Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities by Lydia Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis (review)

There has been a renewed interest in Greek cinema in the last few years, with various films crossing the country’s borders to reach many festivals around the world and garner international attention. Films like Panos Koutras’s A Woman’s Way [Strella] (2009), Filippos Tsitos’s Plato’s Academy/Akadimia Platonos (2009), Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth/Kinodontas (2009) and The Alps/Alpeis (2011), and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), as well as Argyris Dimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth (2011) have been touring the international festival circuit and have received considerable critical attention. It is this newfound international attention to Greek cinema that makes the recent publication of Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities a welcome, overdue, and an important addition to the small body of English-language film scholarship on Greek cinema.

The main intention of editors Lydia Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis with Greek Cinema is to present a collection of essays for film scholars and students alike that conceptualize Greek cinema in different ways. The different theoretical and investigative frameworks within each essay allow for the contemplation of various cultural concerns in order to situate Greek cinema in a variety of different geocultural contexts, whether European, Mediterranean, and/or Balkan. The underlying thread that connects the majority of these essays is an attempt to reconsider the peripherality of Greek cinema in relation to European cinema, as well as an attempt to (re)connect Greek cinema to the wider field of interdisciplinary film studies and film history. As such, the editors’ decision to organize the collection in four sections—“Approaches,” “Histories,” “Identity,” and “Aesthetics”— allows the different authors collected here to approach Greek film and film culture from different thematic and theoretical perspectives. For the most part, Greek Cinema succeeds in providing not only a fresh perspective to the study of Greek cinema but also a solid introduction to a peripheral European national cinema that has been unjustly neglected by film scholars and European film scholars in particular.

As can be expected, despite their organization in four unique categories, the essays in Greek Cinema explore topics and concerns that are interconnected. The most important contribution of the collection is that it successfully brings together critical essays that resituate the location of Greek cinema in global film studies, scholars with a fresh perspective, and new theoretical frameworks and approaches for the study of Greek cinema. The new approaches can help others who have already been writing about Greek film, but most importantly, they might entice new scholars and students interested in studying and working with film to approach a field of Modern Greek Studies that is unfortunately understudied and underproduced.

Three essays in the beginning of Greek Cinema, each with a different theoretical approach, present novel ways to study early Greek film culture and contemporary popular film. Vassiliki Tsitsopoulou’s essay “Coloniality and Early Greek Film Culture,” analyzes the role of early film culture in Greece through the country’s peripheral geopolitical location in the European imaginary. Tsitsopoulou studies the intellectual discussions that took place in the 1920s in the popular film journal Kinimatografikos Astir/Cinematographic Star, as well as the journal’s policies, in order to argue that the films that were imported to Greece in the beginning of the century and the discourse they created functioned as civilizing agents that challenged Modern Greek national difference and promoted a colonial subjectivity in relating to the West.

Whereas Tsitsopoulou concentrates on early Greek film culture, Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Michalis Kokonis reflect on how it is being refashioned in the twenty-first century by Greek films that are breaking box-office records. In “A Touch of Spice: Mobility and Popularity,” Eleftheriotis argues that the commercial and critical success of Tasos Boulmetis’s A Touch of Spice/Politiki Kouzina (2003) is directly related to a dual sense of mobility that resonates both on a narrative and production level. On the one hand, the film’s high production values, especially the use...