A Losing Game: Chevalier and the Performance of Masculinity (original) (raw)
THE PERFORMATIVE AESTHETICS OF THE 'GREEK NEW WAVE'
This paper argues that there is an excessive performative element at work that is constitutive of the formation of the contemporary Greek 'festival films' as a wave (the so-called 'Greek New Wave'), even if each one seems extremely unique and different. Both performance and performativity become conceptual tools to scrutinize something more than the text, and at the same time they are the films' aesthetic penchant inscribed within the cinematic text as a thematic and formal structure. My attempt is to name and explain this, so far unnamed, unfamiliar aesthetics, which is located in and outside the text and functions as a trademark for these films. This performative specificity that bears similarities with contemporary post-dramatic theatre can be detected in the following interconnecting elements: a)
A new cinema of 'emancipation': Tendencies of Independence in Greek cinema of the 2000s
This article contextualizes recent developments in Greek cinema, namely the rise of a new generation of film-makers who rejuvenated film-making in Greece and attracted widespread international and domestic attention. It shifts the focus to the wider cultural, institutional, technological, financial and sociopolitical context and examines this new film trend as one aspect of the much broader changes taking place in the Greek audio-visual sector throughout the 2000s. It explores the driving forces behind the trend, discusses its major characteristics and argues that it is the result of a combination of factors: the rapid growth and prosperity of the Greek commercial audio-visual industry, the enduring financial poverty and institutional failure of the Greek film sector, new forms of cinephilia, developments in communication and image recording practices deriving from new technologies, generational conflict and societal crisis, as well as growing tensions in the Greek public domain between constitutional authority and new modes of articulating public discourse. Finally, it illustrates how each one of these factors found a response in Greek film culture through gestures of independence and emancipation from established practices, institutions and ideologies.
Visual Anthropology Review, 2016
The article explores cinematic and photographic images of the ‘Greek crisis’ in order to show how the visual can render the crisis both visible and invisible, clear and opaque, normalized and contested. Greek new wave cinema, iconic repetitive images of suffering in the center of Athens, and the group of visual artists Depression Era are discussed in this context. I argue that the images in focus articulate the crisis and render it visible. At the same time, however, they challenge one's expectations of what the crisis is and how normalized it has become. I argue that these images can encourage civic responsibility and a dialogue about freedom and democracy in the current predicament.
Volume 16/1 Τόμος 16/1 Παράβασις· τοῦτο λέγεται παράβασις, ἅπερ ἔλεγον ἐπιστρέφοντες οἱ χορευταὶ πρὸς τοὺς θεωμένους. ἔστι δὲ ὁ τρόπος, ὅταν καταλιπὼν τὰ ἑξῆς τοῦ δράματος ὁ ποιητὴς συμβουλεύῃ τοῖς θεωμένοις ἢ ἄλλο ἐκτὸς λέγῃ τι τῆς ὑποθέσεως. Παράβασις δὲ λέγεται, ἐπειδὴ ἀπήρτηται τῆς ἄλλης ὑποθέσεως, ἢ ἐπεὶ παραβαίνει ὁ χορὸς τὸν τόπον. ἐστᾶσι μὲν γὰρ κατὰ στοῖχον οἱ πρὸς τὴν ὀρχήστραν ἀποβλέποντες· ὅταν δὲ παραβῶσιν, ἐφεξῆς ἑστῶτες καὶ πρὸς τὸ θέατρον ἀποβλέποντες τὸν λόγον ποιοῦνται.
Theo Angelopoulos: patricide or respect
This is a paper presented in March 2014 in the Kinematek in Brussels in the context of a tribute to Theo Angelopoulos. It raise the question of how far the younger generation of Greek directors have followed the steps of the great auteur or have proceeded with a symbolic patricide in new trajectories. My assessment is that there are three trends: the Greek weird wave, the social realist and the women flaneurs. The directors in the first wave ( Koutras, Lanthimos, Tsangari, Avranas) have performed a "patricide" and have followed a post-modern path. Directors belonging to the second trend( Tsitos, Anastopoulos) were in terms of choise of subject more close to the last period of Angelopoulos though less innovative in form. Finally those women directors I have called "flaneurs" ( Theodoraki, Voulgari) are tracing their own trajectories investigating the female gaze in post-modern Athens.
This paper focuses on the aesthetic trajectory of the filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari from 1995 until today, so as to trace the main characteristics of her style. The starting point of this examination is her first feature film The Slow Business of Going (2001) that will be discussed as an example of post-classical narration perfectly in tune with issues that became central in the discourse of post-modernism. The examination will continue with Attenberg (2010), as a return to a modernist vocabulary with references to the art-house film of the 1960s and 1970s and will conclude with her recent project, The Capsule (2012), as an example of experimental avant-garde cinema. Furthermore, I trace the influences from international modernist directors, specifically Chantal Akerman and Jean Luc Godard, and at the same time establish a link with the Greek directors of the generation of the New Greek Cinema. One of the questions to be answered is how, despite the seemingly radical changes in her style, Tsangari's work gives the impression of evolution and continuity through stylistic forms of antithesis and opposition, and how the filmmaker deals with authorship. This study aims at helping to define the Greek 'weird' wave in terms not only of topics, production, promotion, or its relation to the crisis, but in terms of aesthetic choices.
Transitions in the Periphery: Funding Film Production in Greece since the Financial Crisis
International Journal on Media Management, 2017
The article focuses on Greece and explores the extent and ways in which film production funding cultures have changed in the period 2010–2015. It maps out the hybrid modes of funding embraced by filmmakers in this period, and explores the extent to which new models, such as crowdfunding, were adopted, European co-production opportunities were more fully embraced, as well as how far traditional modes of financing such as, on the one hand, state funding, and, on the other, private, distributor-led, backing have persisted. As a country of the European periphery, and one particularly hard-hit by the recent financial crisis, Greece offers a good example of the processes of an uncertain, but also creatively productive, cultural, and financial transition. Set within the broader context of global changes led by technology, the national case study illustrates how state and private top-bottom funding initiatives have begun to co-exist with bottom-up production and dissemination processes, and how some new players have entered the scene. The patterns revealed through this exploration of the new funding cultures for film production in Greece contribute to an understanding of the impact of global economic transformations on a national level, and help us assess the effectiveness and viability of the new funding models for small markets.
Greek Cinema as European Cinema: Co-productions, Eurimages and the Europeanisation of Greek Cinema
Studies in European Cinema, 2018
The article examines the extent to which Greek cinema has engaged with European co-productions and identi es the ways in which these have changed its production culture, as well as, indirectly, its form, content and mode of address. While mainly focusing on the 2010s, it also offers a historical account of co-production practices in Greece, especially since the establishment of Eurimages in 1989. It argues that the intensification of co-production activity that has become more evident in the last few years has been the result of a number of factors, including the continuing impact of European institutional frameworks, the reduction of national funds towards cinema, the emergence of a number of new producers trained in building co-productions and the critical success of a number of Greek films in prestigious festivals. The analysis draws on lm studies, media industry and lm policy studies as it aims to reveal the ways in which both Europe-wide and localised social, financial and professional conditions have affected the production culture in Greece, especially with regard to art/quality cinema, leading to the increased ‘Europeanisation’ of Greek cinema.
Miss Violence (2013) by Alexandros Avranas, film review
The review argues that Miss Violence is more of a conservative exercise on sensationalism, which rather reaffirms the patriarchal structure by showcasing its negative other, and less of a sincere critique on the problematic ethics of patriarchy.
Three emblematic films of the Greek ' Weird Wave' cinema, A woman's way ( Koutras 2009), Dogthooth (Lanthimos,2009) and Attenberg (Tsagaris 20111) are compared with the films of the major auteur of Modern Greek Cinema Theo Angelopoulos. Our conclusion is that not only in those films we witness a reversal of the classical oedipal scenario but also by the use of slang and idiomatic language they defy poetry which was a defining characteristic of the oeuvre of Angelopoulos.
Translation Studies, 2017
This article argues that the study of translation as it occurs in cinema at both the production and distribution levels can provide a new critical perspective through which to analyse film. Based on recent research by translation theorists but drawing equally on film studies, the article shifts the focus from translation to cinema. It explains how a translational approach can help revisit foundational ideas in cinema, such as the realism of cinematic representation and the universality of film language. The analysis will focus on Dogtooth by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. An investigation of diegetic occurrences of translation, but also of the film's English subtitles, will show how Dogtooth employs strategies of mistranslation, retranslation and performative reenactment so as to make statements about the politics and aesthetics of mainstream cinema. A translation analysis of this kind will reveal aspects of cinema that are not easily discerned when looked at from monolingual critical angles.
This Tongue Is Not My Own: Dogtooth, Phobia and the Paternal Metaphor
Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present, 2017
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you." –Philip Larkin zombie, n. “a small yellow flower” Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) exists in the shadow of certain real life cases and, as a film about a dictatorial Greek patriarch, is open to readings of political allegory; aesthetically, it is a post-Haneke minimal-realist piece, of fixed shots and cramped framing, and it employs an amalgam of professional and non-professional actors; it is also a reflection on the transgressive and liberating possibilities of the cinema itself; but what is most interesting about the film, from a Lacanian perspective, is what it suggests about language and family structure. And so, through concepts such as phobia and the paternal metaphor, as well as alienation and the uncanny – as they are theorized by Lacanian psychoanalysis – this chapter will explore the constitution of the Subject, in and through language, in Dogtooth to reveal – in a properly psychoanalytic manner – what the “pathological” instance here can tell us about the general condition.
Realism in Greek Cinema_uncorrected proof pdf
Th e present book follows my published history of Greek cinema in an attempt at a closer look at certain filmmakers whose work I briefly analysed there. Each chapter delineates their persistent concern for a cinematic visuality of the lived experience, accented by the social imaginary of Greek culture through the transcultural narrative codes and transnational modes of representation provided by the global medium of cinema. What we are interested in here is not only what made the cinematic ‘product’ possible but how it achieved its accepted form so that its industry could become viable. The work of Michael Cacoyannis, Nikos Koundouros, Yannis Dalianidis, Theo Angelopoulos, Antouaneta Angelidi and Yorgos Lanthimos is presented analytically its historical development (some of them it is their presentation in English).
Masculinity and Ridicule (2017)
Gender: Laughter
In the most acute moments during fits of laughter, as the body convulses and the breath quickens, as each comical thought fumbles toward the next, and when the whole world shrinks around a single word, image, or gesture—in these moments our laughter can come to feel absolutely our own. No social pressure can force this feeling into being. We can fake a chuckle and dissimulate amusement at poor jokes, but we cannot lie to ourselves about laughter. Like a slip of the tongue, laughter tears apart practiced routines of social comportment. Laughter delivers truths through the body. Truths about our deepest desires, fears, and fantasies are revealed through laugher, even if the method of delivery is unreliable and the truths remain littered with fabrications. Indeed, laughter challenges conventional distinctions between the true and the false: we do not, after all, need to believe something to find it comical. The sociology of humor seeks to offer a critical account of laughter. At a kinesthetic level, laughter seems to arrive without a history, culture, or politics, but this embodied feeling of spontaneity can be deceptive. Most societies contain methods for condoning and sanctioning different kinds of laughter. Often these methods are tacit—that is, enforced through inter-personal cues. For the same reason, humor can be an important resource for identity building and the maintenance of cultural continuity in displaced communities, as Elisabeth Betz and Toon van Meijl (2016) show in their study of diasporic communities from Tonga. Critical approaches to laughter are attentive to the social rules that divide the serious from the unserious, the sacred from the comic, and are consequently able to examine the formation of social identities in informal, unguarded, and convivial settings. But critique does not mean showing that people who laugh at ''the wrong things'' are bad people. Moral indictments of laughter tend to be ineffective, because humor taps into strongly felt perceptions and intuitions that connect bodily experience to thoughts and ideas. Sociologists do not need to silence laughter in order to understand the social conditions that make certain things— phrases, images, anecdotes, gestures—funny at some times and not others, for some people and not others, and in certain places and not others.
The Itinerant Cinephile (Maria San Filippo's blog), 2015
Greece boasts one of the most celebrated national cinemas of recent years, evidenced by the festival success and critical acclaim garnered by films such as Dogtooth, Strella, Attenberg and Miss Violence. Some of these works have become instant cult favorites in cinephile circuits. These aesthetically innovative films have been produced in a country devastated by neoliberal austerity policies since the 2008 financial crisis. In this annotated film list, I relate Greek cinema to the crisis by providing brief descriptions of contemporary Greek films and by highlighting a few significant thematic and stylistic precursors to the current output.