Papers by Savina Petkova
photogénie #5 , 2020
Concluding this issue, my own essay explores the particular case of Christian Petzold’s approach ... more Concluding this issue, my own essay explores the particular case of Christian Petzold’s approach to symbolism, which works with the materiality of objects and functions as a narrative device. Be it a car-shaped keychain, a book, or a song, their objecthood reframes and reverbs with the stories that connect or disjunct the protagonists of his films, however different they may be. Petzold prefers to dwell on the border between mainstream and arthouse and, alongside his long-term collaborator Farocki, believes the impossibility of separation between the two to be a political statement.
Philosophia-BG, 2016
The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a critical reading of Yorgos Lanthimos' 'Weird G... more The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a critical reading of Yorgos Lanthimos' 'Weird Greek Wave' film The Lobster (2015) with arguments drawn from Plato's views on love (Eros) as they are shown in his dialogue Symposium. While the film focuses on rough and superfluous representations of relationship behaviour, the text argues that this serves as a hermeneutical code through which the viewer can read a positive message-human interactions are not deprived of meaning, and most of all-of Eros (understood in the Platonic view).
In order to demonstrate that a certain unease can be found in the general perception of a Renaiss... more In order to demonstrate that a certain unease can be found in the general perception of a Renaissance author such as Petrarch, the text follows one of his letters written in Latin, that is 'On life's brevity'. On a larger scale, this letter is representative for an upcoming change in mental structures corresponding to a feeling of loss and fragmentation as a result of a rupture in time. Days are divided into hours, hours into minutes and seconds and, as the gap of measurement becomes smaller, it makes room for a painful realization: life is brief, even shorter than we think. Death becomes a greedy enemy as well as fleeing time. It is crucial to point out that a heightened consciousness of time is relevant to a Renaissance author such as Petrarch and through a closer read of the cited letter, we can find an example of this conjunction of past ‘have-been’ and future ‘yet-to-be’ that is creative work to outdate a person’s earthly existence.
Conference Presentations by Savina Petkova
BAFTSS Conference, 2021
Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria (2014) opens with a rather dystopian state-wide celebration: an infant gi... more Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria (2014) opens with a rather dystopian state-wide celebration: an infant girl born without a belly button has been crowned “baby of the communist decade”. The film explores the strenuous relationship of its two protagonists—mother and daughter—in different stages of their lives, throughout the years between 1979 and 1994, encapsulating both socialist and capitalist times. Viktoria uses corporeal storytelling to recap the country’s socialist past with the namesake protagonist standing in for the end of an authoritative regime. Named after its female protagonist while the country’s name grammatically belongs to the female gender, the film teases out a post-socialist traumatic comparison between motherland and motherhood. Reassessing the role of a maternal body and that of the abject (Kristeva), I will make a case for an underrepresented case study of contemporary women’s filmmaking, as Bulgaria is, by far, the most politically ambivalent country in the EU, as far as women’s rights are concerned.
Film-Philosophy Conference, 2019
In its ostensibly rigid and sterile, stylised social order, the film corpus of Greek director Yor... more In its ostensibly rigid and sterile, stylised social order, the film corpus of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos undoubtedly says something about our contemporary. The amount of scholarly research dedicated to his works is accumulating with every passing year, with a generously represented crowd at this conference as well. I will scale down my attention to the role of animals as animetaphors in his last three films, The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and The Favourite (2018), all of which bear no production links to his home country, and are realised as part of the tendency of "extroversion" of Greek cinema, as called by Lydia Papadimitriou. (Papadimitriou 2018:9). Shot in the English language with production input by UK and US, his last three films have made it to the festival circuit, and Academy Awards. The narrative employment of ontologically real animals in these case studies, already positions them in a reversible transition to and from humanity. Rooted in Giorgio Agamben's political philosophy, his notion of anthropological machine is the backbone of my research, which points out the intrinsic dangers of defining human nature as exclusion of animality in overcoming the human/animal divide. In this paper, I will investigate the role of animetaphors, Akira Lippit's eloquent way of describing a non-anthropocentric way to look at animals. My methodology is rooted in film-philosophy, thus analytic in the choice of sequence analysis and will focus on narrative to contribute to an understanding of film as thought experiment (Wartenberg 2007). I will start with the most recent work, The Favourite, and use to explicate the representation of animals in their metaphoric strata as readily apparent. Then I will move on to its predecessor, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, to explore the idea of transference by its allusion to Ancient mythology and its consequent reversal of the myth. To conclude, I will attempt to bridge metaphor with metamorphosis by taking a closer look at the filmic world of The Lobster. I argue that all these elements are latent in Akira Lippit's concept of animetaphor and ultimately their interconnected features can 'jam' the carnivorous anthropological machine in relation to cinema, thus reconfiguring the relationship between film and ethics.
Drafts by Savina Petkova
The first chapter of my dissertation explores Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest feature film The Killing o... more The first chapter of my dissertation explores Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest feature film The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos, 2017), in relation to Agamben’s concept of bare life. The aim of this approach is to show how a film with no philosophical premise can elucidate such a politically-charged philosophical concept.
In the second part of the dissertation, I use Lanthimos’ earlier feature The Lobster (Lanthimos,... more In the second part of the dissertation, I use Lanthimos’ earlier feature The Lobster (Lanthimos, 2015), the plot of which gravitates around the uncanny process of turning humans into animals. In my analysis I will demonstrate how a seemingly detached - narratively utopian and visually estranged - aesthetic can have political connotation regarding foundational questions about the nature of the human.
Book Reviews by Savina Petkova
Film-Philosophy Volume 25, Issue 1 , 2021
A book review of aura McMahon (2019) Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time, Edinburgh: Edinbur... more A book review of aura McMahon (2019) Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 220 pp.
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Papers by Savina Petkova
Conference Presentations by Savina Petkova
Drafts by Savina Petkova
Book Reviews by Savina Petkova