I'm a twenty-one-year old writer harbored in the Lower East Side of NYC. Each day I bear witness to the horrid glories this forest of cement lays claim to, each night I watch a film to carry the mind elsewhere.
I'm in my final year of undergraduate schooling at New York University, a true victory lap, where my major in Cinema Studies and minor in English Literature are both coming full circle. Soon a Bachelor of Arts degree will be dropped into my palms, and the heavens will alight as another person enters the great scheme of life. As of now and until the end, I'm a critical thinker and a word-player. I'm a good citizen: I water my plants and eat my vegetables. Here, in the serene space of my personal website, I have a blog devoted to displaying the work of two cinema studies courses: THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA (Fall Semester 2023) and THE GREEK WEIRD WAVE (Spring Semester 2024).
The graduate class taken in the fall titled THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION IN CONTEMPORARY SCI FI CINEMA led me to understand sci-fi is more of a mindset than a genre, and that there are dints of the posthuman, the changed, and the sublime in most nooks of sci fi cinema. From Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) to Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), I love it all. There's her (Spike Jonze, 2013), there's Alphaville (Jean-luc Godard, 1965), and of course there's 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Not to mention, Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are biblical works. When it comes to theory, Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of the Simulacra" dazzles me, and I rejoice in locating its postmodern influences in many of my favorite films, especially Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), where the future is old and the city is rust. I took this course to advance my understanding of what makes sci-fi so culturally relevant and contextually rich, along with broadening my readership of the theory germane to our daily experience in a dystopian world. By the end of this course, I hope to be a more enlightened version of myself, acutely aware of the shifty world we inhabit and all the matters it transverses.
I'm taking the Greek Weird Wave seminar as a second-generation Greek woman. My family tree stretches back solely into Greece, and I was raised in the realm of my mother's voice crooning the language to her own mother over the phone––that is, my Yiayia, born and bred in a village outside of Athens called Kopanaki, now a seamstress in Omaha who bakes for the church like a fiend. My life has been imbued with Greek culture, cuisine, and even faith, after attending countless Orthodox Church sermons over the years. I've recently begun learning the language myself. And this seminar is my thrilling chance to be exposed to Greece's contemporary cinemascape, which proffers an array of strange and unique films... Just the type of films I most enjoy. During this course, I plan to harness my heritage to connect more deeply to the Greek experience and language through film. I am eager to encounter these special films with their low-budget, independent status that teases out fresh cinematography and inimitable, mind-opening concepts. By May, I hope to understand every dimension of this cinema of crisis, and be bettered by my sense of what makes a movie Greek, and which Greeks make the best movies.
