Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Research Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies

ABSTRACT:
In recent years, much has been written about Greek cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Comparatively little intellectual energy, however, has been devoted to exploring the history and content of Greek silent film. Greek silent film, in spite of its manifold aesthetic and technical shortcomings, constitutes a privileged and largely unexplored site from which to investigate Greek society's relationship to modernity during the 1920s and early 1930s. Through an examination of film discourse and film texts, this essay will explore how proponents of cinema in Greece - both filmmakers and film critics - sought to redeem cinema from its status as a mass spectacle and redefine it as national medium capable of representing Greek modernity to both domestic and international audiences. I will also discuss the reasons why an economically and artistically viable cinema failed to emerge during this period. In part, I will suggest, this failure can be traced to the financial pressures that the arrival of sound reproduction technologies placed on Greek film production. It is easy, however, to overestimate the impact of technological change. Well before the arrival of sound film in Greece, a set of fundamental representational dilemmas had emerged that centered on the obligation Greek filmmakers felt to capture the fullness of the Greek landscape for audiences. This emphasis on representing the landscape forced Greek film to fashion itself along the lines of a cinema of attractions and confounded the narrative expectations of audiences. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the possibility of reading films of the era as a proto-avant-garde cinema in search of an alternative vision of modernity.

FRANKLIN L. HESS is the Mary Seeger O' Boyle Post-doctoral fellow in Hellenic Studies, 2001-2002. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. His dissertation, titled "Singular Visions, Multiple Futures: Culture, Politics, and American Mass Media in Modern Greece," is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural, social, and political impact of US television programming on urban Greece. He is currently expanding it into a book-length anthropology of the mass media and modernity in Greece, the working title of which is "Modern Greek Revisionists: The Mass Media and Identity in Greece, 1906 - Present." In its final form, the book will contain chapters on silent film; the arrival of sound film technology; popular cinema, tourism, and travel in the 1950s and 1960s; television and the representation of race; and the circulation of American and European popular music forms in contemporary Greece. Since finishing his dissertation, Dr. Hess has taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in a variety departments at the University of Iowa, including American Studies, Rhetoric, and History. He also writes on the theory and methodology of American Studies (particularly, the internationalization of American Studies practice), Greek rap music, and the role of popular culture studies within Modern Greek Studies. In the future, he plans to write on the intersection of sport and culture, either in Greece or the United States. Beyond his intellectual interest in sport, Dr. Hess is actively involved in the praxis of sport, particularly tennis, which he both plays and coaches. While at Princeton, he will be serving as an academic-athletic fellow for the mens team.   [Last Updated 2002]

Place: 58 Prospect, Room 101

ABSTRACT:
There are various ways in which one can approach the problem of the relations between philosophy and literature. This paper provides a particular account that aims at bringing to light different kinds and levels of interaction. I begin by isolating some generally accepted characteristics respectively of philosophy and literature, emphasizing the cognitive or quasi-cognitive aspirations of the former and the aesthetic function of the latter. I then concentrate on "external" relations of more or less easily identifiable and separable elements having to do with the content of philosophical thought and the form of literary expression. After describing some possible uses of philosophy in literature and of literature in philosophy, I move to the study of a deeper level of mutual influence. Following Arthur Danto's analysis of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, I want to examine the contemporary tendency towards a philosophical disenfrachisement of literature and point to an analogous, converse tendency towards a literary disenfranchisement of philosophy. I try to explain this phenomenon and to take into consideration the influence and the possible mediating role of recent literary theory, focusing on a number of examples from contemporary Greek literature and criticism. Indeed, I am especially interested in the reception of literary theory in Greece, in its uses and applications, and in the debate between traditionally oriented critics and more theoretically inclined authors, who often describe themselves as postmodernists. I shall conclude with an attempt at a tentative critical assessment of the development of relations between philosophy and literature, leading to their parallel transformation through osmosis. I intend to defend the thesis that we should resist this double disenfranchisement, insofar as it seems to result in bad literature and literary theory presented as philosophy and in bad philosophy presented as literature and literary theory.

Stelios Virvidakis was born in Athens in 1955. After graduating from Athens College in 1974, he studied Philosophy and Classics at the University of Athens (Ptychion), and Philosophy and History of Philosophy at the University of Paris I (Mantrise, D.E.A.) and at Princeton University (Ph.D). He has taught at the American College of Greece (Deree) and at the Universities of Thessaloniki, Crete and Rennes. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science of the University of Athens. His publications include several articles in Greek, in French and in English and a monograph (La robustesse du bien, Nnmes: Iditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1996), in the areas of ethics, metaethics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, as well as philosophy textbooks for Greek highschools and the Greek Open University. He is a member of the editorial board of a number of philosophical and social science journals such as Deukalion, Philosophical Inquiry, Isopoliteia and Epistimi kai Koinonia and the representative of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy in Greece.   [Last Updated 2002]

Place: Room 107, 58 Prospect Ave.
Directed by Sotiris Goritsas
Starring Stelios Mainas, Gerasimos Skiadaressis, Yiota Festa, Nikos Portokaloglou
Running time: 1:38

"Balkanizateur" is the story of two Greek men's journey through the Balkans to Switzerland in an effort to make some quick money by converting drachmas into leva and leva into dollars. This humorous film is a witty critique of cultural contradictions in contemporary Europe, as well as of Greece's ambiguous position in the modern world.
The film will be shown with English subtitles

Peter Constantine (Writer-in-Residence, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Place: 58 Prospect, Room 107
A reading of the three stories "The Enchanting of the Aga," "Love in the Snow," and the "Seal's Dirge," followed by discussion.

ABSTRACT:
Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911) is among the foremost European prose writers of the 19th century. His stories are gripping and full of surprises, with an intensity that illuminates human suffering. Worlds clash: Ottoman with Greek, Middle-Eastern with European, Islamic with Christian. His portrayal of the uneasy coexistence of Islam and Christianity is particularly timely. Papadiamantis is a clear-eyed realist, but weaves into his stories village magic, vestiges of myth and ancient lore, and the superstitions governing the daily life of the 19th-century Greek peasant. The plight of Greek women is an insistent theme. Greece's Nobel-Prize-winning poet Elytis wrote that "Papadiamantis' characters portray in miniature the eternal passions of man--jealousies, loves, ambitions, hatred, murders, and misfortunes--in [a] movement like the rhythm of a chorus in tragedy." A reading of the three stories "The Enchanting of the Aga," "Love in the Snow," and the "Seal's Dirge," followed by a discussion.

Peter Constantine is a literary translator and senior editor of Conjunctions Magazine. His translations include Six Early Stories, by Thomas Mann (Sun and Moon Press), The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (Seven Stories Press), and Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936-1968 (Harcourt Brace). His most recent translations are Elegy for Kosovo, by Ismail Kadare (Arcade), and The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (W. W. Norton). To be published later this year are translations of Three Haitian Creole Tales, by Felix Morriseau-Leroy (Green Integer), Con Brio, by the Slovenian author Brina Svit (Harvill), and Taras Bulba, by Nikolai Gogol (Modern Library Classics). Peter Constantine's translations, articles and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Fiction, and Paris Review, among others. He has been awarded the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Koret Jewish Literature Award for Fiction. He is currently working on an anthology of twentieth-century Greek poetry with Edmund Keeley, Peter Bien, and Karen Van Dyck.   [Last Updated 2002]

Place: Room 107, 58 Prospect Ave.

This week's screening, Loafing and Camouflage (Loufa kai Parallagi), the 1984 comedy by director Nikos Perakis, tells the story of a young filmmaker who attempts to make ends meet during his stint in the Army. Soon after he is transferred from the Bulgarian border to Athens, the junta seizes power and he finds himself working for the fledgling Armed Forces Television Service (YENED). His struggles to cope with the paranoid military culture he encounters in the aftermath of colonels' rise to power make him stumble into several comic situations. The film ranks among the most commercially successful Greek films of the1980s.
It will be shown with English subtitles.

Room 101, 58 Prospect Ave.

This week's program will feature two rare Greek silent films. After beginning with some early newsreel footage, we'll then screen The Adventures of Villar (1926), a two real comedy by Joseph Hepp and featuring Nikos Sfakianakis. Achilleas Madras' The Magician of Athens (1930) will follow.

The star of the first film, Villar, is a Greek version of the silent film comic. He owes a lot to Charlie Chaplin and Max Linder, but he is perhaps most influenced by Harold Langdon. The second film tells the story of a rich American woman, Dolly, who travels to Greece and falls in love with antiquity, but falls victim to a phony count (played by a very young Orestis Makris!), who's after her jewels. He kidnaps her and leaves her for dead. A passionate gypsy, however, saves her and nurses her back to health, setting the stage for a romantic tale of a woman who's affections are split between two worlds.

What the films lack in terms of artistry, they make up for in terms of spectacle. The sequences that feature Athens and its antiquities (including footage shot on the Acropolis) are extremely interesting, as is Madras' hand-colored gypsy harem. Together, the two provide interesting insights into the cinematic construction of modern identity in Greece.

ABSTRACT:
On July 15, 1667, Merkada was abducted. She was a Jewish girl living in the Phanar quarter of Constantinople and daughter of a rich merchant-jeweler who happened to be on a business trip. It turned out that the abductor was a certain Dimos, a bread-seller originally from Epirus, who was their neighbor and with whom the girl has fallen in love. The couple found their refuge in the Principality of Wallachia, where Dimos's brother lived. Merkada converted to the Christianity and married Dimos. The whole affair had a broader impact on Constantinopolitan society, especially among the non-Muslim communities. It was a subject of a modern Greek anonymous poem, printed in Venice already in 1668, as well as an Armeno-Turkish versified novel, written before 1670, by Eremya Komurcuyan Celebi, the leading Armeno-Turkish writer in the 17th century. This talk will focus on Komurcuyan's versified novel as a source for our understanding of every-day life in 17th century Constantinople.

This Hellenic Studies workshop is dedicated by the speaker to Andreas Tietze, Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna and UCLA, who edited Komurcuyan's text and who studied inter-cultural contacts in the Ottoman and Turkish worlds, and, in particular, Turco-Hellenic cultural interactions.

Nenad Filipovic is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he also works in the Educational Technologies Center. Before coming to Princeton, he studied at the Universities of Vienna, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. From 1988 to 1992, he was Research Fellow of the Balkan Studies Institute, Belgrade, resident in Sarajevo. During 1984-1988 he was Curator of the Oriental Collections at the Sarajevo Museum. He has published two books and many articles in Bosnian, French, and English on various aspects of the 'Tourkokratia' in the Balkans. After he defends his dissertation on the Interregnum era (1402-1413) in the history of the Ottoman state, he plans to write on the migration of intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire (1300-1700 ) and on religion and violence in the Ottoman Balkans.  [Last Updated 2002]