Film

a) Films

Iliou, Maria .  The Journey: The Greek American Dream

Nickles, Michael. Swing Away. 2016.

Following a meltdown that leads to a suspension, professional golfer Zoe Papadopoulos travels to her grandparents’ village in Greece to escape the harsh spotlight of the international sports world. Between baking bread and eating baklava, she meets and mentors a ten-year-old girl who is determined – against all odds – to become the next golf sensation. Along the way, Zoe rediscovers her Greek heritage, her love of the game, and the hidden strength within herself as she inspires the townspeople in an epic showdown against a greedy American developer.

Petrie, Donald.  My Life in Ruins. 2009

Sutton, Sean James.  The Greek-American. 2009.

Maltepes, Alysia.  The Greek American. 2007.

b) Film Resources

Georgakas, Dan with Vassilis Lambropoulos.  The Greek American Image in American Cinema. 

Description: “How American films depict Greek Americans tells us more about American culture than about Greek Americans. Cinema generally reflects contemporary cultural beliefs. By presenting those values in vivid forms, cinema reinforces them. The general rule is that screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, and actors do not have any special knowledge of Greek America and reproduce the dominant negative and positive cultural stereotypes. Far less common is an attempt to consciously reshape those perceptions.

The following filmography, which offers an account of the image of Greek Americans in American cinema, reveals how mainstream America has perceived Greek Americans at any given moment and how American cinema has reacted to that perception. For our purposes, Greek America is composed of immigrants and any offspring who self-define themselves as Greek.”

c) Film Scholarship

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2015. “Within the Nation and Beyond: Diaspora Belonging in My Life in Ruins.” Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Issue 3, October.

This essay undertakes a transnational analysis of gendered diaspora belonging in the Hollywood film My Life in Ruins (Petrie, 2009). The departure point for analysis is a cultural crisis, namely the dissonance experienced by the film’s heroine, and more broadly among Greek Americans ‘returning’ to Greece, between the yearning to belong and the actual experience frustrating this longing. I argue that the film resolves this crisis when it posits diaspora as an object of nationalist discourse, a position that enables the heroine to identify with the nation. I show that the film represents an example of unofficial nationalism that reproduces key ideological tenets of the Greek official national narrative of belonging. The film performs additional cultural work beyond representing diaspora as an object of nationalism to also portray it as a historical subject acting upon and beyond the nation. First, it registers diaspora agency to mediate Greece and the United States and reconfigure social realities within the former. Second, it moves beyond the nationalist polarity of us/them to accommodate diaspora’s transnational affinities and multiple identifications. The film invites us therefore to think of diaspora’s belonging simultaneously within and outside nationalism, alerting our conversations with multicultural publics yearning for deep belonging with Greece. Keywords: diaspora nationalism, en/gendering diaspora, Greece in Hollywood, Greek Americans, diaspora–homeland encounters, transnational Modern Greek studies

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “When ‘Second Generation’ Narratives and Hollywood Meet: Making Ethnicity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” MELUS 37.4 (2012): 139–63.

Basea, Erato. “My Life in Ruins: Hollywood and Holidays in Greece in Times of Crisis.”Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3.2 (2012): 199–208.

Basea, Erato. “Zorba the Greek, Sixties Exotica and a New Cinema in Hollywood and Greece.” Studies in European Cinema 10 (2015): 1-17.

Cardon, Lauren S. The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945-2008. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. [includes discussion of My Big Fat Greek Wedding]

Dombrowski, Lisa ed. Kazan Revisited. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U Press, 2011.

“Fifteen essayists take on various dimensions of the film work of Kazan. Complete filmography and select bibliography featuring most recent books and basic sources on his film work.”

Georgakas, Dan “Ethnic Humor in American Film: The Greek Americans.” A Companion to Film Comedy. Eds. Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Georgakas, Dan. “Kazan, Kazan,” Cineaste Vol. 36-4 (Fall, 2011): 4-9.

Designed as a starting point for evaluating Kazan’s entire artistic career as a whole rather than in distinct segments as is the current practice. Strong emphasis also given on the leftist cultural influences in the work of Kazan and the impact on his work and politics that stem from his Anatolian identity.

Iancu, Ance-Luminiţa. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Race, Ethnicity, and Women’s Choices in Something New and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” East-West Cultural Passage 17.1 (July 2017): 50­–72.

The movies My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and Something New (2006) interrogate various ethnic and racial traditions and expectations concerning interracial and intercultural relationships from the female perspective. The two romantic comedies illustrate how the female protagonists’ decisions to date and marry men outside their ethnic and racial communities create tension and resistance among their family members and circle of friends, revealing an array of cultural and racial differences. By looking at the subtle ways in which these movies depict the challenges posed by interethnic dating/marriage in terms of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, especially in the female protagonists’ family environment, this essay sets out to explore how the protagonists’ choices to transcend cultural and racial borders may represent a new attempt to assuage the concerns regarding the complexity of interethnic relationships by including the option of individual female choice and agency.

Kalogeras, Yiorgos. 2012. “Entering through the Golden Door: Cinematic Representations of a Mythical Moment.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 21.1 (2012): 77–99.

Kalogeras, Yiorgos. “Retrieval and Invention: The Adaptation of Texts and the Narrativization of Photographs in Films on Immigration.
Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Vol. 29.2 (2011): 153-170.

Kalogeras, Yiorgos.  “Are Armenians White? Reading Elia Kazan’s America, America.” Post-National Enquiries: Essays on Ethnic and Racial Border Crossings.  Ed. Jopi Nyman.  Cambridge: Cambridge Scholarly Publications, 2009.  64-76.

Lagos, Taso G.  American Zeus: The Life of Alexander Pantages, Theater Mogul. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2018.

Alexander Pantages was 13 when he arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s, after contracting malaria in Panama. He opened his first motion picture theater in 1902 and went on to build one of the largest and most important independently-owned theater chains in the country. At the height of the Pantages Theaters’ reach, he owned or operated 78 theaters across the U.S. and Canada. He amassed a fortune, yet he could not read or write English. In 1929 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old dancer—a scandal that destroyed his empire and reduced him to a pariah. The day his grandest theater, the Pantages Hollywood, opened in 1930, he lay sick in a jailhouse infirmary. His conviction was overturned a year later after an appeal to the California State Supreme Court, but the question remains: how should history judge this theater pioneer, wealthy magnate and embodiment of the American Dream?

Lev, Peter. Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-1965 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music. Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio’s transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.

Patrona, Theodora. “Migration, Space and Ethnic Female Subjectivities: Pantelis Voulgaris’ film Brides.” Migration and Exile: Charting New Literary and Artistic Territories. Ed. Ada Savin. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2013.

Perren, Alisa.  “A Big Fat India Success Story? Press Discourses Surrounding the Making and Marketing of a Hollywood Movie.”  Journal of Film and Video.  Vol. 56, No. 2 (2004), 18-31.

Roth, Luanna.  “Beyond Communitas: Cinematic Food Events and the Negotiation of Power, Belonging, and Exclusion.”  Western Folklore.  Vol. 64 (¾): 163-187.

Tonys-Soulas, Mersiana. 2012. “Towards a Multi-layered Construct of Identity by the Greek Diaspora: An examination of the films of Nia Vardalos, including My Big Fat Greek Wedding and My Life in Ruins, Part I.” Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 195–207.

The analysis of the two Vardalos films involves a multi-disciplinary approach through the social sciences. The analysis examines constructs of multiple-layered constructs of identity. The themes relating to conformity versus non-conformity will be examined through such constructs within popular culture, as ‘beauty’, the ‘internalizing’ of inferior status by children through research in the social sciences. The ascribing of status and power to a minority culture by the majority culture using a Gramscian analysis will enable a window into seeing contemporary Greek diasporic culture as told through the migration experience.

Tzanelli, Rodanthi.  “Europe Within and Without: Narratives of American Cultural Belonging in and through My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Comparative American Studies.  Vol. 2, No. 1 (2004).  39-59.

d) Film Reviews

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “Greek America 101: My Big Greek Wedding’s Lessons.” The National Herald Online, June 25 (2011).

“…I also take an alternative route in teaching the film. Instead of asking what is true and what is false in the script, I encourage students to probe its significance: What is the purpose of portraying certain groups in specific ways? Why for example are immigrants caricatured? Why is it that the Millers are ridiculed in their WASPy ways? What does the contrast between the unruly Portokaloses and the uptight Millers accomplish? What is it that the film promotes? Clearly, the film denigrates immigrants and WASPs alike.”

DeWitt, David. “Greek Hero in an All-American Tale: ‘A Green Story,’ Directed by Nika Agiashvili.” New York Times. 23 May 2013.

Georgakas, Dan.  Review of Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider. Ed. Robert Cornfield.  Cineaste (2009): 77-78.

Latsis, Dimitrios. Review of Taso G. Lagos, American Zeus: The Life and Alexander Pantages Theater Mogul. McFarland & Company, 2018; and Peter Lev, Twentieth Century Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935–1965. University of Texas Press, 2013. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, October 2019, pp. 445–49.

e) Reflections on Film Making

Kazan, Elia. Kazan on Directing.  New York: Vintage Books: 2009.