[MGSA-L] FILMICON’s Special Issue, Call for Abstracts

[Georgia Aitaki]

FILMICON’S SPECIAL ISSUE, CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Old Games, New Rules: Rethinking Genre in Greek Cinema from the 1970s to the present (abstract submission deadline: 15th May 2016)<http://filmiconjournal.com/journal/announcements#>


In the last twenty years, genre in Greek Cinema has often been at the centre of scholarly research that produced a significant and acknowledged body of work on the subject. Research interest, however, has been limited predominantly to national versions of popular genres such as comedies, musicals, melodramas, or the mountain film (foustanella) and to the mainstream narrative films of the so-called Old Greek Cinema. This restricted focus has created two misconceptions: on the one hand that generic forms disappeared after the decline of the industry in the early 1970s, and on the other that genre is the exclusive domain of commercial cinema.

In this context elitism and commercial failure have been simplistically ascribed to the films and filmmakers of Greek Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, while methodological approaches derived mainly from auteur theory and cultural criticism have been applied to their work. Thus, commercial successes such as Petrina hronia/ Stone Years (Pantelis Voulgaris, 1985), Loufa ke parallagi/ Loafing and Camouflage (Nikos Perakis, 1984) or  Rembetico (Costas Ferris 1983) and their relationship to genre have been disregarded, while the generic features of Nikolaidis’s and Panayotopoulos’s films (just to mention two of the most significant filmmakers of New Greek Cinema), within particular local and international contexts, have attracted little attention.

Although in the 1990s and 2000s genre cinema gained growing importance as post-classical expression in both art and mainstream global cinema, and Greece saw a resurgence of commercial and art film, only a few studies have explored the various manifestations and transformations of genre in contemporary Greek film production. The flourishing of popular comedies drawing on the conventions of Old Greek Cinema and/or Greek TV series, the emergence of melodramas with a camp or queer sensibility, of crime films with sociopolitical nuances and even hybrid horror films with figures such as the vampire and zombie are only a few aspects of this unexplored field. It goes without saying that the relation of the so called ‘Greek Weird Wave’ to genre is also in need of a meticulous research.

Keeping in mind that the boundaries between ‘Old’, ‘New’ and ‘contemporary’ Greek cinema, as well as between popular/commercial/mainstream and art cinema are more fluid than these schematic terms tend to describe, this thematic special issue aspires to broaden, reassess and reposition the notion of genre in the context of Greek Film Studies, focusing mainly on film production from the 1970s to the present.

Areas of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  *   Theorizing and historicizing genre in Greek Film Studies within local, transnational and international contexts.
  *   Contesting genres: hybridity, parody, transtextuality and other generic transformations.
  *   Tracing the development of melodrama, comedy and musicals from the 1970s and beyond.
  *   Unexplored genres and subgenres in the context of New and contemporary Greek cinema like the Greek sci-fi and fantasy film, the vampire and zombie movie, the crime film and others.
  *   Genre and the nation.
  *   Representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and race.
  *   Genre and the representation of the past: the heritage film, the nostalgia film, the historical film, the period film and the costume drama.
  *   Genre and authorship: rethinking established auteurs of the New and contemporary Greek cinema under the genre category.
  *   TV genres (TV series, commercials) and their impact on screen, especially in the 1990s and 2000s.
  *   Industry and genres: issues of production, promotion, exhibition and consumption.
  *   Genres and film reception.

Authors should submit a 300-word abstract for their papers including the title, a short description of the topic(s) to be addressed and the approach that will be taken by 15th May 2016. Proposals, along with authors’ contact information and a short bio of maximum 100 words should be submitted via e-mail to filmgenregr at gmail.com<mailto:filmgenregr at gmail.com>. The editors will make a decision and will contact authors on their proposals by the 12th of June.

The deadline for article submissions is the 30th of November 2016, while the special issue is expected to appear in October 2017. All submissions should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words, written in English, and prepared for an anonymous peer review process. Please note that prospective articles should not have been previously published or should not currently be under consideration for any other publication.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the editors of the special issue Afroditi Nikolaidou, Anna Poupou and  Maria Chalkou at: filmgenregr at gmail.com<mailto:filmgenregr at gmail.com>.?

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