[ecrea] Call for Chapters: Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the present

Title:
Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the present

Call for Chapters:

Since the early 1990s, Greek Cinema has started re-emerging in theatre 
screens and attracting increasing interest, evident both through the box 
office successes as well as the renewed critical attention. From popular 
genre cinema, to art-house and avant-garde, documentary, short film and 
animation, Greek Cinema in the last couple of decades has re-invented 
itself and commanded the attention of audiences and critics alike, both 
nationally and internationally.

Since the mid-2000s, academic criticism has also increasingly focused on 
this re-birth of Greek Cinema, with a number of publications appearing 
and seeking to explore various aspects of Greek cinematic practices and 
contexts. The aim of this edited collection is to expand on current 
analysis of Greek Cinema of the last two decades, as well as move beyond 
those more established fields of research, by inviting innovative 
contributions in terms of content and methodology. This edited volume 
seeks to map key trends of the Greek cinematic output since the early 
1990s, considering a variety of films within their various contexts of 
production, distribution and consumption, both at national and 
international levels.

Arguably, the ever-expanding Film Festival circuit has opened 
opportunities for showcasing the cinema of smaller countries with 
generally limited output, such as Greece. The trend of European and 
international co-productions has also benefited Greek filmmakers, who 
have had limited institutional support in their own country. In 
addition, the global financial crisis, which has hit Greece most 
forcefully, has decreased film funding even further, thus encouraging 
filmmakers to seek support beyond the country’s borders. Thematically, 
this financial and socio-political crisis in Greece has been reflected 
on films produced after 2008/9 in particular; and much of current 
academic research has indeed focused on this ‘New Greek Current’, which 
primarily involves art-house productions with generally limited box 
office success.

However, there has been another type of film production in the country, 
which, despite its success with audiences, has so far enjoyed very 
limited academic attention. The re-emergence of Greek popular cinema in 
the 1990s has mostly been referred to in negative terms. However, 
popular cinema re-emerged at a time when Greece had enjoyed a period of 
seeming affluence and adopted an outward-looking view, promoting its 
European identity and its global outreach (culminating with the 2004 
Olympic Games in Athens). Popular cinema has continued to observe Greek 
reality in interesting and innovative ways, both thematically and 
formally, in the transition years between the 20th and 21st centuries.

We identify two discrete and equally important tendencies (despite some 
points of overlap) in Contemporary Greek film practice and output: 
first, from the early 1990s  to 2009, the re-emergence of Popular Cinema 
and its often claimed close relationship to the new, deregulated 
television industry in the country. We seek contributions which focus on 
and examine the variety of films appearing during that period, and which 
contextualise and problematise the prominence and dominance of popular 
cinema.

In agreement with Lydia Papadimitriou (2014), we consider 2009 a focal 
point when the so-called ‘festival film’ takes the reins in Greek film 
production, and contextual factors change in a dramatic way, affecting 
Greek Cinema in the process. A perceived turn towards art-house/auteur, 
low-budget, transnational productions occurs in this second period of 
the New Greek Current, as it has been called. Critics in the Anglophone 
context have called this trend ‘Weird Greek Cinema’,  though this is not 
an unproblematic term. We seek contributions that address this new turn 
of Greek Cinema, offering new theoretical and/or methodological 
perspectives.

Further to the above, we particularly seek contributions which examine a 
‘cross-fertilisation’ process that we believe exists between these two 
periods and trends.

*

We therefore invite proposals/abstracts which focus on any of the 
following guide areas and themes, though the list is not exclusive:

Genre cinema
Film audiences
Art-house film
Contemporary avant-garde cinema
Documentary
Women’s cinema
Contemporary diasporic film
Contemporary Short Film
Contemporary conditions of production and/or distribution
National identity
Family
Ethnicity
Gender
Tradition and modernity

Abstracts for chapters should be between 300 and 500 words, with a clear 
indication of title, theme and methodology. The deadline for abstracts 
is the 31st August, 2014.

These will undergo a selection process, after which the editors will 
invite draft chapters of 8,000-10,000 words, with a guide deadline of 
March 2015.

Please send your chapter abstract to Tonia Kazakopoulou, Mikela Fotiou 
and Philip Phillis (eds) at (contemporarygreekfilm2013 /at/ gmail.com)


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