Basic Research-Cycle H’, Research Commitee University of Macedonia, 2023-2024
Eleni Sideri Principal Investigator
Three generations of women-creators of Georgian cinema belonging to the same family will form the basis for this research which aims to highlight the concept of memory and history through lived experiences and artistic creation as well as their conceptualization through the category of genealogy. Second, by priming a female genealogy, from grandmother to granddaughter, in an area of patriarchal social organization such as the Caucasus, research will shed light on the ways in which genealogy can be produced over or in addition to substantive and biological constraints and reasons, through imaginative ways of artistic creation in conversation with other European currents and networks despite the ideological anchorings of the Cold War or the regional inequalities resulting from post-socialist Europeanization. Thirdly, the research will explore the concept of the auteur which, since the 1960s, has been identified with a transnational film production, ‘European cinema’, which penetrated the ideological wall of the Cold War, but had clear gender and class characteristics. It will also examine how these three female creators enrich and expand the concept of the creator as gendered historical and artistic subjects producing new social and cultural interpretations. Finally combining, through multimodality, different research methods (bibliographic research, interviews, film analysis, autobiographical texts etc.) the limits of ethnography will be explored in relation to a story that penetrates the past of ideological walls to talk about the present of Europeanization and Europeanness. The research will seek answers indicatively to the following:
1. In what mnemonic/material/emotional ways are female genealogies reproduced?
2. In what ways do these genealogies produce the concept of territory that is often used to frame a framework for analyzing historical experiences and cultural memory?
3. How does multimodal ethnography that combines discourse, film footage, and lived experiences weave between fiction and ethnographic narrative and how can it bring to the surface discourses, memories, and feelings that have been marginalized from national memory and history?