A History of Greek Cinema

Description

The history of Greek cinema is a rather obscure and unexamined affair. Greek cinema started slowly and then collapsed; for several years it struggled to reinvent itself, produced its first mature works, then collapsed completely and almost vanished. Because of such a complex historical trajectory no comprehensive survey of the development of Greek cinema has been written in English. This book is the first to explore its development and the contexts that defined it by focusing on its main films, personalities and theoretical discussions. A History of Greek Cinema focuses on the early decades and the attempts to establish a "national" cinema useful to social cohesion and national identity. It also analyses the problems and the dilemmas that many Greek directors faced in order to establish a distinct Greek cinema language and presents the various stages of development throughout the background of the turbulent political history of the country. The book combines historical analysis and discussions about cinematic form in to construct a narrative history about Greek cinematic successes and failures.

Vrasidas Karalis is Associate Professor in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on Greek culture, history and art. He is the editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand). In the area of film studies he has published on Theo Angelopoulos, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock.

"Karalis has well captured the complexity and diversity of Greek cinema from its origins to the present with a strong sense of its relationship to Greek politics, culture and history." -- Dr. Andrew Horton, The Jeanne H Smith Professor of Film & Media Studies at The University of Oklahoma, and author of 25 books including The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 1999) and award winning screenplays including Brad Pitt's first feature film The Dark Side of the Sun "This volume is the long-awaited and sorely-needed first history of Greek cinema available in the English-language. Particularly impressive are the insights, sources, data, and comprehensiveness provided by Varsidas Karalis regarding the first 80 years of Greek cinema." --Dan Georgakas, Consulting editor of Cineaste and Co-editor of the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora "Vrasidas Karalis' book is a majestic and sublime narrative written with passion and pathos from an "iconoclast" scholar, an "outsider", like the cinema itself is an obsessive one. Its panoramic glances and detailed trivialities represent the author's eyewitness autobiography, when his own life is totally recreated by the reality of pictures. This book is also a cine-catharsis in understanding the Modern Greek society as currently projected in the international "screens", like a cinematographic drama. Read it and you are going to understand why today only the Greek Cinema will "save" the Greek Nation..." --Michael Tsianikas, Professor of Modern Greek, Flinders University, Australia A History of Greek Cinema is a long-anticipated book in the area of Greek film studies, which fills a significant void...an ambitious publication, which would be warmly welcomed by film scholars as an essential and indepensable reading on Greek film studies. It could also serve as a valuable textbook for film students, as it comprises a fundamental and promising work, which would further enrich international literature on the field of Greek film studies. -- Angeliki Milonaki * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *