Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

This article critically examines the construction of the official ideology of the Modern Greek state in its attempt to create and disseminate a historicist perception of the past. It analyses its origins and certain central symbolic discourses, and focuses on the specific pre-urban elites that took over the intellectual hegemony of the state after the urbanization and industrialization of the country without, however, modernizing the function of state apparatuses. Furthermore, it explores the various attempts to create counter-cultural discourses from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, through the critical assessment of the historical continuity between Ancient Greece, Byzantium and Modern Greece. Special attention is given to the critical discourse of the Greek diaspora, especially of expatriates Cornelius Castoriadis, Kostas Axelos, Gerasimos Kaklamanes and Panayiotis Kondyles. The article also examines specific works of art in cinema, literature and philosophy, which in moments of crisis renegotiated the relationship between past and present, power and society, memory and ideology. Finally, it puts forward the suggestion that Greek culture in its long duration needs a different conceptual metaphor, which is the ‘polydialectical palimpsest’, based on an idea proposed by Nikos Kazantzakis. Only through an understanding of the past as both complex and intelligible, full of paradoxes and ambiguities, can Modern Greek culture abandon its monophonic and uncritical official historicism and confront the central questions of contemporary postmodernity.

The ceremonial re-enactment of classical antiquity has long been employed by the Greek state in order to commemorate its past as well as promote its much advertised Hellenic inheritance. This article examines two ceremonies devised by the Greek authorities in the framework ofthe preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, focusing on the technologies of embodiment employed by their makers. Contrary to the strong adherence to neo-classical tastes these ceremonies portray, other, unauthorized revivals of the classical ethos, seem to attempt the emancipation of Hellas from the control of its western admirers – and the trappings of neo-classicism. Through these improvised performances of Greekness, new cultural identities are constantly forged and negotiated, while at the same time the spectre of classical Hellas is seemingly rescued from its neo-classical cocoon.

This article discusses Australian author Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap (2008) and its television adaptation (2011). The latter is situated in relation to Television Studies debates relating to ‘quality’, with elements of the adaptation that enable its categorization as ‘quality TV’ highlighted. Tsiolkas, whose novels all prominently feature Greek-Australian characters, has described The Slap as a response to John Howard’s period as Prime Minister (1996–2007). The article thus examines in detail particular policies produced in Australia during those years, and the competing discourses relating to ‘multiculturalism’, which were in circulation. Drawing on the writings of Ien Ang and John Stratton, as well as David L. Eng, it is argued that both versions of The Slap expose faultlines in Australian society relating to race and ethnicity which multiculturalism policies may attempt to paper over and bury. The article also compares and contrasts the two versions of The Slap, situates the novel in relation to Tsiolkas’ other writings and positions the adaptation within the landscape of Australian film and television. The article concludes with a consideration of the significance of music in Tsiolkas’ novels and how, in particular, this shapes his representations of younger characters.

This article discusses A Short Border Handbook (2006) and My Name is Europe (2010), two novels by Albanian-born and Athens-based author Gazmend Kapllani. It argues that both books are not solely about the Balkans and Europe, but also about the meaning of Europe seen through its treatment of immigrants. The first novel offers an account of the journey of an Albanian immigrant into Greece at the beginning of the 1990s and the related problems faced by him and other immigrants. The second consists of a futuristic account of an aged Albanian, emigrant for half a century, returning to Tirana, now part of the United States of Europe, in 2041, punctuated by a series of testimonials based on actual interviews with immigrants residing in Greece. As the two novels were written originally in Greek for a Greek audience and fuse fiction and memoir, with the narrator’s use of the first-person singular adding to the immediacy of the text, the readers are given the opportunity to look at immigration as a mirror looki g back at them and to consider their identity in terms of fluidity and freedom of movement, as a trajectory in which one is constantly confronted by an ‘other’, often in unequal terms, making this constant becoming an essential process of identity formation.

Through a textual and cultural reading of My Life in Ruins (Petrie, 2009), this article examines the ways in which the film became implicated in cultural politics and, more specifically, in the commercial image of Greece the tourist industry strives to promote. It is argued that My Life in Ruins directs the gaze of the viewers towards stylized images of Greece and stereotypical narratives well known from older films with an agenda to ‘advertise Greece’ to potential tourists. Further examining the making and promotion of the film, one can also argue that the actual involvement of the Greek state in it was not coincidental. The support offered by the Hellenic Archaeological Committee and the newly founded Hellenic Film Commission Office to the film’s production and promotion highlights the stakes that Greek state policy had placed in the film’s global commercial success. It also seems that, as the first signs of a global financial crisis became visible, a nation’s economic anxieties were expressed and precariously invested in projects such as My Life in Ruins.

This article is the first critical and comparative assessment of Duane Michals’s two Cavafy photobooks, Homage to Cavafy (1978) and The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy (2007). Michals’s photo-sequences in these two books are not illustrations of Cavafy’s poetry, nor do they attempt to be faithful to their content. In Adventures Michals creates a ‘cinematic’ role for the poet, impersonated by the actor Joel Grey; however, Michals’s version of Cavafy only bears vague resemblance to the historical character. As I argue, Michals’ digression from biographical accuracy aims at highlighting the queer aspect of the poet rather than just illustrating a gay life, thus showcasing the open-endedness of Cavafy’s life and texts as spaces for queer self-genealogy. As queer fictions, Michals’s photographs display a reading of Cavafy that does not measure itself against the aesthetic impact of his poetry, but grounds itself on the political and ideological repercussion of his sexual sensibility.

This article addresses the appropriative paradigms that marked the western art world from the mid-1970s, delineating first some of the wider issues raised by the term and then outlining their introduction into Greek photography from the early 1980s onwards. As a term in art history and criticism, appropriation is associated with the rise of postmodernism and the introduction of critical theories of representation reflecting on the conditions of authorship. As such, it has a contiguous relationship to the long-standing debate between ‘originality’ and ‘imitation’. The Greek photography world of the 1980s, defined by a modernist orthodoxy which was (and still is) largely predicated on the triumph of compositional originality could not accept any challenging of the authenticity of a work of art or, even more, of the nature of authorship itself. In effect, the reception of postmodern ideas such as appropriation involved selective understandings and distortions. Photography practitioners in Greece produced works that were postmodern in sensibility, but they were only understood and framed in a modernist discourse. This article introduces some prominent examples of these cases and discusses them in the context of postmodern theoretical reflection.

This article contextualizes recent developments in Greek cinema, namely the rise of a new generation of film-makers who rejuvenated film-making in Greece and attracted widespread international and domestic attention. It shifts the focus to the wider cultural, institutional, technological, financial and sociopolitical context and examines this new film trend as one aspect of the much broader changes taking place in the Greek audio-visual sector throughout the 2000s. It explores the driving forces behind the trend, discusses its major characteristics and argues that it is the result of a combination of factors: the rapid growth and prosperity of the Greek commercial audio-visual industry, the enduring financial poverty and institutional failure of the Greek film sector, new forms of cinephilia, developments in communication and image recording practices deriving from new technologies, generational conflict and societal crisis, as well as growing tensions in the Greek public domain between constitutional authority and new modes of articulating public discourse. Finally, it illustrates how each one of these factors found a response in Greek film culture through gestures of independence and emancipation from established practices, institutions and ideologies.