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A milestone in the cinematic representation of neoliberalism, Maren Ade’s 2016 breakout hit Toni Erdmann offers a wide-ranging depiction of the contemporary global economy and its reshaping of our psychic and social lives. Emerging from the German art cinema movement known as the Berlin School, Toni Erdmann achieved unexpected success with audiences worldwide, attaining theatrical release in at least 37 countries and winning more than 50 international awards. Yet the film’s viral popularity and critical acclaim proved perplexing to some commentators, especially given its oxymoronic status as a German comedy; its sprawling, nearly three-hour duration; and its formally unremarkable, even nondescript style.

The fifth and final section of this book, “Cinematic Echoes,” contains three contributions whose common feature is a shift from words on the page to images on the big screen, from Greece to the United States. To this end, Caroline Eades (University of Maryland) and Françoise Létoublon (Université Grenoble Alpes) develop the work of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord on Homer and the Serbo-Croatian oral tradition to situate the oeuvre of filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos within the lineage of Greek and Balkan oral poetry. Such an approach—diachronic (from Homer to the present), geographic (from Greece to the Balkans), and interdisciplinary (at the intersection of literature, cinema, and anthropology)—aims to demonstrate that this tradition is not disappearing, since it finds in Angelopoulos’s films an updating and reactivation that make it a deliberate means for expressing and disseminating myths today.

This is the first edited collection to critically address in its entirety questions related to the displaying of Chinese contemporary art. It includes chapters by scholars and cultural workers from diverse backgrounds involved in the interpretation of artistic as well as curatorial discourses and practices. Each of those chapters gives a detailed account of a particular, socio-culturally informed, approach to the making and showing of Chinese art - including in relation to queer identities, transculturality, the use of social media, artivism, social engagement, institutional critique, and neo-Confucian aesthetics. Together they present a vital intervention with established curatorship amidst the intensely interconnected and increasingly multi-polar cultural conditionalities of early 21st-century contemporaneity.