Nikitas Fessas holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences: Communication Sciences, from Ghent University, Belgium. He has published numerous cultural criticism essays in both Greek and foreign media, as well as academic articles. He regularly writes film reviews for the Greek news site Nostimon Imar. Slavoj Žižek mentions him in his book Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Nikitas is the co-editor of the upcoming volume Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press).
Papakaliatis’s An…/ What If… (2012) belongs to a trend identified by Skopeteas (2005: 147) as ‘postmodernist mainstream Greek Cinema’, which involves the use of intertextual allusion (Skopeteas 2005: 129), while it is also characterized by nostalgia, identified by Tziovas (1993: 259) as one of the characteristics of Greek postmodernism. In What If… both these elements serve a conservative/reactionary ideological function, especially in the way gender relations, but also class and the Greek crisis are represented in Papakaliatis’s film. ... More