Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2016

Unlike the majority of Greek historical films made before 1974, which dramatized specific events, after 1974 some leading Greek film-makers shot historical panoramas, whose plots spanned many periods. This article analyses four such historical panoramas that cover roughly similar periods, Angelopoulos’s O Thiasos/The Travelling Players (1975) and To Livadi pou Dakrizei/The Weeping Meadow (2004), Voulgaris’s Petrina Hronia/Stone Years (1985) and Marketaki’s Kristallines Nihtes/Crystal Nights (1992). The article situates each film within its broader cultural context and identifies the forces that motivate the history’s development, the plot’s logic and its formal substantiation. Each film, the article shows, suggests a different ‘historical cause’ for the events it depicts, ranging from imperialist processes and immanent human traits to psychoanalytic and mythological drives, and uses distinct formal means to convey the events. The examination of these four historical panoramas also attests to the gradual ‘de-politicization’ of auteur Greek cinema, in addition to prompting us to reflect on the various cinematic forms through which history can be represented and the different ways in which historical events can be linked and interpreted.

The article reads two recent Greek films, Kinodontas/Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009) and Miss Violence (Avranas, 2013), as offering a critique of the model of family repression. It argues that the films in their seemingly different aesthetic choices make similar points about the familial necropolitics that does not merely reflect social pathologies but likely also produces them. The families in both films are exposed to forms of control by a fatherly figure who dominates and almost entirely determines the content of the families’ daily lives. They inhabit lives and living spaces that visually, as well as narratively, offer no space for dissent or escape. However, the family members themselves, and especially their mother figures, are likewise perceived as semi-willing accomplices in the repressive scheme, as afraid of the male tyrants, as of the idea of their own liberation. Overall, the article argues that while the family control mechanisms presented in these and other recent Greek films can be read in response to the contemporary Greek crisis, this need not be the case, as the reach and implications of their critique are far wider.

Lanthimos’s Kynodontas/Dogtooth (2009) has been viewed by audiences, journalists, critics and the Greek political class alike as tapping into the issues that stand at the heart of the contemporary political moment. Reception of the film has often focused on the allegorical family in relation to the malaises of neo-liberalism, austerity and the crisis. My contention is that one of the most crucial aspects of this type of account, the economic well-being and class identity of the family, has strangely failed to be taken into consideration. This article shows that the upper middleclass status of the fictional family is one of the premises of the dystopian world of Dogtooth, and demonstrates the various ways in which the omission of the family’s financial prosperity has been central in the rhetoric used to discuss the film’s ostensible political import.

This article seeks to raise some questions and open a conversation on issues relating to the representation of the mother-figure, of motherhood, and by extension of women in contemporary Greek cinema. Focusing on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas/Dogtooth (2009) and Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence (2013), the article argues that, despite their overall unconventional approach in terms of content and form, both films remain rather conventional in their regressive representations of the character of the mother, who is characterized by her paradoxical conceptualization as an active accomplice without agency within the patriarchal universe of both films. In a broader sense, the article (re)turns to established feminist scholarship in insisting on the ‘woman question’ so often neglected in Greek film criticism more generally, and in relation to the selected films more specifically.

The contemporary cinemas of the European countries directly involved with the current socio-economic crisis, such as Greece and Spain, have become key cultural areas in which urban space and social identity is imagined. Films such as Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010) and Hermosa Juventud/Beautiful Youth (Rosales, 2014) come from different cultural backgrounds and are examples of films that establish a powerful semiotic relationship between aesthetics and politics to give cinematic space a new meaning by tapping into a nexus of ideas about time and subjectivity. The films bear striking similarities in their articulation of the latest economic crisis through images of urban recession and their manifestation of social identity. Commonalities can be detected in stylistic and narrational strategies, thematic motifs, characterization and plot construction, and the use of film technology. This article explores the ways in which these images are related and articulate the current social reality in South European cities narratively, stylistically and formally. Bringing Walter Benjamin’s ‘aestheticizing politics’ of urban space in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘desubjectification’, this article is interested in investigating the links between subjective experience and urban space in South European cities hit by the recession.

Although horror films are quite prevalent in Hollywood as well as in various national cinemas, they are not so in the tradition of Greek cinema. However, there are several Greek horror films as well as film-makers – both amateur and professional – working on the genre. This article provides an overview of contemporary horror cinema in Greece, briefly discussing its background and highlighting a change both in the quantity and quality of Greek horror films after 2010. The article also presents key themes found in Greek horror films and traces threads that connect the films while also noting the ways recent horror films have been influenced by and commented upon the Greek economic and sociopolitical crisis. It situates these films in an emerging culture that surrounds, sustains, and seeks to develop this phenomenon in Greece. Finally, the article is followed by an appendix that offers a chronologically organized indicative list of Greek horror films encountered online during this research from early precursors in the mid-1970s to the more recent production discussed in the article, from 2004 down to the present.

I EPINOISI TOU TOPOU: NOSTALGIA KAI MNIMI STIN POLITIKI KOUZINA (THE INVENTION OF PLACE: NOSTALGIA AND MEMORY IN THE FILM A TOUCH OF SPICE), CHRISTOS DERMENTZOPOULOS (2015) Paperback, Patra: Opportuna, 168 pp., ISBN: 9789605530105, 16.00 €

HISTORY AND NATIONAL IDEOLOGY IN GREEK POSTMODERNIST FICTION, GERASIMUS KATSAN (2013) Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 203+x pp., ISBN: 9781611475947, h/bk, $77.99