This book shows how the model of singing poets becomes then an organizing principle for a system of national popular music. It responds to the growing call for the teaching of the textual networks of popular music within the domains of literary and cultural studies.

What relates the early films of Yorgos Lanthimos with Vasilis Kekatos's 2019 Cannes triumph The Distance Between Us and the Sky? What is the lasting legacy of Panos Koutras's 2009 trans narrative Strella: A Woman's Way in today's gender and sexual identity activism in Greece? What was the role of cultural collectives in the formation of a 'weird history' of Greek cinema? And how did cinema and other cultural forms respond to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now learnt to call biopolitics? This book uses such questions in order to establish a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade in an engaged and highly original manner. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 'New' or 'Weird Wave' of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism. At once representing, reframing and reimagining the present, the Greek Weird Wave points to a much larger development in World Cinema.

What relates the early films of Yorgos Lanthimos with Vasilis Kekatos's 2019 Cannes triumph The Distance Between Us and the Sky? What is the lasting legacy of Panos Koutras's 2009 trans narrative Strella: A Woman's Way in today's gender and sexual identity activism in Greece? What was the role of cultural collectives in the formation of a 'weird history' of Greek cinema? And how did cinema and other cultural forms respond to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now learnt to call biopolitics? This book uses such questions in order to establish a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade in an engaged and highly original manner. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 'New' or 'Weird Wave' of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism. At once representing, reframing and reimagining the present, the Greek Weird Wave points to a much larger development in World Cinema.

Between 1945 and 1975, both France and Greece developed an interplay between literature and popular music, each making a new 'national canon'. Literature provided the aesthetic criteria, the cultural prestige and the institutional basis for what aspired to be a higher form of popular song. Published poems were turned into popular songs, while a critical discourse, in return, celebrated songwriters not only for being 'as good as poets' but for being 'singing poets' in their own right. In France, there were Georges Brassens, Leo Ferre and Serge Gainsbourg; in Greece, the presitigious title of 'tragoudopoios' (maker of songs) was awarded to Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos. This challenging and stimulating study draws on a wealth of materials, from theoretical writings by poets, through their lyrics, to the record sleeves and posters used to promote them.