The “Escape” in and of Greek Weird Wave Films – Reflections on National Ethos and Stable “European” Aesthetics
The theme of “escape” is very potent across Greek Weird Wave films. The escape is usually shown and discussed through characters’ storylines, but the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers’ unique cinematic languages that breaks many conventions also act as an “escape” of some sorts against the existing, hierarchical systems of aesthetics and cinematic languages.
The films I have chosen to include in this essay are Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), and Miss Violence (2013). They are prominent examples among the Greek Weird Wave films that foreground escape in their protagonists’ storylines and express these themes through cinematography and sound design. Special attention will be paid on the films’ endings, since they all have as ambiguous and looming sense of closure, whether the escape succeeds or not. This essay will also contextualize these films in the current Greek socio-economic reality and study how they reflect the national ethos and sentiments in contemporary Greece – wanting to escape the current status quo and the incapacity to do so.
The second part of the essay will transition into discussing these films in bigger picture – the “escape” of Greek Weird Wave cinema. Close attention will be paid to the formal aspect of these films – the unique cinematic language and aesthetic system – and how it relates to west Europe’s cinematic conventions. It is a common characteristic within this “wave” of films that the actors’ performance tend to be dry, rigid and “unnatural”. Another example of unique Greek Weird Wave aesthetics would be the way camera frames human bodies as fragmented or “beheaded”. What points are these films making in relation to Greek identity and mimicry of the other “Europe”? Have Greek Weird Wave films escaped the control of the “superior” west European aesthetics? These questions will be answered by the end of the essay. The findings are not singular to Greek national reality or Greek cinema, and will hopefully inspire reflections on other national cinemas as well.
First, the character set-ups in Dogtooth, Alps, and Miss Violence and the characters’ relations resemble the structures of Greek society and the dramatization points toward the problems within the structures. In Dogtooth and Miss Violence, there are striking similarities in the character set-up, which is the classic nuclear family structure. The story of Dogtooth focuses on one seemingly picture-perfect family and its dealing with the crisis of unwanted foreign influences, when the father decided to outsource a woman to fulfill his son’s sexual needs. Although Dogtooth avoids hinting on direct suggestions of the societal context or time period, metaphorically, it is not hard to grasp the story being an epitome of contemporary Greece’s xenophobic sentiments on immigration and the refugee crisis. In Miss Violence, the family deals with the unexpected suicide of a young girl, who later gets revealed in the film to be a prospective child prostitute. It is a dramatic representation of many dark sides of the Greek society including the government’s (patriarch’s) inability to deal with the collective depression and the inability to escape the economic flow (vicious cycle of child prostitution). The story of Alps focuses not on a family, but on a similar, hierarchical structure – a company named Alps that provide a special paid service to perform as specific deceased people to their loved ones. The singular yet stereotypical patriarchal power structure within the company reflects how Greece still retains its roots in misogyny even though it has regenerated many parts of itself and become a “makeshift” society after the economic crisis. The “families” featured in these films provide productive grounds for metaphors. These families are incestuous, violent yet unrecognized by the outside, and in general disconnected to the rest of the society. The films provide an exaggerated and horrifying analogy – incest – to the increasing xenophobia brewing in Greek society and presents the potential consequences to a culture’s inward-looking mentality.
The storylines of the characters feature different types of escapes, and the unavailability of an exit for everyone involved. In Dogtooth, the older daughter, “Bruce”, begins to plan for an escape after watching Hollywood movies brought in by an outsider. However, without the proper language or emotional response for processing her pain and repression, she knocks off her own dog tooth and escapes her house and hides in the car trunk. Without access to knowledge outside of what she’s been told by her father, she does not know how to leave this household without a car. The escape in Miss Violence is just as bleak and pessimistic if not more. It is a rule that young girls after age 11 will be pimped out to have sex with older male customers to make income for the family. The only way that Angeliki knows how to escape from this horrible cycle is to kill herself on her 11th birthday. Death is the only way she knows how to escape. In Alps, we are presented with another narrative rendition of the same theme – escape. Mont Rosa, a worker in Alps who is violently mistreated by her superior Mont Blanc devises her own escape by playing the role of the young tennis player on off-hour, because it is the only time she feels protected and affirmed, even if it means she has to pretend to be a different person. The escape here is subtler and perhaps more pathetic. When one is unable to be accepted, they choose to pretend to be someone else in order to escape the existing system of never ending injustice.
In these films, the ambiguous outcomes of characters’ escape add another layer to the mix. In Dogtooth, the looming last shot never reveals whether the car trunk gets opened or not. In Miss Violence, audience are left wondering about the fate of the family after the murder of the patriarch. Alps ends with a haunting scene of the gymnast dancing to pop music, though it is right after Mont Rosa gets dragged out of her fake family’s house. The suspense in Miss Violence and Dogtooth intentionally rejects providing the pleasure of an enclosed narrative. According to Marios Psaras’ essay “Epilogue”, the defiance of narrativity “undermines the referentiality of language and images, and exposes the futility as well as the oppressiveness underlying the discourse that seek to infuse time and space with meaning.” When the ending presents the audience with neither a plot resolution or a restored moral ground, new, infinite openings of self-interpreted meanings emerge in the “negation of meaningful closure”. In Psaras’ essay “Dogtooth: Of Narrativity”, he argues that “as the audience slumps into the abyss of meaninglessness, as we surrender to the excitements and perils of irony, narrativity, this incessant pursuit and ultimate real of meaning production, is, unequivocally, both thematically and formally dismantled.” Perhaps the unique closures employed by many Greek Weird Wave filmmakers goes beyond dismantlement. It can inspire and make people embrace new vocabularies of cinema, through which new potentiality of literary value and open, ideological awakening come. In Dogtooth, it does not really matter for the audience to know if Bruce successfully escapes from the car trunk and her home, because when she comes out, it’ll be crystal clear to her that this is just another system with a different set of language that is no less ideologically manipulated. In Miss Violence, the director’s refusal in giving us a glimpse at the “matriarch’s” rule makes us step back and reflect on our own lived realities – is gender the ultimate answer to our suppression? What else, if not gender, is the root of the issue to violence and depression? If we are given a clear ending, then the various paths our reflections can take will be heavily reduced into one “truth” that the director believes in. In Alps, the pop music dance sequence purposefully confuses the audience with their mechanisms of empathy. The gymnast has gotten what she’s always wanted – to be allowed to dance to pop music. However, parallel to that, is Mont Rosa’s loss of control over her own identity and the need to insert meaning onto her own life by stealing someone else’s identity and social relationships. This ending disrupts and challenges the notion of a stable identity, and evokes new meanings.
In most cases, the Greek Weird Wave films’ storylines work as disruptive, innovative and open-ended reflections of the national ethos and current Greek socio-economic reality. The feeling of wanting to escape the current status quo and the incapacity to do so resonates well in many works across the Greek Weird Wave. In both Dogtooth and Miss Violence, a family is very much in the center of representation. Psaras articulates one of the structural reasoning behind this in the essay “Dogtooth: of narrativity” that “individual’s own material and emotional survival is always already negotiable and subjected to the given familial political economy.” A family structure symbolizes the bigger structure of power and society. On a grander scale, the escape occurs as a potentially better option not only because of the downfall of Greek economy, but also the dangerous dictating patriarchal norm. Psaras further discusses that “narrativity emerges as a pivotal factor in the production and sustainability of particular systems of hierarchical power relations.” Therefore, the rebellion against the conventions of film medium is in itself a necessary move to challenge the normalcy of the status quo.
In Alps, the focus of the narrative centers this mysterious company named Alps, which capitalizes on the recently deceased people’s loved ones. They provide an eccentric service of actors acting as the deceased people to preserve the feeling of them being still alive. This strange, makeshift system in a way symbolizes Greece’s status in being a makeshift economy. Within Alp’s economy system, however, disturbingly oppressive violence exists between different hierarchies. For example, the scene in Alps where Mont Blanc hits Mont Rosa with a club when she’s not performing the way he told her to perform. The gendered oppression very much still prevails in this “new” makeshift DIY economy. This scene also illustrates how democracy is implemented in the Greek society in a hypocritical manner. Mont Blanc asks Mont Rosa to guess a color and the consequence of the false answer would be a punishment. However, no matter what answer she gives, he is going to hit her. The illusory sense of agency before exercising unjust and violence is typical in many democratic societies including Greece. After experiencing the junta dictatorship, Greece and its artists are particularly sensitive to detecting power structures. Furthermore, the unfair systematic violence and contracts that Greece is forced to agree to with clear consequence of its national power being suppressed can build into this sentiment of lacking agency and pessimism. Perhaps that’s why in Alps, we see Mont Rosa having no power in choosing an alternative path for herself other than holding on to this chance to pretend to be someone other than herself. Again, in Dogtooth, Bruce has little agency of her own because of the knowledge and conditioning she’s received from her father, the powerful patriarch. In Miss Violence, the children of the grandfather seem to symbolize Greece or Greece’s self-projection – a victim with no choice other than self-destruction. The national sentiment of losing control and self-victimization is reflected through all these powerless female characters.
The Greek Weird Wave cinema also attempts to escape. It is escaping from the cinematic conventions and traditional cinematic aesthetics. The “weird” in its name implies a certain degree of eccentricity and deviance to these films that are worth looking into in relation to Greece as an integral cultural production hub within the contemporary cinema landscape, despite Greece’s decay in economy.
Some distinct features of the Greek Weird Wave are “unnatural” performance, unconventional framing of cinematography, and unflinching on-screen violence. In his essay “Attenberg: Of (Dis-)Orientation”, Psaras argues that these cinematic techniques used are to contest the familiarity of a narrative, the unquestionability of the norm. For example, in all three films listed, actors are all arranged to stand in the same line parallel to each other at many points of the films, as if they are intentionally displaying themselves in front of the camera, which is unnatural to how people normally position themselves in daily lives. The term “dis-orientation” that Psaras talks about in his essay refers to the way filmmakers use “subversive rhetoric against familiar narratives of the body.” He also states that by employing this method, the films “redirects our attention toward different objects, those that are less proximate or even those that deviate or are deviant.” The films, Alps especially, foreground the act of performing in the telling of the story. The unnatural performances make the audience very aware that they are watching a film that is created by certain people, and are subjective truths to them. In a way, this technique successfully opens up the room for audience’s independent judgements and interpretations instead of dictating the meanings of a story. The cinematography works in tandem with the performance. Fragmented bodies framed in the picture in all three films redirects our attention in the narrative situations and distance the viewers from the characters by granting them an observer’s perspective. For example, in Dogtooth, the sex scene between the hired woman and the son starts with their heads being framed out of the picture. As audience, it is not an inviting scene for our voyeuristic gaze, and instead, it encourages us to observe this transactional sex activity with a cold, clinical eye. The cinematography achieves a de-normalization effect and encourages the audience to re-examine their reality and it defies the conventions of how certain narratives are framed, such as glorified sex scenes. The violence portrayed in all three films are horrifying. In Miss Violence, the unbearable 3-minute rape and incest scene shakes up a lot of the audience members. With a cold observing eye, the camera exhibits the limits of human decency and the lack thereof. Perhaps it is unnecessarily violent and dark, feeding into the audience’s voyeuristic gaze. Or perhaps it’s challenging audience’s voyeuristic gaze, making the audience an accomplice and punishing them for staying with the film despite it being repulsive.
The affect of these three films is strong and subversive. There is little attempt from the filmmakers to try to please the audience or make the viewing experience easily digestible. It is radical in comparison to mainstream European and Hollywood cinema, whose main purpose is to entertain. It is safe to say that the Greek Weird Wave is a cinema of awakening and a cinema of difficult reflection on the current status quo around us.
Works Cited
Psaras, Marios. “Dogtooth: Of Narrativity.” Queer Greek Weird Wave: Ethics, Politics and the Crisis of Meaning, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 63–89.
Psaras, Marios. “Epilogue.” Queer Greek Weird Wave: Ethics, Politics and the Crisis of Meaning, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 217-223.
Aleksić, Tatjana. “Sex, Violence, Dogs and the Impossibility of Escape: Why Contemporary Greek Film Is so Focused on Family.” Journal of Greek Media & Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 155–171.
Chalkou, Maria. “A New Cinema of ‘Emancipation’: Tendencies of Independence in Greek Cinema of the 2000s.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012, pp. 243–261.
Filmography
Lanthimos, Yorgos. Dogtooth. 2009.
Lanthimos, Yorgos. Alps. 2011.
Avranas, Alexandros. Miss Violence. 2013.