Greek Weird Wave (English, Dimitris Papanikolaou)

Product description Review [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" From the Back Cover What connects 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 to gender and sexual identity activism in Greece? What role did cultural collectives play in the formation of a ‘weird history’ of Greek cinema? How did cinema and other cultural forms respond to a sense of crisis and an ever-expanding management of life that we now call biopolitics?This book poses such questions 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 ‘New’ or ‘Weird Wave’ films in Greek cinema post-2009, 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 much larger developments in World Cinema.Dimitris Papanikolaou is Associate Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College About the Author Dr Dimitris Papanikolaou is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. Read more