Animals and Greek Cinema

“Few scholarly books so successfully use film theory in the service of activism. Fessas leverages a national corpus as a way to think the cinematic animal in unparalleled depth.” – Rosalind Galt, Professor in Film Studies, Kings College London, UK “A pioneering work in intercultural and transcultural cinematic conversations, Fessas’s study offers new principles of hermeneutics for understanding images of animality and what they indicate in relation to anthropology, psychology, politics and philosophy. The result can be compared to Laura Mulvey’s hugely impactful essay that reinvented the vocabulary of film analysis. An immense contribution in taking Greek film culture out of its provincialism.” – Vrasidas Karalis, Associate Professor of Modern Greek, The University of Sydney, Australia “I can't think of anything in Greek cinema studies that could compare with Animals and Greek Cinema. Fessas exhibits an astonishing knowledge of Greek filmography, weaving together, with incredible dexterity and strong academic rigour, theoretical, historical (and historiographic), philosophical, and industrial threads. A formidable scholarly achievement!” – Yannis Tzioumakis, Reader in Film and Media Industries, University of Liverpool, UK 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. 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.