Awards

• Short-listed for Modern Greek Studies Association: Edmund Keeley Book Prize 2022

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781474436311

Table of Contents

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 * The most comprehensive and incisive exploration of the new film trend to date, charting the movement’s forerunners in Greece and untangling its many complexities and contradictions. -- Harrison Blackman * LA Review of Books *

"[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"""

[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 *

Author Information

Dr Dimitris Papanikolaou is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford.

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