Panel 1: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Greek Cinema
Chair: Maria Oikonomou
1.‘Does Contemporary Greek Cinema Have an Identity?’
Dr Thanassis Vassiliou, Hellenic Cinema & Television School Stavrakos
Greek cinema, since the creation of the first sets by Finos Films back in 1942, has never
really known a period of decline in quality. Those who believe that Greek cinema comprises only
the immensely popular classic comedies of the 60’s or the well-known award-winning films by T.
Angelopoulos, M. Cacoyannis, G. Lanthimos, are mistaken: important filmmakers have coexisted
with the ones aforementioned and are, not only numerous, but have also created movies of equal,
if not higher, artistic value .
Thus, the legacy of Greek filmmaking can be characterized far from problematic. The fact
that each year our country showcases at least one or two interesting films, proves that there is an
important filmmaking dynamic worth paying attention to. However, one could also argue that
Greek cinema has not made any real breakthrough. That is probably because of two reasons: a)
because it is not Greek anymore and b) because of the illusion that it will become modern, and
thus worthy of attention, through the participation in international film festivals, in a time when
the question of modern, is not modern any more.
There’s no denying the fact that Dogtooth, Attenberg, Strella or Casus Belli are not Greek
movies. They could have easily been filmed by a Norwegian, American or Korean. Looking in vain
into the empty reservoir of modernism, these films –quite important ones for Greece– make us
wonder what they could have been had they been created more recklessly, without the pressure
to innovate but by turning their attention to Greek detail.
2. ‘This Tongue Is Not My Own: Dogtooth, Phobia and the Paternal Metaphor’
Dr Ben Tyrer, University of York
zombie, n. “a small yellow flower”
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 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,
but what is most interesting about the film, from a Lacanian perspective, is what it suggests about
language and family structure. The film places great emphasis on signifiers and meaning, showing
the latter to originate with the father and the paternal regime. Through Lacan’s conception of
phobia and the paternal metaphor, this paper will explore the constitution of the Subject, in and
through language, in Dogtooth. Bruce Fink states that the paternal metaphor provides the subject
with a symbolic compass reading on the basis of which to adopt an orientation. It is the structure
through which meaning as such enters the world. Dogtooth suggests what happens when this
compass is broken. With reference to Lacan’s fourth Seminar and his reading of the Little Hans
case, this paper will propose that the film’s diegesis establishes an alternative, phobic Symbolic
order, based on recognisable signifiers but radically different signifieds. Mark Fisher has described
the manipulation of language in Dogtooth as a sort of controlling, Dadaist word play, but the
condition here is much more fundamental. Working in a properly psychoanalytic manner – which
is to say, to discover what the pathological instance can reveal about the general condition – this
paper will explore the relationship between language and the family structure in Dogtooth to
demonstrate the way in which the film exposes the structures that determine the Subject.
3. ‘Of Dogs and Men: Identity, Isolation and Otherness in Giorgos Lanthimos’
Dogtooth’
Petrina Vasileiou, Goldsmiths University of London
The term ‘identity’ was introduced by the theory of psychoanalysis and social and
anthropological approaches have been borrowing and elaborating on it ever since. The
investigation and interpretation of the term ‘identity’ is a scientific journey which has crossed
many paths with a wide range of theoretical frames. According to Dimitra Gkefou-Madianou, the
analysis around identity does not give it the character of a stable, unvaried, independent
psychological entity. The presence of the ‘other’ and the interaction with it within the context of
everyday life necessitates a continuous consideration and reconsideration of identity. The ‘other’
is a notion which has been a central issue in many theoretical approaches, for instance in the work
of Anthony Giddens. Identity does not exist in isolation; it acquires its meaning from the ‘other’
and it is associated with the realization of the participation in a collectivity (Eriksen 2007).
It is therefore evident that the presence of the ‘other’ has a decisive effect on any attempt
to approach, examine and construct the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. The film Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009)
offers a deep consideration and interpretation of the ‘other’ by means of introducing some clearly
defined boundaries which are used for the purposes of the family’s isolation, differentiation and
distance from both the social and the spatial surroundings. How is ‘otherness’ depicted in the
film? What are its characteristics? In what ways does the family get in contact with ‘otherness’?
And finally, what kind of assumptions can be made between the film and Greek society with
regard to the meaning of the presence of the ‘other’?
Drawing on anthropological approaches, as well as theories of mobility and migration, this
paper will deal with issues of identity, isolation and otherness in a recent Greek film which has
generated multiple popular and critical responses and interpretations. The purpose of this
analysis is to negotiate the relation between the ‘we’ and the ‘other’ and its significance for the
construction of identity. What is more, I will address the potential of an analogy between the
prevailing atmosphere of alienation in the film and the attitude towards ‘otherness’ in
contemporary Greek society.
4.Replacing the Alps: On the Practice of AbSense in Greek Cinema
Prof Ulrich Meurer and Dr Maria Oikonomou, University of Vienna
Giorgos Lanthimos’s Κυνόδοντας begins with three adolescents in a tiled
bathroom learning vocabulary from a cassette recorder (‘motorway’ – is a very strong
wind, ‘carbine’ – a beautiful white bird); in the first scene of Athina Tsangari’s Attenberg
two girls practice deep kissing in front of a naked white wall (Stick out your tongue. Rub it
against mine. Breathe through your nose); finally, Άλπεις opens with a long shot of a
gymnast rehearsing to the music of Carl Orff (Why can’t we work with something more
pop? – You’re not ready for something more pop). Instead of dramatic dialogue, sexual
surrender or bodily exertion, these opening sequences present us with images of non‐
actuality, replace the event with its preparation and the act with exercise. In this respect,
they seem to hint at a basic aesthetic – and political – strategy of Lanthimos and
Tsangari, namely to place presence, subjectivity, and meaning sous rature by
substituting them with their mere possibility or ‘virtuality’.
The proposed paper traces the narrative as well as formal instances of this
virtuality – e.g., the exposure of individuality as constant ceremonial re‐enactment, of
sexuality as a sequence of poses, of death as a perhaps reversible contingency, of
language as self‐ sufficient signifying structure, of fictional space as a mediated surface
phenomenon. In this context, the crucial image of the Alps in Lanthimos’s latest film calls
up the idea of sublime presence (John Dennis / Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement);
on the other hand, it literally becomes part of a free play of symbolic substitutions which
replaces meaning with a catalogue of arbitrary names and directives. However, the films’
dysfunctional families, erratic violence, athletic competitions, awkward sexuality or
undead revenants destabilize seemingly unassailable metaphysical discourses. Thus, the
missing center is transformed into an aesthetic and political starting point: it denotes a
positive quasi Deleuzian virtuality – the condition of the possibility of new and even
utopian images, concepts, and communities .
Panel 2: Film-Education-Audience
Chair: Lydia Papadimitriou
1.‘Greek Cinema in the Years of Crisis’
Despoina Mouzaki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
For decades, in the realm of ideas there existed the enormous misconception that cinema,
as art, lies above and beyond reality. In the world of the image, both the production and
exhibition of the products was surrounded by a mythical aura: the mass appeal and radiance of
cinema was encapsulated in its myths. In reality itself, however, the situation is far more complex:
cinema is art but it is also involves economic activity. Therefore, in a country experiencing such a
deep economic crisis, can a Greek film reach movie theaters – audiences – both within and
outside the country’s borders, and more importantly, do the production conditions that exist
today explain the increased number of films made in the last two years?
2.‘Developing Moving Image Education in Greek Schools’
Kostas Voros, University of London
The work presented here is inscribed within the field of media education / media literacy
and forms part of a wider research project which aims to explore pedagogies for the teaching of
media in Greek schools.
In particular, I am intending to do three things here:
1. Outline the history as well as the current state of the media education movement in
Greece through identifying the main initiatives, the key stakeholders and their discourses.
2. Describe tendencies and ‘best practices’ currently on an international level for media
education setting thus the backdrop against which media education initiatives in Greece are
taking place.
Here I ask the question of how the direction and the developments of media education in
Greece is in line with the international practice in the field.
Through examining the current initiatives and the discourses they bear as well as comparing
these with the history of the phases of the media education movement worldwide, I am
concluding that we are likely to see in the case of Greek schools a similar series of steps that
resembles the ones ‘followed’ by countries that are now at the forefront of the movement.
3. Finally, I put together a proposal for the introduction of moving image education in
Greek school curricula. I sketch out what a media education programme can comprise and I show
how this can happen through applying and adapting models from elsewhere - based primarily on
a Cultural Studies approach - whilst taking into account national priorities.
3.‘Reworking Embodied Historicity: an Anthropological Analysis of Cinematic
Dance within Audience of ‘Unforgettable’ Greek Cinema of Korydallos, Attiki’
Mimina Pateraki, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
In recent anthropological thought films are perceived as ambivalent visual images carrying
‘representations’ of choices and performances of their production period bringing with them the
past of a ‘common experience’ for a society resulting a ‘continuous interpretation’ in every
posterior view. Present study deals with the ways people in a Greek city criticize contemporary
sociopolitical situation and their personal choices not just recalling the past but using embodied
historical moments through certain ‘unforgettable’ film scenes of Greek Cinema that are brought
to the fore by people. Ethnographic data gathered due to fieldwork, open questionnaires, semi –
constructed interviews and group analyses based on contemporary visual methodologies as
recordings of viewing films as well collecting the social narratives about certain films as viewing
context and analyze them through discourse analysis.
Drawing upon the concept of ‘cultural proximity’ I study the ways people in Korydallos, a
suburb in between Piraeus and Athens, understand through cinematic dance in Greek cinema
previous historical times and at the same time think their contemporary time bringing different
historical moments very close.
Cinematic dance being culturally proximate becomes a
significant actor; an embodied index of historicity in present who enacts recognitions of past in
present as if past and present collapse into the same context. This is not just people’s past
reminisces but rather a reworking embodied memory in order to understand present
circumstances. Exploring how people negotiate performatively political, historical and cultural
situations this study focuses on concepts of the nationalization of significant events in Greece
mutually related to the regularization of gendered relations of power
Panel 3: Crossing Boarders: transnational Cinemas, International
Festivals
Chair: Despoina Mouzaki
1.‘Place, Memory and Tradition in Contemporary Greek Cinema Just Before the
Crisis’
Dr Christos Dermentzopoulos, University of Ioannina
A few years before the European and global crisis and just before the emergence of a
«new» Greek cinema of the crisis, two films, a year apart from each other, set, in my view, the
foundations for a sustained reflection on Greek reality. The films are The Guardian’s Son
(2006), by Dimitris Koutsiabasakos, and correction (2007), by Thanos Anastopoulos. The films
differ both thematically and aesthetically. The first one uses a classic narrative to refer to a
return to the countryside while the second one wanders in the city, making extensive use of
digital video. Both, however, set themselves apart from the run-of-the-mill film production of
that period (sex comedies, romantic comedies of a televisual aesthetic, nationalist epics like
El Greco).
Koutsiabasakos’ film achieves something rare within contemporary Greek film
production: to reflect on what we generally and uncritically call tradition and deal with issues
pertaining to the past and its memory. Anastopoulos’ film, on the other hand, manages to
speak about contemporary issues (racism, multiculturalism, prejudice, contemporary family
forms) remaining within an urban terrain and developing a digital aesthetics quite novel in
that period of Greek cinema. The film offers a substantial critique of contemporary Greek
reality, including all the characteristics, which make up contemporary Greek identity.
In a historical conjuncture when the «death of the past» is incessantly promoted and
which is dominated by a fragmented and ahistorical constant present, Koutsiabasakos’ film
suggests that any move forward to the future will have to negotiate the past and tradition in
a historical rather than a folkloric or nostalgic manner. Anastopoulos’ film, on the other hand,
resituates Greek identity in a new framework, opening up new conceptual horizons. Both
films become places of memory, demanding the reconceptualisations of the present through
the parameters of the past. In this manner, the cultural memory - collective and personal - of
modern Greek reality gets rooted in actuality, in space, in the visual image, in the objects.
2.‘The Cosmopolitan/Cosmopolitical Subject in the Era of Global Crisis’
Dr Erato Basea, Columbia University
The films of George Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps) and Athena-Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg)
‘travelled’outside Greece, and received awards and critical praise around the world. Despite their
mobility across borders, these films are not transnational: they are Greek productions, with Greek
stars and filmed in Greek. Cosmopolitan theory, that dismantles the rhetoric of the local/global
dichotomy, can help us reconsider the films in a global(ized) context. First, it is argued that at the
textual level (admitted openness of narrative, aesthetic idioms used by renowned filmmakers),
these films are embedded in the intersections of the domestic and the global field of cultural
production. Moreover, an exploration of various avenues that informed them (interviews,
reception, publicity) intends to show: i) how these films were defined in national and universal
terms; ii) how this helped in the formation of their directors as cosmopolitan subjects belonging
to the world community of filmmakers. In the era of global capitalism, the national makes a
cultural product marketable (Negri). A working hypothesis is that these filmmakers were placed
inside the economic realities of crisis-ridden Greece to become marketable as Greek filmmakers
but also cosmopolitan subjects who interrogate the geopolitical ethics of working under
conditions of global crisis.
3. ‘Between Resistance and Flexibility: Thessaloniki International Film
Festival and the Challenge of Global Competition’
Georgia Aitaki, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
It has been argued that the large number of film festivals taking place each year throughout
the globe creates an atmosphere of competition with regard to the cultural contribution of each
of these events, while at the same time threatens their long term sustainability. Thomas Elsaesser,
Julian Stringer and other film festival scholars believe that in order to survive the competition, an
international film festival has to find the balance between homogeneity and innovation; it has to
be similar enough with other festivals in order to enter the circuit, but novel enough in order to
distinguish itself from other events. As a result, just like any other business, product or cultural
event playing by the rules of capitalist market, international film festivals are also subject to
economic pressures and they struggle for differentiation, which will enable them to attract
filmmakers and films, audiences, subsidies, sponsors, but also popular and critical attention.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the case of ‘Thessaloniki International Film
Festival’ in the light of the strategies it employed in order to transcend its national character and
find its place in the international film festival circuit. Born in the 1960s as a national event, the
festival acquired its international profile in 1992 and it is now described as the leading film festival
in Southeastern Europe, the showcase of annual Greek production and Balkans’ primary and
oldest festival for the work of emerging new international filmmakers. By taking a closer look at
the first decade of its existence as an international event, its programming choices and its general
philosophy, this paper aspires to provide an overview of the festival as an expression of
contemporary Greek film culture which responded to the challenge of global competition by
combining an international orientation with integration of local and regional elements.
Panel 4: Film – Politics – Crisis
Chair: Evgenia Giannouri
1.‘Marx’s Das Kapital and Greek Avant-Garde Cinema: the Politics of Form in
Sfikas’ Modelo and Angelidi’s Idées Fixes/Dies Irae’
Dr Rea Walldén, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
My paper poses the question of the politics of form. Using a semiotic methodology, it
compares two Greek avant-garde films of the 1970s: Modelo (1974) by Kostas Sfikas and Idées
Fixes / Dies Irae (1977) by Antoinetta Angelidi. It investigates the premise that avant-garde filmmaking combines experimentation with political radicalism, enacting a politics of form. It also
attempts to explore certain strategies and techniques which may constitute such politics. Sfikas
and Angelidi consciously oppose the very possibility of form-independent content. They are
considering their decisions with regard to form as politically meaningful. Modelo and Idées Fixes
partake to left-wing politics and refer to Marx’s Das Kapital. Sfikas’s film is a ‘translation’ of Das
Kapital in the cinematic medium. Angelidi’s film chooses a more complicated point of view,
feminist and post-structuralist; yet it does refer to the Marxian critique of product-fetischisation
and surplus value, while also using the structure of dialectical juxtaposition. Both films’ politics
affect their visual form, narrative structure and textual techniques. They both deny classical
narration, question the function of representation, investigate cinematic time, expand the
definitional borderlines of their medium. Nevertheless, they are two very different films. Modelo is
comprised by a single static shot, based on symmetry and minimal aesthetics, while Idées Fixes
relies on a multileveled exploration of cinematic heterogeneity. In my paper, I wish to study both
their differences and inter-connections, hoping to draw some conclusions as to what may
constitute a revolutionary text made in the language of cinema.
2.‘Unregistered Experiments: Issues of the History of the Greek Avant-Garde
Cinema’
Nikos Tsagarakis, University of Crete
As a marginal type of filmmaking, avant-garde or ‘experimental’ cinema has always been
overlooked by audiences and historians alike. An aesthetically challenging and theoretically
complex form of cinema, avant-garde filmmaking still remains difficult for theorists and historians
to approach, and exactly because of that difficulty, it becomes even more fascinating.
This paper is based on early findings of a research for the PhD dissertation The Greek avantgarde cinema at the University of Crete. Beginning fervently in the 1970s with Kostas Sfikas,
Thanassis Rentzis and Antoinetta Angelidi as its leading figures, slowly fading away in the 90s and
continuing to this day with sporadic efforts, avant-garde film remains one of the most neglected
areas of Greek cinema history. This paper will examine issues of terminology, chronological
boundaries, thematic and stylistic traits, in a first attempt to map the uncharted territory of the
Greek avant-garde cinema.
3.‘Election Documentaries Enter Greek Cinema’
Apostolos Karakasis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Following the classic documentary “Primary” (1960) by Robert Drew, an emblematic film
associated with the birth of cinema verité, documentaries on elections have appeared regularly in
many national cinemas over the last 50 years. In 2012 the sub-genre of the “election doc”
appeared for the first time in Greek cinema with the almost simultaneous release of two films:
“One step ahead” by Dimitris Athiridis and “Demokratia, the way of the cross” co-directed by five
filmmakers under the coordination of director-producer Marco Gastine. The former follows the
campaign of one candidate, the mayor of Thessaloniki Yannis Boutaris, while the latter observes
four MP candidates from different parties during their campaign for the national elections of
2012.
The adaptation of this internationally successful sub-genre indicates a tendency of Greek
documentary filmmakers who come from a “cinematic” background to get involved in current
affairs issues, previously dealt exclusively by journalist-filmmakers. As documentary film is often
associated with alternative and more sophisticated representations of political reality, it is natural
that the appearance of the two films raises expectations and questions regarding their positive
contribution to the current public discourse.
Despite the claims of publicity material that the films let the audience “make their own
mind”, the paper examines how different formal choices encourage specific readings. A
comparative analysis reveals different narrative functions as a result of variations of modes of
documentary representation (the expository and observational mode), of different stylistic choices
(i.e. the use of nondiegetic music, voice over, continuity editing, visual effects Etc.) as well as
different forms of narrative construction in the way each film organises its footage into a plot.
However my paper would like to argue that the two films do indeed offer a valuable and
alternative point of view by revealing politicians as human “social actors”, identifying historical
and psychological traits in the political behaviour of both candidates and public, revealing the
role of the media and on the whole exposing processes that take place behind closed doors.
Panel 5: Film and the Body
Chair: Yiannis Skopeteas
1.‘The Aesthetics of the ‘Performative’: Defining Trends of the Recent Greek
“Festival Film”’
Dr Afroditi Nikolaidou, Independent Researcher
The aim of this presentation is to indicate film performance and performativity as a stylistic
and narrative element that has acquired a centrality in the contemporary Greek “festival films”,
namely in the so called “New Greek Wave” or “Greek Weird Wave”. This centrality manifests itself
both in thematics and style and is reinforced by context since many of the performers and
directors are part of recent post-dramatic Greek artistic groups (blitz, drog-a-tek, grasshopper
theatre etc).
Performance and performativity have a long inter-disciplinary history. However, my work
starts from film form analysis using the neo-formalist tool-kit and results to the “aesthetics of the
‘performative’” (as I call it borrowing a phrase from Erika Fischer-Lichte) as one characteristic that
may help us define the specific ‘festival film’ category. Moreover, I would like to clarify that the
concept of film performance should not be confined to acting. The ‘performative’ aspect in my
film analysis is referring to: a specific style of acting and the stylistic and narrative choices of the
overall film that shape it, a recurrent motive for characterization (playing roles, dancing, singing
etc) and a narration that suades of presenting and not representing, contesting notions of realism
and authenticity of the previous film production.
Performance and performativity might prove to be a constitutive element for understanding
dissimilar ‘festival films’ (like Lanthimos’, Tsitos’, Tzoumerkas’, Psykou’s, Lygizos’ etc) as a category.
For that matter, I will use as case studies the first films of three young Greek directors that were
presented in the festivals of Venice, Karlovy Vary and Berlin, namely Syllas Tzoumerkas’
Homeland, Ektoras Lygizos’ Boy Eating the Bird’s Food and Elina Psykou’s The Eternal Return of
Antonis Paraskevas respectively, in order to define not only coherence but also the possible
trends within this “aesthetics of the performative”.
2.‘ΕΞΕΓΕΡΣΗ, or Mother’s Recipe for Boiled Eggs’
Michael Chronopoulos-Mantas, Cardiff University
Greece imagines itself as a nation, and this imagined idea is sometimes correct, other times
confused, and even at times an idea at conflict with reality. My filmmaking explores some of the
tension created between the real and imagined national self, as realized in individual narratives.
Key ideas from my recent work in Greece attempt to combine psychosocial theorizations of
repressive political ideologies running parallel to contextualized conceptions of Self, Embodiment
and Resistance. Using the camera eye for a self reflective relative ‘I’ and becoming another in the
process. I explicate a self- referentiality beyond mere thought -experiment into broader
anthropological and sociological concepts of the individual as a body moving through life
construct explored in relation to three select spatial/temporal nodes: Selfhood; The New Europe;
the contemporary resistance milieu. I wish to focus my attention on terms that allude to the
notion of subversion, concepts of physicality, corporal reality, embodiment, (our social body)
including images of war, resistance and battle on the same trajectory of the traditional ‘family
home movie’. I wish to draw from this piece of First Person Cinema a 'semiotic fiction making' by
investigating a provocative relationship of semiotic signifiers and 'signified' within the film by
using sound and flickering, sometimes unwatchable images to create a palpable sense or
anticipation and dread. The notion of civil unrest in my film mapped out onto (and embedded
within) a recurring theme of bodily damage, decay, and impending death – the crumbling body of
the state instantiated in the body of a drug-addicted stranger, for instance or a close family
member in hospital. Critical damage, illness, mortality here become something experienced
personally as a loss, and observed, from an almost anthropological distance, as an effect of
greater forces. Likewise I wish to explore a real sense of uncertainty about the temporality of what
the viewer is watching. The 'flicker' effect which is a idiosyncratic feature of analogue film and
how that affects sensations of temporal instability - a juxtaposition or flipping back and forth
between memory and the present, between dream and reality.
My critical approaches as a PhD candidate within British academia will include the following
sub fields within the established : 1) post-structural 2) neo-impressionistic 3) documentary style,
which is informed both by the 4) rhetoric style of Eisenstein and the 5) surrealism of Fellini. I will
locate my subject matter in the physical field of 6) multi-generational, 7) post-colonial, 8) postmodern Greece, but will conjure up broader 9) sociological questions of race,10) familial
structures, 11) national identity, and 12) collective memory. Film and ethnicity; film and identity;
and the sociology of film will provide a fecund terrain for inquiry relevant for my project within
the context of academic discourse. This 12 minute montage features 16 and 8 mm analogue film
and H.D video.
3.‘The Filmic Image of Vagelis Mourikis: the Construction and Use of Its
Symbolic Content’
Aspasia Ligourgioti, University of Patras
The image of a film actor is revealed and constructed within a particular space-time and a
particular historical moment. This image interacts with other elements of its cinematographic and
sociopolitical era, and ultimately constitutes a very important and expressive sign of this era.
Vagelis Mourikis may not be, like Jean-Pierre Léaud, an actor-symbol of a recorded and
demarcated historical movement, such as the Nouvelle Vague and the French May. His image,
however, materializes the contemporary radical political stakes, and is materialized through these
with the help of important Greek directors, such as Nikos Grammatikos and Yiannis Economides.
The above directors interact with the actor to finally shape with him the conceptual universe that
the actor emits; an image built equally by both actor and director.
Through a series of films that create the filmic image of Vagelis Mourikis as a genuine,
sincere toiler and folk hero, I choose to refer in more detail to those that, in my opinion, do not
distract the viewer from the very understanding of the sign-actor, such as the “King” of Nikos
Grammatikos and the “Knifer” of Yiannis Economides. Those movies reveal and not obscure the
actor, aiming to bring out something different from what the material and immaterial body of the
actor signifies.
Finally, it is of importance to pinpoint the way Greek filmmakers use as an instrument the
already shaped conceptual image of Mourikis, in order to impregnate the infertile ground of
Greece’s historical past with the aura of contemporary and vibrating revolutionary movements. An
action that aims in a reverse result, which is instead of aiming at historicizing actuality, it aims at
updating history.
Panel 6: Explorations in Genre
Chair: Lydia Papadimitriou
1.‘A Genre so Resistant? The Fall and Decline of the Greek Melodrama (19671975) and the foustanela hybrid’
Dr Ursula-Helen Kassaveti, National and Kapodistrian University of
Athens
While Greek popular cinema of the 1960s was enjoying its reputation as a medium which
had a very big mass appeal to the Greek audience, the military coup d’ état of 1967 and the
advent of television in 1968 changed the audiovisual landscape of the era. New genres, like the
war film, appeared within the Greek film industry, while older ones, such as the melodrama,
underwent their last period of internal development, being already in a serious decline. Other
hybrid genres, such as the foustanela genre (named after the “Greek kilt”) based their narratives
on melodramatic formulas, borrowing the iconographical details from war films. Especially, in the
case of the Greek melodrama, it is clear that, the genre formerly known as having a specific
“palliative” influence upon the low-class audience of the suburban cinemas, it had lost its “ritual”
function. Also its narratives, the actors and the filmmakers who were engaged in the genre,
seemed that they couldn’t survive even in the foustanela genre, which was more popular than
melodrama during that time. Despite the various changes in the audiovisual terrain, melodrama
and its conventions reappeared during the rise of the VHS-films in the 1980s and after the
deregulation it was transplanted in different variations in the private TV of the 1990s and the
2000s.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the last period of the Greek melodrama genre
during 1967-1974 in terms of narratives, formulas and its ideological function. The case of the
foustanela genre will be examined in contrast to the Greek melodrama of this period, especially
the foustanela films, which were based on purely melodramatic patterns in terms of form and
content. Furthermore, the paper will evaluate the role of melodrama narratives in modern TV and
film narratives and its final resistance as a popular genre.
2.‘Greek War Films During the Colonels’ Dictatorship (1967-1974): History
Repeating in a Shooting Star Genre’
Dr Vlasis Komninos, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
It was mainly because of the arrival of television that Greek popular cinema began to
seriously decline during the seven-year dictatorship. Box-office records from this period are
testimony to this, as well as the gradually diminishing volume of Greek films produced. Two film
genres seem to stand fast in this rather difficult time for Greek film production: Melodrama and
War films. War films were a fresh commodity throughout the late 60’s and early 70’s. Direct
descendants of resistant films, historical and costume dramas, these films aimed to offer
audiences, spectacles of epic proportion, grand scale historical drama and entertainment. Even if
they didn’t always attain box-office success, they always managed to attract significant audiences
and in some occasions even become “classics”. In the same time they were advocates of rightwing ideological doctrine, often promoting nationalistic stereotypes and established narratives of
Greek history, connecting war and military prowess (as components of Greek tradition) with
collective memory. What makes this genre even more intriguing is its quick decline after the fall
of the dictatorship. On one hand, nationalistic narrations of history became politically incorrect
and unpopular during the 80’s cinema production in Greece. On the other hand, some of these
Greek war films managed to secure a second life in TV: From the mid 80’s and up until now, these
films are regularly screened by private channels on the occasion of national celebrations (October
28th-Italian invasion of Greece, 1940 and March 25th-Greek war of independence, 1821). This paper
will describe the ideological and propaganda functions of the war film genre: How these films
were narrating a glorious past in order to explain life under a military regime and ultimately
constructing public consent. In connection with contemporary Greek cinema, the paper will
emphasise on the relation between these films and the non-nationalistic war-dramas produced
after the dictatorship. Finally it will examine the survival of these films through television as
audiovisual representations of history, which seem to be still abiding to dominant narrations of
Greek history, but this time by depicting them and not by indoctrinating them.
3.‘The Revival of the Greek Civil War in Film in Times of Crisis’
Dr Kostis Kornetis, New York University
Michel Foucault famously commented on cinema as being an alternative institution of
history, offering “another knowledge” regarding the ways in which historical experience can be
viewed. In terms of the filmic representations of the Greek Civil War –for some commentators the
equivalent to Vietnam for American cinema – post-1974 films were marked by an attempt to
substitute the very absence of historical work on a very contentious issue. From Theo
Angelopoulos’ emblematic Traveling Players (1974) to Nikos Tzimas The Man with the Carnation
(1980) and up to Alexis Damianos’ Iniohos (1995), the genealogy of films regarding the civil
conflict fulfilled to a great extent that function. From the 2000s onwards, however, the reversal of
this trend seems to have taken place: the boom of historical studies regarding the civil war had no
parallel in terms of cinema. Interestingly, it was only after the unprecedented riots of 2008 and
the onset of the economic crisis in 2010 that the civil conflict started attracting
cinempatograpgers again. This paper deals with two such recent representations of the civil
conflict. One, Pantelis Voulgaris’ Psychi Vatheia (2009), being a large production aiming to
provide the new national narrative and the other one, Kostas Haralambous’ Demeni Kokkini Klosti
(2011), an independent and controversial –some critics called it “splatter” – production. The paper
aims to catalogue the changes in the depiction over time, the aforementioned relationship to
historiograpic production, and the way in which the theme of the civil war and violence taps in –
through cinema – to the general political reconfiguration of Greece in times of crisis.
Panel 7: Cinematic Journeys, Cinematic Places
Chair: Ulrich Meurer
1. ‘Epiphanic Trope in Cinematic Journey to Greece’
Dr Taso G. Lagos, University of Washington
Movies involving characters traveling to Greece provides the possibility of expressive and/or
psych-therapeutic growth, even psychical breakthrough, usually in the form of sensual release
and (re)discovery of dormant emotions. This trope borrows on existing secularized epiphanic
traditions of the physical and psychological transformative power inherent in spiritual journeys
such as those involving Siddhartha’s transformation into the Buddha through his physical
wanderings and Jesus’ spiritual metamorphosis after his 40 days/40 nights of tribulation in the
desert. In similar sense, the British writer played by actor Alan Bates in Michael Cacoyiannis’s
Zorba the Greek provides a secular, metaphorical counterpart to the transformative power
available in journeys to the Mediterranean country. Other cinematic traditions employ the same
correlative quality (e.g., the American going to Scotland in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero), yet the
particular psycho-sensuous possibilities of Greece imposes certain attributes of this
transformative quality. Other filmed journeys to Greece are considered within this subgenre of
transformative narratives along with their relation to the epiphanic possibilities of the country.
This survey considers both classical film forms, such as Zorba the Greek, Summer Lovers, Shirley
Valentine, Corelli's Mandolin, Mediterraneo, Il Postino as well as more contemporary examples,
such as Opa! and My Life in Ruins.
2.‘Exploring Images of the Cinematic City: Thessaloniki Through Fiction Film
and Documentary’
Dr Angeliki Milonaki, Independent Scholar
This paper explores the cinematic representations of Thessaloniki, which are formulated and
disseminated in a spectrum of more than 60 films concerning the city, both fiction films and
documentaries. The main goal of this paper is to critically examine Thessaloniki’s projections on
the big screen, in an attempt to initially highlight the significant yet unexplored links between
Greek film history and the city’s history itself. Indeed, Thessaloniki builds up a unique connection
to the cinematic medium and its evolution, which begins as early as the 1910s, when Thessaloniki,
a city of an “unintentional multiculturalism”, dominates the screen in the first film newsreels
produced in Greece. Since then, for more than a century, Thessaloniki becomes a discernible
cinematic space, which is partly or fully documented in a wide selection of films, ranging from
silent film melodramas to contemporary documentaries, which advocate for different city images
by various filmmakers at different historical, cultural and cinematic contexts.
In this paper, I consider how Thessaloniki is portrayed on film, the generic and aesthetic
codes that mainly communicate its screened realities and their social and ideological implications
to the viewers. I will also argue that, despite Thessaloniki’s cultural importance in promoting
Greek film culture as the host city of the most significant film festival in the country and the
backdrop of a distinctive cinematic culture, it lacks an authentic and comprehensive depiction in
feature films. On the contrary, a distinct “city-documentary” trend has recently emerged in
Thessaloniki, particularly during the last 15 years, coinciding with the inauguration of the
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and the promotion of a more overt and politicized film culture.
These city-documentaries, primarily shot in Thessaloniki, emphasize on the city’s political and
cultural issues, thus encapsulating and enhancing Thessaloniki’s images through film.
3.‘Politiki Kouzina: Tastes of Istanbul Without Constantinople’
Sertac Timur Demir, Lancaster University
If it is claimed that, socially and architecturally, Istanbul has been getting uglier by the day,
it should be noted that one of critical breaking-points of the deformation process was the
deportation event between Turkey and Greece in the 1960s. That resulted in profound and
essential changes in the urban, social and demographical form of Istanbul, and is dealt with in this
paper through a film, A Touch of Spice (2003). The deportation, which is a reflection of the
nation-oriented State, `disinfected` Istanbul of strangers and destroyed a multi-coloured notion of
the city. As a result of the deportation and population exchange, the ethnic Greek population of
Istanbul was reduced from 135,000 to a mere 7,000. This situation can be accepted as being one
of the most influential events to affect the urban culture of contemporary Istanbul. A Touch of
Spice tells the story of a Greek family who was deported from Istanbul to Athens. Interestingly,
the film deals with the political situation from a different perspective, which is suffused with
metaphors of love, stereotypes, strangeness, nation-building, freedom and homeland. These
features of the film support the argument that Greeks were/are the cultural wealth of Istanbul,
and that the deportation and ethno-nationalism in Istanbul`s urban life context are a kind of
cultural impoverishment and decolourisation of its socio-cultural diversity.
As a Turkish researcher, I touch upon the social and urban reality that the story of Fanis,
Vasilis and Saime indicates. As far as Tassos Boulmetis portrays, the city is quite important and
still alive in Greek memory. Because Constantinople, as Fanis said in the last scene of the film,
remains as a promise in the sight of deportees. The essential questions in my presentation will be
that, “How has the deportation event and nationalist politics changed the city after the
foundation of Turkish Republic?”, “How has the city affected the Greek memory about
Constantinople?”, “How does the film reflect the historical paradox?”
3.‘Audiovisual Databases as Narrative Mechanisms: Pilot Prototype for a
Digital Archive of Moving Image Works on Post-War Architecture and the
City in Greece’
Prof George Papakonstantinou, University of Thessaly
The research project ‘A Digital Archive of Moving Image Works on Post-War Architecture
and the City in Greece,’ generously funded by the Research Committee of the University of
Thessaly and conducted at the Laboratory of Environmental Communication & Audiovisual
Documentation over the past year, forms the basis of our proposed contribution to the
conference. Our paper summarises the initial research and production results of the project and
discusses potential future applications for furthering the production’s heuristic value. Our
research project introduces a methodological toolkit for gleaning urban spaces in Greek cinema
and examining their spatial features. This is achieved by developing a database of moving image
works and describing the items on the database with specific types of metadata, which focus on
unearthing and interpreting spatial qualities via the use of a project-specific and finite number of
categories and subcategories. These are derived from the study of key texts and reference works
on the theory of architecture and urban-planning. In this theoretical framework, we designed a
web-based pilot prototype –an on-line, audiovisual database of moving image works– that caters
for the spatial mapping of information, thus foregrounding the role of space in cinematic
narratives. The current focus of our production is the fairly uncharted territory of Greek
documentaries and newsreels from the 1950s and 1960s, a period that has been associated with
escalating rates of urban development. Possible future upgrades involve expanding the database
to cover both additional periods and, ultimately, Greek narrative cinema. Our project aims to
contribute to the on-going domestic discussion about the Greek city in cinema (Milonaki 2008,
Sifaki, Poupou & Nikolaidou 2011, Milonaki 2012) and relevant, international contemporary
literature with a presentation and analysis of both results that represent work in progress and the
proposed methodological tool and its application in the contemporary educational process.
Panel 8: Authorial Forms
Chair: Mikela Fotiou
1. ‘Classifying the Major Legacy of Theo Angelopoulos for the Future of
Filmmaking: the Art of Camerawork in Eternity and a Day’
Dr Yannis Skopeteas, University of the Aegean
Since 1970, there have been hundreds of texts commenting on the themes of Theo
Angelopoulos as shown in the content of his images: the “Journey”, the “Exile”, the “Political” and
the “Historical”, the “Myth”, the «Utopia» and the “Allegory”, the “20th century tragedy”, the
history of Greece, Balkans, Europe. Similarly, there have been numerous, though much fewer texts,
describing the stylistic elements with which Angelopoulos represents these themes: dominant
colours, “dead” time and other narrative violations, poetic use of sound and music, off‐screen
space, Greek landscapes, acting and distanciation effect, lighting moods. However, there have
been very few texts analysing thoroughly or exclusively the major stylistic element that was
developed in a definite unique way by Angelopoulos and his Directors of Photography:
camerawork in Angelopoulos’ “Plan‐Sequence”(a French term translated in English as “Long
Take” and sometimes corresponds to a “Single take” or a “Sequence‐shot”).
This paper describes the most prolific stylistic practice in Angelopoulos’ film making,
camerawork, using as case study the reference film (according to the researcher) for this art
among Angelopoulos’ films: Eternity and a Day/ Mia eoniotita ke mia mera, the film that was
awarded with the Palm d’ Or in Cannes Festival of 1998 as well as several other awards and, de
facto, became a cornerstone in the history of Greek cinema. For the first time in an analysis of
Angelopoulos’ films, a “statistical style analysis” is used as a starting point. All the
camerawork elements (e.g. camera movement, camera height, camera angle, camera distance,
camera movement, camera focus, camera level and shot duration) are first counted, one by one,
in all 64 shots of Eternity and a day. Then, they are decoded according to the cultural
framework where they were created.
The final conclusion of the paper is not different from this of the texts with a political or
social or semiological approach: Angelopoulos’ films belong to a “cinema of contemplation”,
indeed. However, this paper may prove very clearly why Angelopoulos’ style is unique in the
history of cinema as well as the way film style and techniques convey culture.
2.‘A Grammar of Time: History, Politics and the Sequence Shot in the Work of
Theo Angelopoulos’
Alexis Radisoglou, Columbia University
While the plan-séquence, or sequence shot, has correctly been described as the stylistic
trademark of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, it has rarely been noted that the “content of the
form” of the sequence shot undergoes a radical transformation in the course of the filmmaker’s
career. Highlighting important moments in the development of this technique in Angelopoulos’s
oeuvre – from the 1970s to the 2000s – I argue that the shifts in the formal construction of the
sequence shot are manifestations of a changed conception of time and space and their relation to
the historical process. The way time and space are formally articulated, and thus our being-inhistory is imagined, in Angelopoulos’s work is historically situated within a framework of larger
transformations in contemporary thinking about temporality, the historical process, the possibility
of political agency, and the function of art within society at large. Questions, for instance, about
the end of avant-garde conceptions of art and the crisis of modernism and the project of
modernity at large; about a “posthistoire” and the impossibility of political praxis amid largely
autonomous systemic processes; about memory culture; and about the reconfiguration of time
and space in the age of globalization, are all being negotiated in Angelopoulos’s sequence shots.
The transformations of the sequence shot thus can be read as formal sedimentations of specific
social-historical contents in Greece and beyond, accompanying Angelopoulos’s turn from
historical materialism and a Marxist aesthetics in the 1970s to an altogether different model of
modernist aesthetic production in the 1980s, 1990s, and in his last films in the first decade of the
21st century.
3.‘Going Backwards, Moving Forward: the Return of Modernism in the Films of
Athina Rachel Tsangari’
Dr Anna Poupou, Independent Scholar
This paper examines the evolution in terms of style in the work of Athina Rachel Tsangari, as
a leading figure of the so called “New Greek Wave” and as an acknowledged director in the
contemporary film festival circuit. Her recent films and projects are considered as representative
of the so-called “weird” aesthetics, a label used by film critics in order to describe a mixture of
recurrent elements in both form and content, such as de-familiarization, minimalism, deadpan
acting, irony, closure, a combination of the grotesque and the sublime, the use of allegory etc.
However, it is interesting to include in this examination her first feature film The slow business of
Going (2001) as an example of the post-classical narration in order to trace the shift in Tsangaris’
style and the passage to a modernist vocabulary expressed by Attenberg (2010). Her recent short
film The Capsule (2012) will also be examined as a transition from art-house modernism to an
experimental avant-garde creation in terms of aesthetics, production and exhibition. The
conclusions from this analysis could help not only in the definition of the thematic and aesthetic
coherence of the “New Greek Wave” but also in tracking down the directors’ influences and
relationships with contemporary international trends and filmmakers. For this purpose, the notion
of the “parametric narration”, introduced by D. Bordwell and reevaluated by film theorists who are
tracing a contemporary reemergence of the modernist tradition in art film, will also be used.
4.‘Space, Time and the Female Condition in the Films of Pantelis Voulgaris
Stone Years and Quiet Days in August’
Myrto Kalofolia, Panteion University, Athens
The films of Pantelis Voulgaris have often constituted fertile ground and material for gender
studies and approaches.
In this presentation, the films that will be examined are Stone Years (1985) and Quiet days in
August (1991) because they connect issues of gender with built environment and space. The
presentation’s aim is to consider the ways in terms of film language (editing, shots, camera
movement, actors’s movement in the built environment) Voulgaris managed and utilized built
environment in order to depict the female condition, creating connotations, comparisons and
symbolic correlations derived by architecture and representational space.
In Stone years, the action of the film, reduced to an atemporal wandering from one state of
enclosure to another, determines the portrait of the heroine. Voulgaris uses the device of
enclosure, the built environment and the heroine’s relation to it in order to depict the female
condition. He thus describes woman’s relation to her physicality, presents motherhood and
pregnancy as an enclosure, presents the infertile ground for the flourishing of female identity
while bringing forth the feminine qualities of the Resistance.
In Quiet days in August Voulgaris transforms a real setting into a mental and illusionary one,
through, once again, an atemporal wandering in Athens. He uses the deserted city and urban
apartments in order to depict loneliness, nostalgia and longing as well as the unfulfilled human
relationships. The urban setting reveals female nature and female eroticism, whereas the
conditions of urban living describe the alienation and the fruitless efforts to communicate and
relate.
Finally, I will examine the way the director, aiming to describe the female condition, uses
space in order to determine time. In Stone Years space is used as a time-shrinking device, whereas
in Quiet days in August, space is used as a time-expanding device.
Panel 9: Film – Family – Nation
Chair: Philip Phillis
1.‘Eleni Alexandrakis and Dora Masklavanou meet Papadiamantis: Two
adaptations for the cinema of The homesick woman (I nostalgos)’
Prof Maria Paradeisi, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Two recent Greek films The who missed home (2004) by Eleni Alexandrakis and Coming as a
friend (2005) by Dora Masklavanou are based on Alexandros Papadiamantis’ novel, The woman
who missed home ( I nostalgos 1894). The novel describes the short trip of a young married
woman, Anna, who leaves her elderly husband to visit her parents’ island. A young boatman,
secretly in love with her, helps her to make the journey. A latent desire lies in her soul too, but the
real reason for her escape is nostalgia for her homeland.
The “comparison” between the novel and the two “adaptations” opens an interesting field
of research. Drawing on some theories concerning the novel –film relationship I will attempt to
present the different strategies the two cineastes use. It should be noted that the two films could
not be more ‘antithetical’ in their contrasts. The first, displaying a fidelity to the novel, seems like a
“symphony in blue”. It takes place mostly at sea while the second is a “symphony in earthy
colours”. In the first, the landscape is calm and seems like a metaphor for the latent eroticism
between the two principal characters; in the second the landscape is rough, a metaphor for the
harsh life of the characters and the tension of their feelings. The first film has a “rich” plot and
contains a lot of “text” (dialogues, voice over); in the second very little happens and it has very
few and short dialogues. Last but not least in significance is that the first ends with the “order
restored” while the second finishes abruptly and in “media res”.
2. ‘The
Nation as Family and Transnational Families’
Dr Eleni Sideri, International Hellenic University
Family is a prominent field of representation in the Greek film industry starting from the
post-war family comedies (Chalkou 2008) which in most cases perpetuated national and gender
stereotypes, but also in the critical moments of transformation and reassessment of the Greek
social structures such as, in the post-junta period. The emergence of the so-called the Greek
Weird Cinema or New Greek Cinema is closely related to the deconstruction of family almost in
its ruins. To what degree, is this deconstruction related to the economic and social
transformations nation-states went through due to globalisation and its results on Greece
(Saasen 2002), one of which was immigration, another topic through which Greek society and
family are re-imagined?
The economic, social and cultural transformations since the 1990s led to a reconsideration
of the ways family is conceptualised in new and less essentialist categorisations such as, the
concept of ''cultures of relatedness" (Carsten 2000) which avoids the a priory biological, cultural
and economic definition of family. At the same time, human mobility and in particular,
international migration re-organised family relations both in time and space giving birth to
'transnational families' (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). However, what often remains less studied is
the ways family as a metaphor for national transfigurations becomes also a field of transnational
influences. In this theoretical framework, the paper will study the ways a contact zone between
the national and the transnational is emerging in/though the 'family space' by examining family
representations in three different cases" Dogthooth (G. Lanthimos, 2010), Homeland (S.
Tzoumerkas, 2010) and The Kutaiseli Babua (The Grandpa from Kutaisi, Z. Kolelishvili 2007), a
Georgian film on the Greek family from the immigrants' perspective.
3.‘News From Home: “Oiko-politics” in Contemporary Greek Film’
Dr Evgenia Giannouri, IRCAV
Matchbox (Giannis Oikonomidis, 2003) and Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009) both
attempt to portray extreme household settings. The first film deals with verbal and psychological
violence enacted among the members and relatives of a low-class Athenian family: a
claustrophobic depiction of their nauseous everyday manipulations and abuses. The second one
describes the activities of an upper-class family whose members (wife, two daughters and son)
live confined in a sumptuous isolated residence somewhere in the suburbs: a clinical, semiobjective/semi-allegorical display of the origins of terrorism. Both films are situated “indoors”,
that is to say inside regulated spaces surrounded by apartment walls and high fences. These are
architectural structures that not only reduce physical movement and action but furthermore the
ability to think and project one’s self beyond the established territorial and intellectual
boundaries. They form hostile living spaces that (a) undo the genealogical bond and thus wipe
out the prototype of the nuclear family conceived as a space of loving intimacy; (b) organize
themselves in terms of “oiko-systems” administrated by their own set of laws (nomos) and
disorders; (c) perform their own politics of language by distorting and altering the meaning of the
words and thereby the linguistic environments (logos).
In her 2009 article “Oikopolitics, and Storms”1, political theorist Angela Mitropoulos argues
the possible association between the climatic and the financial crises given an environment that
we identify with the household (oikos) and the hypothesis that good environmental stewardship
resembles good household administration. For this to happen, the household management and
its micro-economics should be able to stand for the cornerstone paradigm of a nation’s political
governance in a way that one rescales and reflects the other in measurable criteria. Still, the core
of Mitropoulos’ reflection is the Aristotelian fracture between “oikos” and “polis”. The fact that the
household in the Aristotelian understanding is “the realm of production and reproduction of life,
a place where each of its figures (guards women, slaves, animals etc.) might be accounted for as
line- items in the household budget” (Mitropoulos, 2009, p. 68) but in no sense is it the space of
intimacy culminating in genealogy and in political/national sovereignty. Although, Mitropoulos
calls to mind that the intersection of household and nation (“oikos” and “polis”) already exists
(since Fordism), she invites us to reconsider the current context of the political, economic and
environmental merger.
This paper aims to study the cases of Matchbox and Dogtooth with an emphasis on the way
the two films problematize the concept of “Oiko-politics” coined by Angela Mitropoulos. The axis
of analysis will be the one mentioned above. Giannis Oikonomidis and Giorgos Lanthimos
suggest a specific political discourse designed by and rooted in the rhetorics of the “oikos”. The
household therefore becomes the laboratory of perverted future politics both in terms of “oikonomy” and “oiko-logy”, a prophetic figure of the political environment yet to come.
Panel 10: Language – Film – Nation
Chair: Ben Tyrer
1.‘Broken Greek, Intact Art: Breaking Waves and Language Barriers in
Contemporary Greek Cinema’
Geli Mademli, PhD Researcher at the University of Amsterdam
Much has been said about the so-called “Greek Weird Wave” in cinema, but very little about
where this weirdness starts. Surprisingly enough, while this tag has been introduced to public
discourse by non-greek media, the foreign, non-greek-speaking audiences are the ones that
cannot trace the possible main parameter for the transformation of greek national art-house
cinema: the appearance of a new, hybrid spoken language in the dialogue script, which consists in
word plays, metaphorical schemas, elliptical sentences, loanwords and made-up words, among
others.
The paper proposed will attempt to work in two dimensions on this paradox: Firstly, we will
try to detect the specific particularities of the spoken language in five different greek films of the
last decade (Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogthooh, Athena Tsangari's Attenberg, Babis Makridis' L,
Philippos Tsitos Plato's Academy and Ektoras Lygizos' short Pure Youth) and reveal that there is a
common axis around which this 'private language' revolves – echoing Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Secondly, we speculate the possible reasons and aims of this phenomenon and aspire to connect
it (in terms of a metaphor!) to the state of the art in greek cinema, where it stands as a playful
artistic means of expression, as well as the state of Greece, in the context of a generalised cultural
practice. These weird broken Greek, uttered in an unconventional manner of articulation and
intonation, break ground and seperate 'new' from 'old' contemporary greek films, as the latter
tended to apply narrative techniques akin to traditional literature. Upon the premises of this
language, the wordsmith directors are called to create a new cinematic one.
2.‘Negotiator of Meaning: Subverting Reality in Contemporary Greek Cinema’
Dr Maria Thanassa, Independent Scholar
In the semantically distorted Looking-Glass world of Humpty Dumpty, in which Lewis
Carroll’s self-professed word-master of a character can explain ‘all the poems that ever were
invented — and a good many that haven't been invented just yet,' patterns of communication are
constantly de-contextualised, manipulated and inverted or invented. 'The question is,' asserts
Humpty Dumpty in the chapter that bears his name, 'which is to be master’.
In this paper, using Carroll’s book as a point of reference, I would like to explore the link
between linguistic power, autocratic rule and subversion as seen in contemporary Greek cinema,
particularly in Dogtooth, Strella and Homeland. I propose to discuss these films in terms of the
challenge they pose to preconceived notions of identity, gender and biology. By presenting a
distorted or transgressive perception of the world, often mediated by a de/reformed linguistic
awareness, these films constitute iconoclastic approaches to the medium of cinema, certainly of
Greek cinema, fracturing many of its conventions, undermining audience expectations and
creating the possibility of new, potentially subversive meanings.
Ultimately, the key question I would like to address in this paper is whether the
radicalisation of cinema, exposing as it does the fraudulence of what I would term ‘a civilisation of
representation’, can indeed effect the radicalisation of society.
3.‘‘Pussy is the big light’: Reconceptualising the Language of the Nation and
the Medium Through Dogtooth and Attenberg’
Marios Psaras, Queen Mary, University of London
As J.R. Gold explains, Walter Benjamin’s insight on the intersection between language and
film lies particularly on the capacity of modern visual technologies, and specifically cinema, ‘to
vocalize the extremities of modern experience, thereby rendering audible (and hence intelligible)
what would otherwise remain mute.’Benjamin’s account on film’s revolutionary impact upon
human perception remains relevant to the contemporary renewed interest in film ontology, which
emerged as an effort to shed light in the midst of definitional crisis that film is going through at
the present moment, owing to the invention and proliferation of the so-called New Media.
Indeed, these contemporary ontological and epistemological reworkings and reconfigurations of
film and film studies have reoriented the focus of film theory and criticism from its adherence to
textual decoding and the relations between film’s representational practices and the respective
spectatorial responses, to the exploration of new, and perhaps previously unthought,
spatiotemporal and affectual relations, which emerge both within and outside the frame exposing
the limitations of human perception and language.
This paper aspires to offer a reading of Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) and Attenberg
(Athena Rachel Tsangaris, 2010) beyond textual decoding and representation, focusing on the
films' self-conscious defiance to the conventional cinematic techniques that are often understood
as the language of cinema; a defiance which reveals film's potential to reassess its own mediality
as a mere conveyor of representations and, thus, allow its ethical dimensions to emerge, as an
ultimately queer medium which foregrounds irreducible difference as the essential precondition
in human relations and communication. At the same time, the films themselves can be
understood as offering alternative ways of thinking about notions of national space and time,
especially if contextualised within Greece's current sociopolitical situation.