The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece by Toby Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece by Toby Lee Lydia Papadimitriou (bio) Toby Lee, The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. xxi + 193. 6 illustrations. Paper $29.95. Using as a case study her extensive on-site ethnographic work on the Thessaloniki Film Festival (conducted mainly between 2008 and 2010), Toby Lee offers a thorough, far-reaching, and ultimately empowering reconceptualization of the public value of cinema and of cultural production more broadly. Countering arguments that seek to establish the significance of the arts, she provocatively but compellingly argues in favor of their "insignificance within dominant hierarchies of value" (22). "The value of mereness," Lee's argument goes, lies in the fact that the arts can "harbor more radical, agonistic and dissenting forms of collectivity" (22), enabling spaces of political possibility that more consequential, serious, or sober fields of social practice preclude. In other words, the arts, publicly funded independent cinema among them, matter because their "essential futility" (152) can create opportunities for encounters in which contestation and dissent can be variably and potently expressed. Greece offers a very appropriate context for the development of such an argument. The sociopolitical and then financial crisis (or "trouble") that the country and its citizens experienced during the period of Lee's ethnographic work led to various manifestations of "conflict and collectivity," some of which—the ones explored here—crystallized around cinema (10). Conceptualizing the crisis as the effect of "complex and uneven processes of nonlinearization, political and economic Europeanization and the growth of state patronage that were set in motion in the previous period" (16), Lee locates its beginning in the events of 6 December 2008, when police killed a young man in Athens. By autumn of 2009, when the severity of the fiscal deficit began to become widely known, the group Filmmakers of Greece (FOG) had already formed to protest "what they saw as incompetence, corruption and lack of transparency in the formation and implementation of national film policy" (21). In November 2009, FOG boycotted the Thessaloniki Film Festival by refusing to have their films screened. [End Page 251] The festival, and especially its fiftieth anniversary that year, offers fertile ground for Lee's examination of the public value of cinema, its "public thingness" (3). In seeking to articulate film's public value, the book focuses on various encounters between the festival and its public audience(s). Chapter 1 situates the festival within local, national, regional, and European contexts, and within its own geography, while also explaining Lee's involvement with the festival as a participant observer. In chapter 2, Lee explores "forms of publicness" by focusing on some of the publics that the festival produces, addresses, and responds to. Highlighting not only their plurality but also the coexistence of "varying discourses and practices of publicness" (77), she draws on specific issues, events, and moments of tension during the 2009 festival. These included controversies over whether all English should be translated into Greek for Q and As and award ceremonies (59–60), seat swaps on opening night between those interested in the opening ceremony who left when it concluded and those wishing to see a film's premiere who arrived late (62–67), and the festival's staging of its own publicness for purposes of publicity, referring to the "Street Cinema" sidebar program that aimed to "take cinema out into the street" (68). Ultimately, Lee concludes that the festival's various publics and the ways they engage with the festival are irreconcilably different from one another and do not converge to constitute a single uniform experience—nor, as Lee points out, should they aim to. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which the festival depoliticized its own 50-year history and sought to create continuities by downplaying and suppressing that history's many internal inconsistencies. Noting the "untimely timelessness" (79) of the ways in which the 2009 festival's theme—"Why cinema now?"—was addressed in the festival's official discourse, Lee focuses on three instances in which the festival did engage with its past: an honorary awards ceremony that functioned as...