho-killer and more a neo-noir about the existential and political processes of a becoming-murderer.

The film opens with a crime committed around midnight in a street in Athens: a young woman is stabbed to death by someone who disappears in the dark. During the interrogation of the witnesses by the police, the spectator gets bits of contradictory information about when and how the murder was committed. The witnesses expose in flashbacks and voiceovers different versions of what happened. Then the victim is identified and presented: Eleni worked as an assistant in a woman's underwear shop, and had a fiancé who lived with his mother and sister whom she used to visit and attend on every day. Through police interrogations of Eleni's colleagues, relatives and friends, who are similarly presented through voiceovers and flashbacks, with increasing curiosity we learn about her financial situation, intimate life and sexual habits. In the next few days, parts of this information hit the newspapers, spiced up with rumours and hearsay. The witnesses’ and the press's narratives reflect, in a crude way, all the dominant gender and class stereotypes of the time. The filmic strategy of presenting the facts through fragmented narratives and different points of view, often used in noir and neo-noir films, questions from the very beginning the possibility of accessing the truth.