Prospectus Draft

My final paper is going to be focused on magical realism and migrant cinema. These are two topics I’ve never breached in a cinema studies paper, but I have a feeling I’ll have a lot to say. The films under discussion will be Xenia (Panos Koutras, 2014), Strella (Koutras, 2009), and Son of Sofia (Elina Psykou, 2017). Each film employs magical realism to express profound emotions on behalf of the characters. I’m interested in what happens in that moment when the film takes a decisive turn to the realm of magic and fiction: what is gained and what is lost? Moreover, how does this play into the characters of these Greek Weird Wave films being immigrants? Inevitably, discussion of queer spaces will crop up, and hopefully avenues to acceptance will be uncovered amid Greece’s notoriously homophobic posture.

The sources I have gathered thus far will assist me on this foray into magical realism and, more soberingly, migrant cinema. Although Strella does not classify as migrant cinema, it contains magical realism which is definitely worth mentioning in the scope of my piece. I wish there were a contemporary film out there which dealt with Greek-American immigrants, incorporated magical realism, and fit into the Weird Wave’s aesthetics. But the closest thing I can find is, of course, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and that just won’t do. So, thus far I think these films will provide enough fodder for these concepts to be teased out. I was struck by the power of the white rabbit (in its many forms) in Xenia as a symbol of Dany’s lost childhood and deep grief. When the rabbit is hopping along the river to meet Dany’s gaze, amongst other docile forest creatures, I felt it was the most extravagant yet accurate way to depict his bereavement, and the perfect departure from the stress-stricken plot of the film. In class, Professor Hass. mentioned Elsaesser’s productive pathology in dialogue with this moment, and I’d like to investigate that much further. In Strella, I want to analyze how the father having visions of that squirrel from his childhood toy reveals the emotions of his interior world. And in Son of Sofia, there is a whole nocturnal ensemble of animals that come out to play, and I wonder if any of them hold a more symbolic meaning, in addition to Misha representing the Moscow mascot. In regards to how this plays into migrant cinema, I want to discover what magical realism does for it, and what we can learn from it.

Annotated Bibliography

Ballesteros, Isolina. “Immigration Cinema in the New Europe.” Immigration Cinema, Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, 2015.

This book chapter explains how the experience of diaspora is linked to isolation, nostalgia, and separation. When Ballesteros is speaking of the diasporic subject struggling to integrate, I instantly think of Misha and Dany. Moreover, Ballesteros highlights how coming-of-age films are very central to diasporic films and cites tension between the child and parents as being a characteristic of these stories. This is seen in both Xenia and Son of Sofia, so I think this chapter will be a great help in contextualizing the diasporic conditions in New Europe for these characters in very objective, grounded terms.

Crawford, Alison. “‘Oh Yeah!’: Family Guy as Magical Realism?” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 52–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688624.

Now this may be a leap, but I just rewatched a very special episode of Family Guy, and the scores of talking animals within this particular episode woke me up to all of the magical realism at play in the story line. A sudden cutaway to Peter having an operation to be a lizard "because [he'd] always felt himself to be a lizard emotionally," was commentary on gender affirmation surgery, which directly relates to my topic at hand here. There is also a talking bear and cheetah in the episode. I found this terrific article on JSTOR published by the Journal of Film and Video which proffers a very academic breakdown of the state of realism in sit-coms, and what the insertion of magic into the plot does. If this background fits in anywhere in my paper, I'd like to slide it in!

Jameson, Fredric. “On Magic Realism in Film.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2, 1986, pp. 301–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.

I’m turning to trusty old Jameson for his definition of magical realism and its significance. He says, “Such narrative reduction has, for example, very real and practical consequences for ideology and ideological analysis. It is not enough to show a systematic abridgment in the generation and projection of narrative meanings, as though that were only a matter of aesthetic choice; we must try to understand that such eradications also have a political function” (Jameson 321). The only issue I have with this piece is the films he references I have not seen, so I’m still on the lookout for a great definition of magical realism.

Papanikolaou, Dimitris. “Assemblage, Identity, Citizenship: Strella’s Queer Chronotopes.” Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 195–226. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1hm8h75.13.

Papanikolaou’s examination of Strella is incisive and illuminating. He writes, “Strella takes a tragic story of abuse, desire and revenge, and retells it with camp aesthetics and idiosyncratic humour. As a style, it is firmly positioned in a world queer cinema canon, aligning itself with post-1990s new queer cinema, though, even in 2009, this was still quite a rarity in the Greek context” (Papanikolaou 207). I think this article will really help me situate Strella in my final paper.

Phillis, Philip-Edward. “A Faggot and An Albanian: Queer Belonging in Xenia.” Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991-2016, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

This line stood out to me: “the director redetermines the function of space itself by injecting Dany’s liberated imagination and the culture of camp. Koutras’s queer reclamation of the urban spaces of belonging is in line with that of street artists who have been exercising urban creativity in abandoned places since the emergence of the financial crisis in 2008,” as it segways into discussion on the abandoned hotel Xenia, which becomes a haven for Dany and Ody (Phillis 194). This article is perfect for my paper because he fleshes out the nitty-gritty facts of Koutras’ main character being a queer, Greek-Albanian man. Phillis also touches upon how self-made queer subjects express the ultimate empowerment, able to carve out their own identity in relation to their nationhood and fatherhood. Is being queer as decisive as inserting magical realism into the plot of the film? Either way, using both queerness and magical realism as the centerpiece of the film decenters what is typically regarded as “right” or even “Orthodox,” since the margins encapsulate such a large demographic their representation must be had so people can detach themselves from tradition and establish acceptance.