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Cinema of Marbles

Summary: PhD dissertation by Geli Mademli on how Greek film heritage stages and resists different forms of crisis — national, center-periphery, financial, ecological — through archival practice. The signature concept is marmarization: the process by which film stock and other moving-image artifacts are transformed into national-cultural monuments, with the digital often deepening rather than undoing this fixation.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md (Draft no. 1, 30 December 2025).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Author and status

Author: Geli Mademli. The file in raw/ is Draft no. 1, dated 30 December 2025; section cross-references include "p. XX" placeholders, so the manuscript is still pre-final. Where the draft refers to an external publication of a sub-section, the source citation is kept.

Core argument

Greek film heritage is read as a privileged site for examining "crisis" — not as one event but as a recurring discursive mode. Each chapter pairs a particular crisis with a particular archival situation, and shows how binary logics (national/transnational, center/periphery, analog/digital, material/immaterial, weird/eerie) are mangled rather than resolved.

The titular metaphor of marbles works on three registers, all examined in the dissertation:

  • Marble, singular, as the monumentalized cultural object — sculptural, immutable, identity-fixing, allied with classical antiquity and the national imaginary.
  • Marbles, plural, as decentered, mobile, accident-prone objects with random trajectories — the metaphor for archives that distribute agency rather than concentrate it.
  • Marmarization as the process verb — a metamorphic transformation that, like geological marble, results from heat, pressure, and water, and that "applies in the radical process of digitization" as much as in physical preservation.

Method

Comparative, peripatetic, drawing on critical archival theory, media archaeology, science and technology studies (Latour, Pickering, Star, Bowker), and post-structuralist political theory (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Glissant, Agamben). The dissertation does close readings of specific cultural objects (films, exhibitions, archives, programs, institutions) and treats each as a "laboratory" where archival assumptions are being negotiated.

The author's methodology is openly informed by autotheory: she writes from inside the Greek film-festival and curatorial milieu, occasionally as a participant-observer (e.g. her interview with Korina Filoxenidi about the new Thessaloniki Cinema Museum design; her colleague's projection-booth observation about a continuity error in vlihi).

Structure

Four analytical chapters, each pairing a crisis-modality with an archival figure:

Recurring concepts

The dissertation builds and re-uses a set of analytical terms across chapters. They are gathered in glossary; the most load-bearing have their own pages:

Throughlines

A few arguments cut across all four chapters:

  • The digital does not undo monumentality. In every case — the Manakia digitization, the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum redesign, the international festival circuit's branding of Weird Greek Cinema, Archipelago Network's Cyclades platform — the digital is shown to enable rather than dissolve archival fixation, often by importing centralizing logics into ostensibly distributed systems.
  • Naming is an archival act. The Macedonia naming dispute, the "Weird Wave" label, the Vlihi/bleat title, the swap of "Skopja" for "Σκόπια" on the Greek motorway — these are all read as archival gestures.
  • Errors, gaps, and untranslatables are generative. Drawing on Mark Nunes and Donna Haraway, the dissertation treats syntactic mistakes ("Macedonia is Greece"), perforation mismatches in Manakia film stock, untranslated Arabic on the Spectres soundtrack, continuity errors in Vlihi, and the lacunae in the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum's holdings as places where the archive opens up.
  • Auto-theory is an archival mode. The author's own movement across festival, curator, translator, and researcher positions is named as method, not bias.