The agony of cosmopolitan love: the Melina Mercouri-Jules Dassin partnership

Eleftheriotis, D. (2023) The agony of cosmopolitan love: the Melina Mercouri-Jules Dassin partnership. Transnational Screens, 14(3), pp. 165-187. (doi: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2221514)

Abstract

The article explores the role that cosmopolitan love plays in the cinematic partnership of émigré director Jules Dassin and Greek star Melina Mercouri. In defining cosmopolitan love, it employs a conceptual framework informed by Simmel’s theorisation of the ‘stranger’ and Barthes’s analysis of ‘a lover’s discourse’. It offers a detailed and historically rooted understanding of stardom, performance, and aesthetics in the films of Dassin and Mercouri tracing changes in the director’s film aesthetics and in the star’s performance style. It argues that these transformations, demonstrated through a comparison between Never on Sunday and Phaedra, are substantially the outcome of a struggle to reconcile their cosmopolitan positions with love as a cosmopolitan disposition. The article uses this specific case study to propose an agonistics of cosmopolitan love that stands in opposition to ethical approaches such as Levinas’s for whom love is a form of ‘being-for-the-other’.

• Item Type: Articles
• Keywords: Jules Dassin, Melina Mercouri, love, cosmopolitanism, ethics, agonistics.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Eleftheriotis, Professor Dimitris
• Authors: Eleftheriotis, D.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Journal Name: Transnational Screens
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• ISSN: 2578-5273
• ISSN (Online): 2578-5265
• Published Online: 22 June 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author(s)
• First Published: First published in Transnational Screens 14(3):165-187
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license