The research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) is dealing with four different chapters of Theo Angelopoulos’ form and style. The first chapter focuses on the historical and political aspects of ...Theo Angelopoulos’ films, especially on the film shot during his first period up until Alexander the Great. The second chapter emphasizes on the connection between Theo Angelopoulos’ work with the estrangement techniques of Bertolt Brecht. This chapter reshapes our knowledge regarding this connection and elaborates on the debate between the traditional Brechtian approach of Angelopoulos’ work and the post-Brechtian approach. The third chapter stresses the importance of the Greek coffeeshop (kafeneion) as an ideal location in Theo Angelopoulos’ films, while the last chapter talks about the birth of the Greek Weird Wave movement in the contemporary Greek cinema, as well as how this new gaze could be influenced by Theo Angelopoulos’ work.
The short film Flickering Souls Set Alight (2019) is the final outcome of my practice-based PhD research in the University of Central Lancashire entitled: “Reshaping Contemporary Greek Cinema Through ...a Re-evaluation of the Historical and Political Perspective of Theo Angelopoulos's Work”. Examining and reshaping our knowledge around the historical and political aspects and techniques of Theo Angelopoulos's work can give us a better understanding in the way that we can use these tools in contemporary Greek cinema. Flickering Souls Set Alight (2019) is the example of this new wave of political Greek cinema that I suggest.
Nowadays, there are two types of scholars teaching film courses at the Greek universities. The first one is the theoreticians with a background in film studies and a PhD in film theory, who approach ...their teaching methods strictly from a theoretical point of view. The second type of university teachers are practical filmmakers that come directly from the industry, most of them without a PhD or formal research experience. They approach their courses from a practical point of view sharing their experience from the industry. Greek Universities are exclusively public at the moment and fall under the Ministry of Education. The system is quite bureaucratic and difficult to adapt within and responds slowly, if at all to changes. PhD candidates are dealing almost exclusively with traditional theoretical PhDs. Over the past several years, the first art-based PhDs focusing upon performing arts or visual arts in the Greek academic environment were submitted. However, the field of film practice research is still brand new. At the same time, over the past decade the Ministry of Education established a new unit in Universities that will measure the quality of research and teaching entitled Quality Assurance Unit (MO.DI.P). MO.DI.P is an advisory body for the administration of the University which, through the coordination of procedures for internal and external evaluation of the academic units of the Institution, gathers information regarding the strong and weak points of a University. Within this framework it is really difficult for arts based or film-based research practitioners to prove the impact of their research to MO.DI.P. and to establish film practice research in general within the Greek academic environment. Since my background is on film practice and my PhD was undertaken in the United Kingdom, I am familiar with the ways that we can measure film practice impact in the academic environment. Establishing this culture in the Greek academic environment is quite difficult but at the same time it forges new paths and exciting opportunities for new art based and film-based research practitioners. This paper will focus on the ways that we can measure impact in film practice research, through examples from my own work. I will argue how I was able to measure the impact of my own films Flickering Souls Set Alight (2019) and A Quest for Eternity (2020) but also how to measure impact in more cross disciplinary research with examples of my participation as researcher in StoryLab (Skills Training for Democratised Film Industries) research lab. Finally, I will focus on the issues and the possibilities of establishing these new opportunities in the Greek academic environment and the solutions that this alternative path will be able to provide, not only to academia in Greece but to contemporary Greek filmmakers, too.
Theo Angelopoulos's unique gaze in cinema established him as one of the most significant figures in European cinema of the last fifty years. His dialectical approach to form and style and his ...connection to Greek history helped him to reawaken collective memories and remind people of certain historical events. After his tragic death in 2012, the Greek film industry made a huge shift to a more post-modern and non-political point of view. Something that is quite surprising since Greece has been in the midst of major political conflicts since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Many scholars have investigated various points in Theo Angelopoulos's work. This paper focuses on a detailed search of the historical and political perspective of Angelopoulos's films by creating a cross-disciplinary research in theory and practice. This research provides new insights regarding the way that Angelopoulos used Brechtian techniques in his first trilogy, and also the significance of the use of the Greek coffee shop (kafeneion) as an ideal location in his films. The theoretical findings are used as a key tool in the creation of three research films that will illustrate the ways we can use the techniques of Theo Angelopoulos's work to create a new kind of contemporary political cinema in Greece, and ultimately lead to the creation of the Manifesto for a new avant-garde contemporary Greek cinema.
Citation counts and related metrics have pervasive uses and misuses in academia and research appraisal, serving as scholarly influence and recognition measures. Hence, comprehending the citation ...patterns exhibited by authors is essential for assessing their research impact and contributions within their respective fields. Although the h-index, introduced by Hirsch in 2005, has emerged as a popular bibliometric indicator, it fails to account for the intricate relationships between authors and their citation patterns. This limitation becomes particularly relevant in cases where citations are strategically employed to boost the perceived influence of certain individuals or groups, a phenomenon that we term "orchestration". Orchestrated citations can introduce biases in citation rankings and therefore necessitate the identification of such patterns. Here, we use Scopus data to investigate orchestration of citations across all scientific disciplines. Orchestration could be small-scale, when the author him/herself and/or a small number of other authors use citations strategically to boost citation metrics like h-index; or large-scale, where extensive collaborations among many co-authors lead to high h-index for many/all of them. We propose three orchestration indicators: extremely low values in the ratio of citations over the square of the h-index (indicative of small-scale orchestration); extremely small number of authors who can explain at least 50% of an author's total citations (indicative of either small-scale or large-scale orchestration); and extremely large number of co-authors with more than 50 co-authored papers (indicative of large-scale orchestration). The distributions, potential thresholds based on 1% (and 5%) percentiles, and insights from these indicators are explored and put into perspective across science.
Scientific impact has been the center of extended debate regarding its accuracy and reliability. From hiring committees in academic institutions to governmental agencies that distribute funding, an ...author's scientific success as measured by the h-index is a vital point to their career. The objective of this work is to investigate whether the collaboration patterns of an author are good predictors of the author's future \(h\)-index. Although not directly related to each other, a more intense collaboration can result into increased productivity which can potentially have an impact on the author's future \(h\)-index. In this paper, we capitalize on recent advances in graph neural networks and we examine the possibility of predicting the \(h\)-index relying solely on the author's collaboration and the textual content of a subset of their papers. We perform our experiments on a large-scale network consisting of more than \(1\) million authors that have published papers in computer science venues and more than \(37\) million edges. The task is a six-months-ahead forecast, i.e. what the \(h\)-index of each author will be after six months. Our experiments indicate that there is indeed some relationship between the future \(h\)-index of an author and their structural role in the co-authorship network. Furthermore, we found that the proposed method outperforms standard machine learning techniques based on simple graph metrics along with node representations learned from the textual content of the author's papers.
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