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This book offers a non-anthropocentric account of a national cinema. Drawing on cutting-edge developments in Animal (film) studies, the book gathers a wide range of species and genres to discuss the Greek cinematic animal. This en-tails recalibrating the readers /viewers gazes to include particular nonhumans, often displaced in the frame s margins. While acknowledging the cost paid in animal suffering for Greek cinema to rise, the book features instances of animal-human bonding. Combining close readings with interviews with directors, human actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, producers, special effects artists, and animal wranglers, this book proposes a paradigm of human-animal praxis, arguing that revisiting nonhuman images can lead to renewed ethical relations, and to less speciesist cinemas, film industries, and societies.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Towards a nonhuman account of Greek cinema.- Chapter 3: One or several wolf men, little foxes and young Aphrodites.- Chapter 4: Furry-tales: narratives of therianthropy and queerness; the cases of Panos Koutras and Elina Psykou.- Chapter 5: Birds of a feather.- Chapter 6: Dying like dogs.- Chapter 7: All creatures great and small: Dimos Avdeliodis's theistic posthumanism.- Chapter 8 : Shooting animality: Menelaos Karamaghiolis's cinema of transspecies poetics.- PART II: The Animal People.- Chapter 9 : Small lives.- Chapter 10: Dressing animals; or: the calculated banality of nonhuman film logistics.- Chapter 11: Olga Malea's malleable animals.- Chapter 12: Getting their goats.
About the author
Nikitas Fessas owns a no-kill farm in Crete. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences: Communication Sciences (focused on Film). He has worked as a film reviewer and has co-edited the volume Greek Film Noir (2022). Slavoj Žižek references him in two of his books.
Summary
This book offers a non-anthropocentric account of a national cinema. Drawing on cutting-edge developments in Animal (film) studies, the book gathers a wide range of species and genres to discuss the Greek cinematic animal. This en-tails recalibrating the readers’/viewers’ gazes to include particular nonhumans, often displaced in the frame’s margins. While acknowledging the cost paid in animal suffering for Greek cinema to rise, the book features instances of animal-human bonding. Combining close readings with interviews with directors, human actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, producers, special effects artists, and animal wranglers, this book proposes a paradigm of human-animal praxis, arguing that revisiting nonhuman images can lead to renewed ethical relations, and to less speciesist cinemas, film industries, and societies.
