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Greek Weird Wave
A Cinema of Biopolitics
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Book Presentation:
Examines political engagement in recent films of the Greek New Wave
• Shortlisted for the 2022 Keeley Book Prize
• Offers an up to date account of 21st century Greek filmmaking
• Provides a theoretically informed analysis that proposes new terms and a fresh viewpoint
• Proposes the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement, which points to a much larger development of biopolitical realism in World Cinema
• Listen to author Dimitris Papanikolaou discuss the book on the Archipelago podcast
What relates the early films of Yorgos Lanthimos with Vasilis Kekatos’s 2019 Cannes triumph The Distance Between Us and the Sky? What is the lasting legacy of Panos Koutras’s 2009 trans narrative Strella: A Woman’s Way in today’s gender and sexual identity activism in Greece? What was the role of cultural collectives in the formation of a ‘weird history’ of Greek cinema? And how did cinema and other cultural forms respond to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now learnt to call biopolitics? This book uses such questions in order to establish a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade in an engaged and highly original manner. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 ‘New’ or ‘Weird Wave’ of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism. At once representing, reframing and reimagining the present, the Greek Weird Wave points to a much larger development in World Cinema.
About the Author:
Dr Dimitris Papanikolaou is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford.
Press Reviews:
[Papanikolaou] brings together pieces of an informal Greek cinematic archive, collects unnoticed information, and weaves the threads that connect people, practices, technologies of survival, gestures and spaces, inside and outside the cinematic or artistic context; it is this auto-ethnographical participative approach that makes this book so valuable, and also so enjoyable to read. [...] And yes, it is a weird book, as funny, brilliant, provocative, personal and political, biting and moving, as the films of this wave are.– Anna Poupou, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Issue 7
Dimitris Papanikolaou is the pre-eminent Greek cultural critic of his generation and every one of his books is an intervention – as well as, always, an interminable source of thought-provoking pleasure. Yet again, with his signature crystal clarity, inventiveness, and daring, Papanikolaou has written the book on contemporary Greek cinema. In the process, he has also given us a new rubric in which to consider biopolitics, not as fashionable theoretical abstractions but as tentacles of power that permeate every family’s living room – biopolitics as depicted in films but also making films and being made by films. The book is political above all – an epitome of anti-canonical thinking.– Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Realism in Greek Cinema (2021)
From the Post-War Period to the Present
The Greek Film Musical (2005)
A Critical and Cultural History
The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi (2022)
Dir. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis
Subject: Director > Antoinetta Angelidi
The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015)
Dir. Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven
Subject: Director > Theo Angelopoulos
World Film Locations / Athens (2014)
Dir. Anna Poupou and Afroditi Nikolaidou
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