Introduction¶

Summary: The dissertation's introduction, organized in five subsections (0.0–0.4). Opens with the April 2025 Bugonia / Acropolis / KAS case (Lanthimos's filming request denied), proposes "film archaeology" as the framing discipline, develops the marble vs marbles heuristic, breaks down the four chapters, and lays out a four-field "mangle" methodology drawing on film theory, media archaeology, critical archival studies, Modern Greek studies, and STS.

Sources: introduction-2026-06.txt (sections 0.0–0.4).

Last updated: 2026-06-10.

0.0 Recognising the Landscape: Setting out the crisis¶

The introduction opens with an April 2025 news event: Yorgos Lanthimos's company Either/Or had requested permission to shoot the closing sequence of Bugonia on the Acropolis. The Central Archaeological Council (KAS) — the country's supreme advisory body on heritage protection through the early 19th century — unanimously denied the request on two grounds:

The proposed 24-hour shoot over four days would dent visitor revenue at the country's highest-grossing tourist site.
The plot of Bugonia (set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop, culminating in human extinction) was deemed "incompatible with the aura of the monument and its associated symbolisms" (Smith 2025).

The case is treated as the dissertation's emblem: a moment in which the same state apparatus that had celebrated Lanthimos's 2023 Venice Golden Lion as a national accomplishment refused to lend him a heritage site for filming, because the filming itself would have un-marmorized the monument's aura.

0.1 Film Archaeology as a Network of Associations¶

The introduction's most significant contribution to the dissertation's vocabulary: the framing discipline name film archaeology — an amalgam of media archaeology and film heritage. The term, drawing on Siegfried Zielinski, Giovanna Fossati, and Jussi Parikka, is positioned as Mademli's own framing of the entire project. See film-archaeology for the dedicated concept page.

The Greek case is doubly entangled because:

Archaeology is in Greece a "national discipline" (Yannis Hamilakis 2016) — "an arena in which national imagination is being produced and reproduced daily." Dimitris Plantzos (2023) names this archaeopolitics: a Foucauldian-inflected name for state governance that operates through public interest in past materialities.
Greek cinema, in the second decade of the 21st century, became "a highly valued cultural product" abroad despite thin production capacity at home — and its festival success was systematically read as a referent to crisis reality.

The introduction surveys the post-crisis institutional archival activity: the 2016–2018 "Lost High of Greek Cinema" collective; the 2022 "Motherland, I See You" initiative (Hellenic Film Academy + Greece 2021 committee); the 2025 inauguration of the Greek Film Archive's Digital Laboratory (NRRP-funded); the 2026 soft launch of Filmography.gr by the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Mademli's own research is positioned next to this density rather than within it — she "prefers to turn to archival endeavors with more generative 'tacit narratives' (Ketelaar 2002), whose concealed power structures complicate their scope."

Fossati's three frames, with Mademli's extension¶

Giovanna Fossati (2009, 2017) proposes three frames for film archivization:

Film as monument — auratic, materially singular, institutionally custodianship-bound.
Film as document — indexical, evidential, a record of reality.
Film as event — the most generative for this project. A force that "creates" rather than represents, with a double-structure of present-actualization and open past-future temporality.

Mademli extends Fossati: "the filmic event does not only account for changing materiality; it capitalizes on the material properties of film ... to point at the rhizomatic potential of heritage, and its capacity to debunk the binary opposition between center and periphery."

0.2 Against Losing One's Marbles: The critical archival¶

The introduction's most extended exposition of the marble vs marbles metaphor. Three registers of marble:

The geological substrate of the Parthenon and Greek antiquity.
The monumental statuary of national museums.
The dominant paradigm of Greek archaeological cultural identity.

Marble names "the archive's aspiration to permanence, its institutional drive toward immutability, and its entanglement with founding narratives of nation, sovereignty, and ... civilizational hierarchy." In this register, Latour's immutable mobile "passes into the service of state exceptionalism."

The shift to marbles (plural) names "a different relational logic: one of transmission, collision, and serendipitous encounter." Marbles "do not represent; they move, they collide, they follow trajectories that no single actor controls." Their movement is "a singular, yet invisible (and therefore) speculative visual imprint that cannot be repeated in the same way."

The introduction explicitly names interoperability as the marble-vs-marbles operational concept — "deployed here not in its narrow technical sense (the compatibility of metadata schemas) but as a metaphor for transmission, collision, and the performance/production of knowledge and practice across different boundaries."

The "critical archival dispositif"¶

A new term: the critical archival dispositif — "a framework attentive to how cinemas, museums, festivals, and digital platforms configure not only films but also the bodies, gazes, and discourses that meet them." Extended from Jean-Louis Baudry's appareil de base and the wider genealogy in Foucault and Agamben.

0.3 Chapter Breakdown¶

A "double structure" runs through all four chapters: each chapter pairs a primary case (a dominant manifestation of crisis) with a counter-example that "does not simply complement the first but enters into a productive tension with it." The counter-examples are chosen "for their scarcity, their limited range or application, and, mostly, their capacity to complicate, and in some instances to unsettle, the analytical work of the preceding pages."

A few small refinements visible only in the introduction's summaries:

Chapter 3 is explicitly subtitled in the breakdown as "Crisis of Memory: Archival Aesthetics in Greek Cinema" and uses Catherine Russell's archiveology (2018) as its operative concept. Vlihi is dated as 2023 (not 2022 as the body text earlier suggested).
Chapter 4's account of archipelago-network explicitly names the allusion both to Glissant ("main pool of decolonial thinking") and "unknowingly to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory" — the dissertation reads the project's name as carrying both inheritances.
The chapter pairings are restated cleanly: Ch 1 (preservation), Ch 2 (exhibition), Ch 3 (reuse), Ch 4 (dissemination).

0.4 On Methodology: A Mangle of Disciplines¶

The most explicit methodological statement in the dissertation. The "mangle" — Andrew Pickering's "open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay" — is recast as the dissertation's actual operating logic: "again, like in a game of marbles where particles clash and change directions, only to meet later in the same setting."

Four fields are explicitly named:

Film theory — dispositif, apparatus, montage, medium-specificity, spectatorship.
Media archaeology — Siegfried Zielinski (1997), Thomas Elsaesser (2004), Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (2011); deep time of media; obsolete technologies as critical tools.
Critical archival studies — Ann Laura Stoler, Jacques Derrida, Wolfgang Ernst; archive as site of power, knowledge, performative inscription.
Modern Greek Studies — Stathis Gourgouris, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Dimitris Plantzos, Lydia Papadimitriou; the metabolizing of ruins in contemporary cultural landscape.
Science and Technology Studies (STS) — Bruno Latour, John Law, Susan Leigh Star; archive as sociotechnical assemblage.

The introduction is explicit that these fields "are mangled rather than harmonized." It quotes Haraway's Staying with the Trouble (2016) — "to become-with each other or not at all" — to frame the methodology.

Desire lines¶

The chapters are described as a "peripatetic movement" guided by Sara Ahmed's desire lines (borrowed in turn from landscape architecture via Nasha Hassen 2026): "the alternative 'unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.'" This is the introduction's chosen name for the dissertation's autotheoretical-peripatetic method.

Positionality¶

The introduction closes with an explicit statement on the autotheoretical method, citing Lauren Fournier: "the researcher's own archival encounters — with the projectionist who noticed the continuity error in vlihi, with the architects who shared their unbuilt museum prototype, with the curators who agreed to be interviewed in rooms filled with objects described in these pages — are understood not as contaminations of the scholarly account but as constituents of it. The mangle of practice, after all, includes the researcher."

What the introduction does for the rest of the wiki¶

The introduction provides the dissertation's most explicit account of:

What discipline this is — film-archaeology.
What its core analytic is — marble vs marbles as critical archival framework.
What its method is — the four-field mangle.
What its closing image is — "to keep the marbles rolling, the trajectories open, and the ground hospitable to accidental collision."

The 2025 Bugonia/KAS case at the top is the dissertation's most contemporary anchor and the most condensed example of marmarization in real time — a state archaeological body refusing to let a heritage site host a film that would un-monumentalize it.