Cultural and Cinema Studies

The aim of the graduate program Cultural and Cinema Studies is to furnish students with knowledge and skills applicable in a variety of fields. Cinema; theatre; visual and performative arts; literature, and a number of issues pertaining to modernity; to urban life, to genre/sex, and to the complex links between culture, history and society are examined both separately and in their multiple interrelations.  The courses combine theoretical approaches to the close reading of works of art and literature as well as to creative activity, i.e. the production of short films.

Curriculum 2020-21

Winter Term 

A) Introduction to Cultural and Cinema Studies

Teachers: Maria Komninos, Ioulia Mermigka

This course emphasizes the interdisciplinary dialogue and the intersection between Film and Cultural Studies. The aim is to get students acquainted with the theoretical and methodological approaches of cinema’s dual substance, both as art and as cultural industry. Thus, on the one hand, it is an introduction to film theory: theory of montage, historical avant-grades, genre, realism, auteurism, cinema as language and semiotics, screen theory, issues of film archiving, digital cinema and new cinephilia, etc. On the other hand, it is an introduction to the theoretical and methodological approaches of cinema within the context of Cultural Studies: critical theory, structuralism/post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, subaltern and post-colonial studies, etc. Culture’s and cinema’s practices and representations are studied primarily in relation to shifting ideologies and power relations. Students are encouraged to reflect on the cultural politics of cinema and the audiovisual culture, so as to articulate their own critical interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches.

B) Observational Film

Teachers: Eva Stefani, Anghelos Aletras

The course is an introduction to observational cinema, a means of filmmaking inspired by anthropological and documentary practices but also from poetry and other arts. Observational filmmakers  value non-verbal behavior, the mundane and ambiguity as opposed to journalistic documentaries which aim for facts and action. They explore their subjects by spending long time with the people they film, trying to understand their view on reality rather than imposing their view on them.

Students are expected to familiarize themselves with the theoretical and practical aspects of the observational approach and to create short films using this theoretical framework.

Adjoined to the seminar will be offered a Practice Course, taught by Giorgos Kravaritis

C) A choice between:

1) City and Cinema

Teachers: Afroditi Nikolaidou, Dimitris Papaharalampous, Eleni Tzoumaka

This course focuses on the interdisciplinary field that connects cinema with urban and cultural studies and it will be based on the exploration of a) the theoretical cluster of cinema, city and (post)modernity (as suggested by thinkers and cultural theorists like W. Benjamin, S Kracauer, G. Bruno, Fr. Jameson) b) the representations of cities in the history of cinema, c) the relation of urban development to the industry of cinema (production houses, film offices, film festivals etc), and d) the convergence of cinema and city in the digital era.

 Adjoined to the seminar will be offered a Practice Course.

2) Gender, Image and Gaze in Film narration

Teacher: Ioanna Athanassatou

 Syllabus

1. Feminism as a radical challenge to the social and political theory
2. The feminist film critical theory / The approach of Hollywood cinema by Laura Mulvey/Visual pleasure (1975) and afterthoughts. The case of young modern women of 1920¨ς (M.Hunsen;s work)
3. The woman in film noir. The debate about female gaze and female spectatorship (Ann Kaplan, Mary Ann Doane, Judith Mayne)
4. Gender and society in the Greek popular cinema 1950-1967.The problem of the code “honour and shame” and the feminist film critical theory
5. A new modern gender identity in the frame of New Greek cinema. (F.Liappa, T.Marketaki, A.Aggelidis)
6. The radical male gaze in the modern European cinema(Antonioni, Godard, Regnais ).
7. Breaking the vails. Ways of representation of women in the cinema of Iran, India
8. Gender as performance (Judith Buttler)
9. Current problems of feminist film theory (Race, gender, class, crisis)(Mc Cabe)

Films

Blue Angel (1929)-J.Von Sternberg

Stella   (1955)-  M. kakogiannis

Red Lights (1964)- B. Georgiadis

Katiforos (1964)-G. Dalianidis

Love wanders in the night (1981)-F. Liappa

Revans (1983)-N. Vergitsis

The price of love (1984)- T.Marketaki

The circle (2000)-J.Panachi

A nation without women (2001)- Manis Jha

Hirosima mon amour (1959) -A.Regnais

L; aventurra (1960)- M. Antonioni

Masculin, feminin (1964)-Z.L.Godard

Some like it hot (1959)- B.Wilder

Adjoined to the seminar will be offered a Practice Course under the title: Gender Approaches to Ancient Greek Drama in Cinema

Summer Term

Ancient Tragedy and Modern Drama

Teachers: Myrto Rigou and Thomas Tsakalakis

 This class explores issues pertaining to the following: the differences between tragedy and drama, the stage seen as a political threat and as a spectacle, the concept of apparency, and the search for identity. The plays (as well as their cinematic representations) which will be studied cover a broad spectrum, ranging from ancient tragedies and Renaissance dramas to poetic theatre and the theatre of the absurd. The class also investigates the affinities between various relevant philosophical schools of thought, literary genres, artistic choices, and specific playwrights and texts, in search of intra- and inter-textual references. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, and from the latter to Artaud and Beckett, we will critically analyze both the questions and the answers that arise from the text themselves, as well as from their onstage or cinematic manifestations. 

Artistic Creation Issues

Teacher: Evaghelia Diamantopoulou

The subject matter of this seminar is Modern Greek Art. We examine artistic products as a narration, addressing issues such as visual testimony, historical imagination, visualisation of the idea, self-referentiality. We also study the visual vocabulary of art and attempt to analyse its discourse, while also getting familiar with the various forms of art of modernity, such as painting, sculpture display, audovisual installation or performance.

Literary Text Analysis

Teacher: Elli Philokyprou

The aim of the seminar is to acquaint the students with important modern literary texts as well as to furnish them with the necessary keys for unlocking them.  During the current academic year we shall be focusing on a selection of poems which can be seen as forming pieces of a puzzle or else a broken or hidden synthesis. This is a central feature of the poetics of modernism; as T.S. Eliot wrote in 1922: you cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ a heap of broken images. The reader is asked to reconstruct these images and build an entity bearing signs of its fragmentary nature. The poets we shall be working on are: Seferis, Elytis, Ritsos, Leivaditis, Katsaros, Leontaris, Zefi Daraki, Eva Modinou, Eleni Kefala.

Third term

MA thesis