Public Culture and Cultural Citizenship at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival

This dissertation explores the relationship between state, citizen and public culture through an ethnographic and historical examination of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in northern Greece. In the two-year period leading up to and following its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the festival was caught up in the larger economic, political and social crises that have overtaken Greece in the last five years - a painful period of rapid transformation and neoliberalization for one of Europe's staunchest social-welfare states. As the Greek state faces bankruptcy - both economic and political - it is being forced to revisit the terms of its social contract with its citizens. In a country where "culture" was once touted as a national "heavy industry," the relationship between the state and cultural production is also being restructured. Public culture is one of the areas of social life in which people are now struggling with these changes and attempting to redefine what it means to be a citizen of the Greek state - utilizing and revising local, national and transnational identities in the process.;In this larger context, I consider how the Thessaloniki Film Festival functions as an institution of public culture. Specifically, this dissertation investigates how different film publics come together within the space of the festival and how, on the occasion of the institution's fiftieth anniversary, different social histories of cinema were being constructed in response to the present crises. I also take an in-depth look at a Greek filmmakers' movement that boycotted the festival's fiftieth-anniversary edition as a way of protesting the state and demanding a new national film policy. Through these investigations, I analyze how different forms of publicness, collectivity and citizenship are negotiated and enacted, both by the institution and by members of its publics and counterpublics. I argue that practices of cultural citizenship - forms of citizenship that arise where fields of cultural production meet the practices and discourses of the state - can constitute important forms of resistance, attempts at recuperating a critical public sphere and reclaiming a citizenship based on the experience of a critical collectivity.