Edited volume by Olga Kourelou and Philip E. Phillis

Deadline: September 30, 2024

Greek cinema has been defined primarily on national terms with discussions revolving around questions of ‘Greekness’ and what Greek films reveal about the national character and culture. Therefore, the idea of transnational Greek cinema may at first sound like an oxymoron. Yet, as Maria Chalkou has argued, what is perhaps the most distinguished characteristic of Greek cinema today is the ‘renegotiation and redefinition of the national through the transnational’ (2020). Indeed, since the 2000s and especially after 2010 and the international success of the films of the so-called ‘Greek Weird Wave’, Greek film culture has been characterised by an increasing openness – what Lydia Papadimitriou has described as ‘extroversion’ (2018). On the one hand, this is the result of the intensification of co-production activity and the distribution and consumption of Greek films beyond their national borders. On the other, this is evident in the thematic preoccupations of an ever-larger number of films that take a more fluid approach towards the national by focusing on the multicultural make-up of Greek society and by bringing to the fore the subjectivities of ethnic ‘others’, questioning thus nationalist myths of purity, authenticity and containment.

This edited volume invites chapter proposals that will open up discussions of Greek cinema and film culture beyond the national through a consideration of its transnational dimensions. The scope of the book is historical in that we are interested in mapping out Greek cinema’s transnationalism diachronically. While scholars have rightly pointed out the recent outwardness of Greek cinema, Greek film culture has always been transnational. This was especially the case in the post-war era, when production and exhibition practices, as Dimitris Eleftheriotis has demonstrated (2001, 2006), were of a hybrid character, involving cultural exchanges with both the West and the East. However, the transnationalism of this period of Greek cinema, and of others, remains under-researched and this gap in our knowledge is something this book aims to fill. We welcome contributions adopting different methodologies in their analysis, from empirical to text-based. The goal of this publication is to explore at what levels the transnational manifests itself in Greek cinema, whether this is in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, creative personnel, content, or form, as well as to what effect, looking specifically at the politics and ideological implications within transnational flows. For, as Rosalind Galt reminds us, ‘the transnational is always political because it demands that we think about the relationships of cinema and geopolitics through, between, and beyond the state’ (2016).

Topics may include but are not limited to:

•  Transnational modes of production, distribution and exhibition from early Greek cinema to today
  
•  Co-productions
  
•  Auterism and cosmopolitanism
  
•  Genre flows, remakes and remixes
  
•  Transnational cinephilia
  
•  Transnational actors and stars
  
•  Migration (representations of migrants, refugees and ethnic ‘others’; migrant and diasporic filmmakers; borders and border-crossing)
  
•  Queer transnationalism
  
•  Greek locations in international filmmaking, and film tourism
  
•  Reception of Greek films abroad (festivals, audiences, exhibition practices, critical reception)
  
•  Transnational readings of the so-called ‘new’ and ‘old Greek cinema’
  
•  Language, dubbing, subtitling
  

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The edited volume is under consideration with Edinburgh University Press.

Please send a title, 300 word abstract and a short biography in a single file to transnationalgreekcinema@gmail.com by 30th September 2024. The final chapters should be around 6000-8000 words and submitted to the editors by the end of May 2025. No payment from authors will be required.