Note: A longer version of this article will be presented in a graduate seminar, next Fall at New York University Abu Dhabi.
With the title “Must Watch: The Most Meaningful Greek Short Film We Ever Wrote About,” Lia Pavlou writing for the Greek Reporter[i] highlighted the emotional impact of Jafar, a short film by Greek filmmaker Nancy Spetsioti, released in 2013. The film unfolds in a hospital waiting room where a Greek family shows overt prejudice toward a dark-skinned man, the titular character, Jafar. The film is only two and a half minutes long and yet it speaks volumes as it tackles themes of racism and xenophobia within Greek society in a poignant way. Through a series of visual cues and a powerful twist at the end, Spetsioti invites, or rather, I would say challenges viewers, both local and global, to confront their own biases and the societal structures that perpetuate discrimination
The film touched a chord with the audience as it becomes obvious from the millions of views it amassed online. Pavlou states that “the film that this last week went viral has almost 3.5 million views on Youtube.” ... More
According to Fredric Jameson,
Burke’s problem as he confronted […] the sublime was to find some explanation [...] not for our aesthetic pleasure in […] “beauty”, in what could plausibly gratify the human organism on its own scale, but rather for our aesthetic delight in spectacles which would seem symbolically to crush human life and to dramatize everything which reduces the individual human being and the individual subject to powerlessness and nothingness (2016: 235).
Assessing this particular aesthetic experience, Jameson continues, Burke identified a particular connection to being as essential, detecting an ontological link, glimpses of a force that transcends human life. Through the sublime, the subject encounters a barely detectible force, one that generates a sense of acute vulnerability (2016: 236). ... More