Cinema might not be able to help heal a broken nation but it can definitely help revisit a nation’s past, reframe its present and re-imagine its future. This is the first book-length study on what has become an internationally acclaimed strand in contemporary Greek cinema. Psaras examines how this particular trend can be thought of as an integral aesthetic response to the infamous Greek crisis, illuminating its fundamental ideological aspects by means of a queer critique of national politics. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches from queer theory, film theory, ethical philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume sheds light on the way the Greek Weird Wave challenges, deconstructs and re-imagines traditional notions of Greekness, the Greek nation and the Greek patriarchal family. This is achieved through close textual analysis of the subversive thematics and idiosyncratic forms of six films made by some of the best-known and most celebrated contemporary Greek directors including Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) by Yorgos Lanthimos, Strella (2009) by Panos H. Koutras, and Attenberg (2010) by Athina-Rachel Tsangaris.

The chapters in this book consist of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd International Conference and Poster Exhibition on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2017. They investigate the theme of the third conference, “The Semiotics of Branding”, and look at branding and brand design as endorsing a reputation and inhabiting a status of almost mythical proportion that has triumphed over the past few decades. Emerging from its forerunner (corporate identity) to incorporate advertising, consumer lifestyles and attitudes, image-rights, market-research, customisation, global expansion, sound and semiotics, and “the consumer-as-the-brand”, the word “branding” currently appears to be bigger than its own umbrella definition. From tribal markers, such as totems, scarifications and tattoos, to emblems of power, language, fashion, architectural space, insignias of communal groups, heraldic devices, religious and political symbols, national flags and the like, a form of branding is at work that responds to the need to determine the presence and interaction of specific groups, persons or institutions through shared codes of meaning.

This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The accruement of crises over the last two decades, with their particular manifestations in the European context, has evoked the feeling of living in exceptional times, as captured in the recurrent claim that we live in the "age of anxiety." The main aim of this collection is to analyse, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the causes and consequences of the current dominance of the discourse of fear, anxiety, and crisis through the experience of distinct and often interdependent moral panics in twenty-first-century Europe. With its multidisciplinary approach, this volume sheds light on the need to view the interrelationship between different crises and their associated affects as crucial in attaining a more nuanced understanding of the aetiology and effects of the current "age of anxiety." This multidisciplinary scrutiny of the interrelationship of twenty-first-century fears, anxiety and crises signals an original engagement with these complex phenomena in order to make their emergence and profound effects on contemporary society more comprehensible. The timeliness of the thematic focus and the rigorous in-depth analyses make this collection relevant to students and academics within the fields of sociology, literary and cultural studies, political science and anthropology, as well as to those in European studies and global studies.

This book offers a range of accounts of the state of "European Cinema" in a specific sociopolitical era: that of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and the more recent refugee and humanitarian crisis. With the recession having become a popular theme of economic, demographic, and sociological research in recent years, this volume examines representations of the crisis and its attendant market instability and mistrust of neoliberal political systems in film. It thus sheds light on the mediation, reimagination, and reformulation of recent history in the depiction of personal, cultural, and political memories, and raises new questions about crisis narratives in European film, asking whether the theoretical notion of "national" cinema is less or more powerful during moments of sociopolitical turbulence, and investigating the kinds of cultural representations and themes that characterize the narratives of European documentary and fictional films from both small and large national markets.