Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

Greek cinema is on the rise during a period of deepening economic and political crisis. Films such as Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps have won critical acclaim and awards at international film festivals. They have been produced under increasingly difficult conditions, at a time when funding for social and cultural programmes in Greece is being cut precipitously. What is the relationship between this cinematic resurgence and the crisis? To what extent are these films a response to the troubles that grip the country? This essay relates the depiction of agency in Lanthimos’s and Tsangari’s films to the decline of popular sovereignty in European politics, Greek peripheral modernity and epochal transformations in Greek film culture.

This article introduces a framework for discussing contemporary dance’s potential for critical intervention within the context of the current socio-economic crisis in Europe, focusing on examples from Greece. In particular, it explores how the use of history in recent works proposes new engagements and relationships between past and present, inviting a reconsideration of the past while making possible the envisaging and articulation of emergent narratives, identities and social formations. It also examines the use of collaborative practices for choreographing, which depart from hierarchical dance processes that have been dominant in Greece and thus challenge the prevailing perception of danse d’auteur while exploring different modes of production. The significance of these practices lies in their questioning of previously established modes of working but also in their potential function as models of broader social practices. The works in question are analysed not as artefacts alone but as artistic practices that operate, act and interact within the social, the political and the aesthetic. It is argued that under conditions of socio-political crisis, the established social order is renegotiated and that these works, through the practices with which they engage, are significant in the reconstitution of the social. Thus, they propose a way of reclaiming the social dimension and potential of the arts in a period when their role is disputed.

This article focuses on the militant subjects in Dimitris Nollas’s fiction and considers them as tragic heroes that occupy liminal positions. Political violence, as a contested tactical option of militancy, posits pressing dilemmas and generates intricate explorations of morality and agency. After sketching a brief theoretical framework in order to assess recent theories of the tragic, I focus on the novella To Pempto Genos / The Fifth Age (Nollas, 1988) and the novel O Anthropos pou Xehastike / The Man in Limbo (Nollas, 1995) in terms of conflictual memory frames and ethical stances. Although they present similarities on the thematic level, a close reading of the texts elucidates the different approaches taken towards the militant past from the present standpoint and, consequently, the divergent implications for the future.

Kostas Manousakis’s Prodosia / Betrayal (1964) is one of the few films dedicated to the period of German occupation in Greece, offering a rare portrayal of the German soldier and touching upon the persecution of Jews in Europe. This essay relates this historical representation to the extensive and long-standing debates about the representation of the Holocaust in cinema and deploys Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of ‘parapraxis’ to identify a series of key thematic and stylistic motifs. The film, read through the prism of parapraxis, presents a portrait of history with complex temporalities, inviting us to rethink the course of history through the current perspective and work on our historical imaginary in new meaningful ways.

O Adelfos Anna / Brother Anna (Grigoriou, 1963) is a Greek film about Anna, a Jewish girl who cross-dresses as a monk in a Christian monastery in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The film’s negotiation of gender and religious identities is peculiarly subdued: unlike other cross-dressing films (such as Sylvia Scarlett or Yentl), both Anna’s disguise and her subsequent identity disclosure do not lead to paradoxical situations that can invite queer interpretations, and her Jewishness recedes into the background. Yet, the fact that Anna resides in an oppressive environment, which stipulates female sexuality as profane and punishes its manifestations, marks her own, queer trajectory of identity disclosure: being initially saddled with a non-gendered identity that helps her avoid female oppression, Anna experiments with religious, Christian pathos to sanctify her own sexuality. At the same time, she unknowingly but actively explores the negative stereotype of a Jewish temptress to seduce her male object of desire to Christian morality. Even though Anna will finally embrace a conventional heterosexual bonding, both her non-normative, religious expression of sexuality and her overturning of the negative connotations that female Jewishness entails leads to her acknowledgement of female sexuality as something inherently positive, which does not require validation from a conventional, Greek Orthodox marriage scheme.

This article examines the ways in which the sociolinguistic construction of youth identity takes place in the popular Greek family sitcom Deka Lepta Kirigma/ Ten-Minute Preaching (Mega TV, 2000–04). Drawing on the ‘identities in interaction’ sociocultural linguistic model of Bucholtz and Hall (2005) and the ethno-methodological tool of ‘membership categorization analysis’ (Sacks 1992), our analysis focuses on three interactions between teenage and adult characters in the show. As we demonstrate, each of the analysed characters constructs themselves and others through identity categories that the other conversationalists attempt to contest and denaturalize. This suggests that, unlike other similar mainstream media texts which firmly adopt an adult perspective on young people, Ten-Minute Preaching is more ambivalent in its portrayal of youth through the characters’ talk, since it includes both teenage and adult voices, conveying the message that there are multiple and even conflicting versions of reality, depending on the perspective from which one sees it. Our analysis, however, demonstrates that the show eventually supports the stereotypical view that adults have of young people and their style of talk, as it sees them through the prism of the generation gap, a key theme that has traditionally defined the adult-constructed discourse of adolescence, which has structured mainstream media texts historically.

This essay discusses the ways in which an idealized image of classical Athens contributed towards the formation of a city in which the coexistence between the ancient and the modern, old and new convey a unique urban experience. This ‘modern antiquity’, or the socially constructed and aesthetically perceived image of the city’s past as exclusively classical was promoted by a number of different actors, from German classicists who never visited Greece, English and French travellers, to Greek governments and communities of city dwellers. The essay focuses on the role of the latter two categories in the building of modern Athens and explores three spheres where the emphasis on antiquity redefined the city’s past and hindered its modernization, namely royal decrees, local and national governmental obstructions to an organized city plan, and the various perceptions of the city’s concrete apartment buildings.

Thanassis Rentzis’s work offers an investigation into the nature of the cinematic medium and the constellations of industry, spectacle and subjectivity, most explicitly demonstrated in two films he made in the 1970s, Bio-Graphia (1975) and Corpus (1979). Largely influenced by collage and pre-cinematic techniques, these are the most essayistic of Rentzis’s films and they set out to trace human sensibilities that were central to the rise of audio-visual culture. Their main themes concern the fragmentation of representation in modernity, and correspondingly, a mutual constitution of the audio-visual with interactions throughout social life. The article will argue that the films do not insist on spectacle as a negation of life, but on a vitalist approach of audio-visuality whereby the dissemination of images relies on physiological and perceptual modes of spectatorship.

This visual essay attempts to map how evolving feelings of unrest have been captured in slogans and street art painted on the walls of Athens over the past few years. Slogans and street art demarcate alternative spatialities and alternative subjectivities within the city limits. In effect, slogans and street art function as signs of a community struggling to articulate itself in the face of political stagnation; ontology, politics and art thus become intimately entwined. Street art and graffiti are collective gestures of desire, movement and flux coming from a loosely defined collective of artists and amateurs making use of their artistry to create works which comment, disrupt and create alternative ways of building communities and subjectivities.

The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture and Politics in Greece after 1989, Vangelis Calotychos (2013) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1-137-29243-8, hardback, £57.50