FILMICON: The New Journal That Will Launch a Thousand (Plus) Greek Film Studies

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce the launch of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. A peer-reviewed, open access and cross-cultural project, its mission (excerpted from, below) is a refreshing, important and timely one, indeed.

The lively and original contents of its first issue are also linked to below. FSSF would particularly like to flag up Olga Kourelou's brilliantly useful English-language bibliography on Greek Cinema (2010-13), which contains links to numerous online and open access items of further interest, and Deb Verhoeven's excellent study of the Greek film circuit in Australia

FSFF wishes Filmicon the very best of luck: Καλὴ τύχη! 

Screen shot of Filmicon's mission

Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Issue 1, September 2013 

EDITORIAL: Creating an Open-Access, Cross-cultural Home for Greek Film Studies


ARTICLES

• Banal or Extraordinary? Pedagogical Dilemmas in the New Audiovisual Environment Dimitris Eleftheriotis
• Twice Born: Dionysos Films and the Establishment of a Greek Film Circuit in Australia (updated) Deb Verhoeven (Γεννημένος δύο φορές: η Dionysos Films και η δημιουργία ενός ελληνικού κινηματογραφικού κυκλώματος στην Αυστραλία Deb Verhoeven [μετ: Μαρία Χάλκου]) 
• “Cinderella of Modern Greece”: Aliki Voyouklaki as National Romance Nick Potamitis
• From ‘Made in Greece’ to ‘Made in China’: a 21st Century Touring Revival of Golfo, a 19th Century Greek Melodrama Panayiota Konstantinakou

BOOK REVIEWS

• Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities, edited by Lydia Papadimitriou & Yannis Tzioumakis (2012) Maria Chalkou
• Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, vol. 37 1 and 2 (Special Issue on Greek cinema, 2011) Afroditi Nikolaidou
• New Greek Cinema 1965-1981: History and Politics by Stathis Valoukos (2011) Anna Poupou

FILM REVIEWS

• Wasted Youth (Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel, 2011) Angeliki Milonaki
• Amnesty (Bujar Alimani, 2011) Philip Phillis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Greek-language Bibliography on Greek Cinema (2011-12) Dimitris Kalandidis
• English-language Bibliography on Greek Cinema (2010-13) Olga Kourelou

Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos

Framegrabs from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα/Voyage to Cythera ( Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1984)

The world needs cinema now more than ever. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Andrew Horton]

Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Raymond Durgnat in “The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God.” Film Comment 26.6 (November/December, 1990): 43-46]

[Some] complain that Angelopoulos’ films are long, slow and boring, but that is exactly what they are not. They are too short (for the subject matters they cover [...]), quite fast (within the image or sound or the narrative, there is always something occurring) and always fascinating (in the multi-layered way they mix the personal with the political, the aesthetic surface with the deeper meaning, etc.). [Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000]

What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape. [Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, 1997: 98]

Today, Film Studies For Free solemnly pays tribute to the monumental cinematic career of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who very sadly died last week while near the set of his film The Other Sea.

David Hudson has collected a wonderful series of links to items of interest to anyone who has been touched by or is studying Angelopoulos's films. Below, as is its memorialising wont, FSFF points its readers in the online direction of a whole host of high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items.

• Acquarello, 'Theodoros Angelopoulos', Senses of Cinema, Issue 27, 2003
• Maria Chalkou, Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
• Hsin-Ning Chang, Viewing the Long Take in Post-World War II Films: A Cognitive Approach, MA Thesis,  Ohio University, 2008 
• Burcu Fikretoglu, 'Gazing at Decay in the Narratives of Theo Angelopoulos and W.G. Sebald', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Andrew Horton, 'The Greek and Balkan Spirit of Comedy During the Journeys with the Films of Theo Angelopoulos', GreeceTravel.com, [date unknown]
• Smaro Kamboureli, 'Memory under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Paper at Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium: Cicac, 2007
• Angelos Koutsourakis, 'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' , Kinema, Spring 2010
• Antonis Liakos, 'Historical Time and National Space in Modern Greece', Slavic Euroasian Studies, Hokkaido University “Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present”, Sapporo, Japan, December 14-16, 2005
• Vangelis Makriyannakis, 'Angelopoulos’ Ulysses' Gaze: Where the Old meets the New', Forum, Issue 1 - Origins and Originality, Autumn 2005
• Evangelos Makrygiannakis, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: a voyage in time, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000
• Arthur J. Pomeroy, 'The sense of epiphany in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Classical Receptions Journal Vol 3. Iss. 2 (2011) pp. 213–226
• Anne Rutherford, 'Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en scène and the Senses in Angelopoulos’ Balkans Epic', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Irini Stathi, Eleftherios Tsouris, Nikos Soulakellis, 'Geography as Utopia. From the Rigas Pheraios Map to the Division and Establishment of Borders in the Balkans: An Intercultural Itinerary through the Geography of Ulysses's Gaze', Earth Conference, University of the Aegean, 2008
• Gonda A.H. van Steen, 'Playing by the Censors' Rules? Classical Drama Revived under the Greek Junta (1967-1974)', Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 27.1-2 (2001)
• Lasse Thomassen, 'Heterogeneity, Representation and Justice: Borders and Communities in Angelopoulos’s Balkan Trilogy', originally in D. Morgan and G. Banham (eds), Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 191-210 
• Paris Tsekouras, 'Narrative and historical accuracy in The Travelling Players', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Katerina Zacharia, '"Reel" Hellenisms: Perceptions of Greece In Greek Cinema, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Cutlure, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Ashgate 2008)