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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020
- Articles
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Introspective cosmopolitanism: The family in the Greek Weird Wave
More LessThis article reframes the critical discourse around the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ using an approach informed by theoretical work on cosmopolitanism. Focussing on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) and Athena-Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), the critical interpretation of the role of the family is radically rethought. I argue that the privileging of allegorical readings of the family in the Weird Wave films constitutes a form of critical denial of the deeply problematic and specifically Greek ways in which the family (dys)functions. I challenge the absolute and exclusive power that the Greek ‘crisis’ holds over interpretations and evaluations of Weird Wave films, which discursively displaces the problems of the family to broader sociopolitical frameworks. In reclaiming the importance of literal readings of the films, I reposition them as manifestations of a specific cosmopolitan disposition, that of introspection, a process of self-examination that overcomes denial. In turn, the critical reframing of the films outlines the contours of a complex agonistics of introspective cosmopolitanism, an inward investigative disposition that is dialectically linked to cosmopolitan positioning. Jean François Lyotard’s 1989 theorization of the oikos (home/house) provides a conceptual model for understanding the family (oikogeneia), which, in its Greek specificities, is central to the films under discussion.
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Film criticism and the legitimization of a New Wave in contemporary Greek cinema
Authors: Eirini Sifaki and Anastasia StamouContemporary Greek cinema garnered a great reputation in recent years, including Oscar nominations, numerous awards and distinctions in international festivals and also worldwide media coverage. The emergence of a new group of filmmakers whose creativity and avant-garde aesthetics were stimulated and heightened by the social and economic crisis was first marked by media critics (film critics and cultural journalists). As journalistic art criticism plays a prominent role in the legitimization of cultural products and artistic genres, this article examines the way in which professional film critics and journalists, both in Greece and abroad, described, evaluated and labelled the ‘Greek New Wave’. In line with cultural evaluation theories, we conducted a content analysis of film criticism articles in order to explore how professionals have reviewed and deployed their arguments towards this new phenomenon. Our results indicate that film criticism decisively influenced the Greek New Wave’s shaping and legitimization in the film industry. Even though film critics and journalists hesitated to adhere to a specific name for this phenomenon in Greek cinema, their discourses and interpretations have been based on the films’ break with previous film practices and representations of Greek society and the paradox between a ‘collapsing country’ and a flourishing arthouse cinema.
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Fear, city, cinema: Urban regeneration as a mental trap in Alexis Alexiou’s film Istoria 52 (Tale 52) (2008)
More LessThe article analyses Alexis Alexiou’s thriller Istoria 52(Tale 52) (2008) in relation to media and academic discourses on fear and safety in the city. The film’s mise-en-scène does not include any shots of the city; however, the off-screen presence of the city is implied as the main driver for the main character’s actions. The film was produced at a time when Athens was undergoing a huge urban regeneration, which remained incomplete, leading to the unwilling coexistence of people from different walks of life. The article offers an analysis of the film’s narrative and, in particular, its spatial dimension, placing it in the context of the contemporaneous urban condition of the Greek capital, which is implied, but not shown, in the film. I argue that the main character’s disturbed mental state, which drives much of the action in the film, is not just a result of an unbalanced psychology. Rather, his desire for isolation and the hyper-protection of private space are reflections of a conservative view on fear and safety in the city, where urban regeneration strategies are simultaneously the solution and the cause of fear and insecurity, trapping people in an endless closed loop.
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Reclaiming Greece’s national star: Aliki Vougiouklaki, from sex kitten to working girl
More LessDuring the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Greek cinema (roughly from 1950 to 1970), Aliki Vougiouklaki emerged as Greece’s biggest star. Yet, although her image remains extremely familiar, it is largely misconstrued in both popular and critical discourses about her. This article shifts the focus from conventional readings of Vougiouklaki’s star persona as ideologically and sexually conservative, mainly due to her embodiment of the sex-kitten type, to the work dimension of her image – a heretofore unexplored facet of her persona. A careful look at her early films, the control she exercised over the construction of her star image, as well as the ways in which it circulated off-screen reveals a dogged, stereotypically ‘masculine’, devotion to her work and career, making Vougiouklaki into a powerful and progressive image of femininity in post-war Greece.
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Comics, memory and migration: Through the mirror maze of Soloup’s Aivali
More LessThis article turns towards the legacy of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) in contemporary Greek culture. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of postmemory and intergenerational transmission of trauma, it examines the Greek graphic novel Aivali by Soloup (2014, translated into English in 2019) in order to discuss aesthetics and practices set in motion by the memory of Asia Minor, when the relay of remembrance reaches the third generation. The article demonstrates how the fragments of memories that the grandchildren of Asia Minor refugees inherited from their ancestors find their way into comics panels, through which those memories are reassembled into a public visual archive. At the same time, the graphic novel also performs a reconstitution of the Greek literary canon, when the works of Greek and Turkish writers are called upon to fill in the gaps in the family story. Ultimately, it is argued that affective connections fostered through reading Aivali ensure that memory can travel across time and lead to new encounters, bringing back reminiscences of Asia Minor afresh to communities’ collective imagination.
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- Review Essay
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The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity, Johanna Hanink (2017)
More LessReview of: The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity, Johanna Hanink (2017)
Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 338 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-67497-154-7, $29.95
To Prosfato Mellon: I Klasiki Arhaiotita Os Viopolitiko Ergaleio (The Recent Future: Classical Antiquity as Biopolitical Apparatus), Dimitris Plantzos (2016)
Athens: Nefeli Publishing, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978-9-60504-151-9, €17.90
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- Book Reviews
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Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos (eds) (2018)
More LessReview of: Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos (eds) (2018)
London and New York: Routledge, 279 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-13823-777-3, h/bk, £88.00,
ISBN 978-1-31529-903-7, eBook, £20.00
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Roidis and the Borrowed Muse: British Historiography, Fiction and Satire in Pope Joan, Foteini Lika (2018)
More LessReview of: Roidis and the Borrowed Muse: British Historiography, Fiction and Satire in Pope Joan, Foteini Lika (2018)
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 295 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-44388-113-5, h/bk, £47.99
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- Exhibitions Review
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Exile, the weight of history, art and transcendence: Jannis Kounellis and Takis
By Mark DurdenReview of: Exile, the weight of history, art and transcendence: Jannis Kounellis and Takis
Jannis Kounellis: Fondazione Prada, Venezia, 11 May–24 November 2019
Takis: Sculptor of Magnetism, Light and Sound, Tate Modern, 3 July–27 October 2019
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- Museum Review
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