Books by Alex Lykidis
2021. Art Cinema and Neoliberalism surveys cinematic responses to neoliberalism across four conti... more 2021. Art Cinema and Neoliberalism surveys cinematic responses to neoliberalism across four continents. One of the first in-depth studies of its kind, this book provides an imaginative reassessment of art cinema in the new millennium by showing how the exigencies of contemporary capitalism are exerting pressure on art cinema conventions. Through a careful examination of neoliberal thought and practice, the book explores the wide-ranging effects of neoliberalism on various sectors of society and on the evolution of film language. Art Cinema and Neoliberalism evaluates the relevance of art cinema style to explanations of the neoliberal order and uses a case study approach to analyze the films of acclaimed directors such as Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Lucrecia Martel in relation to the social, political, and cultural characteristics of neoliberalism. By connecting the aesthetics of art cinema to current social antagonisms, this book positions class as a central concern in our understanding of the polarized dynamics of late capitalism and the escalating provocations of today’s film auteurs.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Alex Lykidis
The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos: Films, Form, Philosophy, 2022
This essay discusses how Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) revises the conventions of Briti... more This essay discusses how Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) revises the conventions of British heritage films in order to provide a more critical perspective on history, politics and society. The innovative visual and narrative style of Lanthimos’s film avoids the pictorialism, pastoralism, nostalgia, regressive class politics and fetishization of period detail associated with the heritage genre. Whereas the critical narratives of heritage films are often contradicted by the visual plenitude of their cinematography, the framing and mise-en-scene in The Favourite are at the service of the film’s unflinching portrayal of undemocratic systems of power, which continues the thematic preoccupation with authoritarianism, proceduralism and disempowerment evident in Lanthimos’s earlier Greek-language cinema. The critical acuity of The Favourite is partly based on its use of gothic tropes such as grotesquerie and its exploration of the intersections between madness, social status, and political power.
Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (eds. Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis), 2020
Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media: Pedagogy and Politics (eds. Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett), 2016
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2015
Travel narratives in Greek cinema of the 1990s chronicled the shifting perceptions of Greece’s ro... more Travel narratives in Greek cinema of the 1990s chronicled the shifting perceptions of Greece’s role in Europe and the Balkans. Their figuration of internal exile expressed the disenfranchisements wrought by European convergence, while their depiction of travel to other Balkan countries signaled a renewed engagement with Greece’s regional responsibilities and multicultural heritage. Viewing these films through the lens of Greek cultural theory, this essay addresses how their representation of cinematic space negotiates competing European and Balkan paradigms of Greek national identity.
Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 2015
Greek cinema is on the rise during a period of deepening economic and political crisis. Films suc... more Greek cinema is on the rise during a period of deepening economic and political crisis. Films such as Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps have won critical acclaim and awards at international film festivals. They have been produced under increasingly difficult conditions, at a time when funding for social and cultural programs in Greece is being cut precipitously. What is the relationship between this cinematic resurgence and the crisis? To what extent are these films a response to the troubles that grip the country? This essay relates the depiction of agency in Lanthimos’s and Tsangari’s films to the decline of popular sovereignty in European politics, Greek peripheral modernity and epochal transformations in Greek film culture.
We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (eds. Daniel Baker and Maria Hlavajova), 2014
Journal of Migration & Culture, 2012
Entre les Murs/The Class (Laurent Cantet 2008) is one in a long line of critically acclaimed Fren... more Entre les Murs/The Class (Laurent Cantet 2008) is one in a long line of critically acclaimed French films to address the social and political dynamics of contemporary immigrant experience. The film's focus on a multicultural suburban high school has fuelled ongoing debates about the ability of the French public education system to accommodate the interests of the nation's diverse population. While much of the critical response to Entre les Murs has focused on its realism, this article addresses the allegorical significance of the film's primary narrative spaces - the classroom, faculty rooms and the playground - in the context of contemporary French immigration policies, definitions of citizenship and mechanisms of political governance. The ambivalent representation of cultural particularism in Entre les Murs is discussed in relation to the self-legitimating ideologies of French Republicanism, while the tension in the film between individualism and institutional analysis is set against discourses of objectivity long associated with art cinema.
The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, 2011
A Companion to Michael Haneke (ed. Roy Grundmann), 2010
This chapter contains sections titled: Modes of Address: Insecurity and Ambiguity; Modes of Autho... more This chapter contains sections titled: Modes of Address: Insecurity and Ambiguity; Modes of Authority: The State and Authorship
Spectator, 2009
The representation of minority and immigrant
experience has been taken up by a wide cross-sectio... more The representation of minority and immigrant
experience has been taken up by a wide cross-section
of contemporary European filmmakers, including
Gianni Amelio, Tony Gatlif, Constantine Giannaris,
Michael Haneke, Yesim Ustaoglu and Michael
Winterbottom. The work of these filmmakers addresses
many of the most prominent and controversial
aspects of contemporary European immigration and
multiculturalism, such as the large-scale migration of
Albanians after the fall of Communism, the influx of
Afghani and Kurdish political refugees, the continued
persecution and marginalization of Romani (“Gypsy”)
populations, the human trafficking of women in
Europe’s sex industries, and the challenge (purportedly)
posed by Muslim minorities to European secularism.
While the films dealing with these issues employ
conventions long associated with European cinema,
the incommensurabilities of immigrant and minority
experience require us to reevaluate the spectatorial
dynamics of European film practice across axes of
difference. This essay considers the strategies
of identification used in European cinematic
representations of immigrant and minority identities,
the striking diversity of which reflects the uneven
social dynamics framing multiculturalism debates in
contemporary Europe.
Annotated Bibliographies and Filmographies by Alex Lykidis
Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, Nov 2015
The Itinerant Cinephile (Maria San Filippo's blog), 2015
Greece boasts one of the most celebrated national cinemas of recent years, evidenced by the festi... more Greece boasts one of the most celebrated national cinemas of recent years, evidenced by the festival success and critical acclaim garnered by films such as Dogtooth, Strella, Attenberg and Miss Violence. Some of these works have become instant cult favorites in cinephile circuits. These aesthetically innovative films have been produced in a country devastated by neoliberal austerity policies since the 2008 financial crisis. In this annotated film list, I relate Greek cinema to the crisis by providing brief descriptions of contemporary Greek films and by highlighting a few significant thematic and stylistic precursors to the current output.
Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, May 2014
Encyclopedic Entries by Alex Lykidis
The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (ed. Immanuel Ness), 2013
Human migration – the movement of people across political boundaries – has always been a signific... more Human migration – the movement of people across political boundaries – has always been a significant factor in the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. In the United States, the non-narrative silent films made in the early years of the medium (1895–1902) appealed primarily to working-class immigrants. These early films adopted the shocking and spectacular style of fairground attractions, sporting events, and magic acts popular with non-English-speaking audiences. In later periods, film production houses such as the Ufa studio in Germany and the Hollywood studios in the United States benefited greatly from the creative contributions of immigrant workers. In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and other European émigrés helped to usher in a greater realism to American screens and were instrumental in the development of the film noir style. The postwar period also saw the emergence and proliferation of film festivals, which today function as nodes in a vast global network that enables the migration of film products, ideas, and technologies across borders. Film festivals constitute interstitial spaces of exchange that catalyze the global circulation and reproduction of film culture. The existence today of festivals devoted to films about migration is a testament to the increasing prominence of cinematic representations of the migrant experience. It is this engagement with migration at the textual level of narrative, genre, and spectatorial address that is the focus of this essay.
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Books by Alex Lykidis
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Alex Lykidis
experience has been taken up by a wide cross-section
of contemporary European filmmakers, including
Gianni Amelio, Tony Gatlif, Constantine Giannaris,
Michael Haneke, Yesim Ustaoglu and Michael
Winterbottom. The work of these filmmakers addresses
many of the most prominent and controversial
aspects of contemporary European immigration and
multiculturalism, such as the large-scale migration of
Albanians after the fall of Communism, the influx of
Afghani and Kurdish political refugees, the continued
persecution and marginalization of Romani (“Gypsy”)
populations, the human trafficking of women in
Europe’s sex industries, and the challenge (purportedly)
posed by Muslim minorities to European secularism.
While the films dealing with these issues employ
conventions long associated with European cinema,
the incommensurabilities of immigrant and minority
experience require us to reevaluate the spectatorial
dynamics of European film practice across axes of
difference. This essay considers the strategies
of identification used in European cinematic
representations of immigrant and minority identities,
the striking diversity of which reflects the uneven
social dynamics framing multiculturalism debates in
contemporary Europe.
Annotated Bibliographies and Filmographies by Alex Lykidis
Encyclopedic Entries by Alex Lykidis
experience has been taken up by a wide cross-section
of contemporary European filmmakers, including
Gianni Amelio, Tony Gatlif, Constantine Giannaris,
Michael Haneke, Yesim Ustaoglu and Michael
Winterbottom. The work of these filmmakers addresses
many of the most prominent and controversial
aspects of contemporary European immigration and
multiculturalism, such as the large-scale migration of
Albanians after the fall of Communism, the influx of
Afghani and Kurdish political refugees, the continued
persecution and marginalization of Romani (“Gypsy”)
populations, the human trafficking of women in
Europe’s sex industries, and the challenge (purportedly)
posed by Muslim minorities to European secularism.
While the films dealing with these issues employ
conventions long associated with European cinema,
the incommensurabilities of immigrant and minority
experience require us to reevaluate the spectatorial
dynamics of European film practice across axes of
difference. This essay considers the strategies
of identification used in European cinematic
representations of immigrant and minority identities,
the striking diversity of which reflects the uneven
social dynamics framing multiculturalism debates in
contemporary Europe.