The Queer Greek Weird Wave

Ethics, Politics and the Crisis of Meaning

Marios Psaras

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319403090
• eBook ISBN: 9783319403106
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Cinema might not be able to help heal a broken nation but it can definitely help revisit a nation's past, reframe its present and re-imagine its future. This is the first book-length study on what has become an internationally acclaimed strand in contemporary Greek cinema. Psaras examines how this particular trend can be thought of as an integral aesthetic response to the infamous Greek crisis, illuminating its fundamental ideological aspects by means of a queer critique of national politics. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches from queer theory, film theory, ethical philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume sheds light on the way the Greek Weird Wave challenges, deconstructs and re-imagines traditional notions of Greekness, the Greek nation and the Greek patriarchal family. This is achieved through close textual analysis of the subversive thematics and idiosyncratic forms of six films made by some of the best-known and most celebrated contemporary Greek directors including Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) by Yorgos Lanthimos, Strella (2009) by Panos H. Koutras, and Attenberg (2010) by Athina-Rachel Tsangaris. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Marios PsarasThe Queer Greek Weird Wave10.1007/978-3-319-40310-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Meaning of the Crisis or the Crisis of Meaning

Marios Psaras¹

(1)

London, UK

End Abstract

On 6 December 2008 15-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos was killed in cold blood by an armed policeman in the Exarcheia area of central Athens. Within hours angry protesters and demonstrators took to the streets of the Greek capital and put themselves at risk in violent confrontations with the police. The demonstrations soon escalated into a massive series of nation-wide riots that lasted for more than three weeks, paired with solidarity demonstrations and riots in many cities around the world, from London to São Paolo. Expressing ‘a general rage against state arbitrariness and police impunity’, as Kostis Kornetis observes (2010, p. 174), this unprecedented movement in the history of contemporary Greece history, later dubbed the ‘December Events’ of 2008, comprised protests ranging from peaceful sit-ins at Syntagma Square outside the Greek parliament, to the occupation of university buildings, daily clashes with the police and the indiscriminate destruction of public and private property.

The December Events drew heavily on the revolutionary rhetoric of past dissident movements, particularly of student movements both at home and abroad, such as the anti-dictatorial Polytechnic movement in Greece in 1973 and May ’68 in France, in the form of slogans, banners and graffiti that voiced such distinctive demands as ‘Bread, Education, Freedom’ and ‘We don’t ask for much, we want it all!’ However, as Kornetis argues, this polycephalous movement, which in no time managed to gather together such different and, to an extent, even opposing social groups as anarchists, teenagers, immigrants, hooligans, radical intellectuals and unspecified others, soon made clear its intentions to separate itself from the revolutionary legacy of the past, conveying ‘an anti-heroic tone and a rather critical attitude’ (2010, p. 177). A giant graffito cried ‘Fuck May 68, Fight Now!’, while an aggressive leaflet expressed the rioters’ ‘acute resistance against the cannibalization of a historic tradition’, stating ‘the mandarins of harmony, the barons of quiet, law and order call on us to be dialectical. […] We saw them in May, we saw them in LA and in Brixton, we have been watching them for decades licking the bones of the Polytechnic’ (2010, p. 177).

Clearly, the December uprising was an anti-foundational, anti-authoritarian yet heterogeneous movement, which deployed modern technology, particularly social media such as online blogs, Facebook and Twitter, in order to mobilize thousands of discontents across the country, thus turning what could have been an isolated urban incident into a national event or, better, to use Kornetis’s words, ‘from a local to a global, or more fittingly, a “glocal” movement’ (2010, p. 185). Nevertheless, the movement’s profound heterogeneity as well as the absence of clear determinant content made it difficult for analysts and critics to provide meaningful interpretations of its emergence. Stathis Gourgouris for instance notes:

The deeper historical and political significance of the December insurrection may still elude us, though there is no doubt that this event will remain a key reference in radical history and in the history of youth movements worldwide. The hermeneutical work in this case is made harder by the fact that the insurgent actors demanded precisely that we dismantle our ways of interpreting and representing the world. (2010, p. 371)

Indeed, as Kornetis tells us, ‘many analysts called December “a crisis of meaning,” others an identity crisis, a nihilist outburst, or a collective psychodrama, and juxtaposed it to the euphoric utopianism of 1968’ (2010, p. 182). Following Slavoj Žižek’s insight regarding the 2005 French uprising in the Parisian suburbs, Kornetis similarly suggests that, ‘if 1968 was “a revolt with a utopian vision,” 2008, just like 2005 in the banlieues of Paris, was “just an outburst with no pretence to vision”’, a mere ‘insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated ressentiment’ (2010, p. 182). At the same time, however, as Kornetis contends, this visionless outburst reverberated with Kenneth Clark’s analysis of such events as ‘subconscious or conscious invitation to self-destruction […] reflecting the ultimate in self-negation, self-rejection, and hopelessness’ (1970, p. 108). Nevertheless, I would argue that psychoanalytically infused interpretations of self-negation and self-rejection mask theoretically reactionary responses that seek to annihilate or merely fail to conceive of the political ramifications of the events, and thus evade the assumption of political responsibility by precisely reducing the protester to the status of a hopeless irrational rioter.

Disappointingly though unsurprisingly, this was also the official state response to these events, as Greek politicians and especially the conservative government of the time did indeed avoid having to take responsibility for the events. However, the 2008 riots were only the beginning of this establishment’s end, as its scams and deceptions could no longer remain hidden. The 2008 global economic meltdown led to the sudden exposure of all the deficiencies of the Greek economy, which the country’s governments had for years swept under the carpet. Exposed to the inherent anomalies and imbalances of the newly formed European monetary union, which, fearing its own collapse, immediately withdrew all its previous concessions to the Greek economy, the scandalously corrupt Greek economic-political structure had no choice but to condemn the country to a massive and extremely painful material and ideological breakdown. Towards the end of 2010, Greek politicians, in an effort to avoid the country’s default and its exit from the eurozone, asked the so-called Troika, that is the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, for a bailout. In exchange, the Troika demanded the implementation of unprecedented austerity measures that have resulted in an explosive rise in unemployment and a corresponding deterioration in every aspect of people’s daily lives, including such vital areas as the country’s health and educational systems. In the years that have followed, the economic crisis has only further deepened leading to unpredictable social and political turbulence not only in Greece but across Europe, challenging and questioning the neoliberal foundations of its monetary union, as well as the once-lauded vision itself of the united Europe.

Despite the overabundance of public discourses, widely propagated by printed and electronic Greek and foreign media, and the proliferation of public demonstrations and riots in Greece’s capital and major cities, the prevailing affective, as well as cognitive, response to the catastrophe has been characterized by an extreme sense of confusion, frustration and disenchantment with politics for a society that has traditionally been very politicized. In the face of the abrupt calamity, an unparalleled inarticulacy has emerged, reinvoking the nihilistic spirit of the December Events, which has now grown and overrun even the last remaining pockets of optimism. Nevertheless, where language falls short in verbalizing the lived experience, both individual and collective, of this modern Greek tragedy, cinema emerges as the unexpected medium through which the aesthetic provides a paradoxical cognitive and affective access to this unprecedented encounter with the ‘crisis of meaning’. Appropriately, the cinematic movement that is said to articulate this encounter bears the epithet ‘weird’.

‘Is it just coincidence that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema?’ wonders The Guardian journalist Steve Rose in his article ‘Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema’, asking whether ‘the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari [are] a product of Greece’s economic turmoil’ (2011). In this article, Rose makes the case for identifying a ‘Greek Weird Wave’, pointing to ‘the growing number of independent, and inexplicably strange, new Greek films’, including Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009), Panos Koutras’s Strella (2009) and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), which he places at the top of what he calls the ‘strangeness scale’, as well as other ‘slightly less weird’ but equally unorthodox films, such as Yannis Economides’s Knifer (2010), Syllas Tzoumerkas’s Homeland (2010) and Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth (2011). The correlation between the country’s severe financial crisis and a particular corpus of its cinematic production emerges as, indeed, an interesting hypothesis generating a number of epistemological and ethical questions with regard to the meanings and interpretations of the crisis, but most significantly with regard to its social, cultural and affective manifestations. In effect, much as the collapse of the Greek economic-political structure has brought about an unprecedented deterioration in the material quality of Greek people’s daily lives, so it has brought about an irrevocable destabilization and demythologization of established national narratives that have long been central to the production of national identity and history, exposing them as fantasmatic ideological regimes, in many ways accountable for the present catastrophe.

Clearly, such a critique could not but permeate the country’s cinematic production, not only because of cinema’s inherently emancipatory potential, but also because Greek cinema has invariably invested in or critically engaged with the nation’s favorite narratives. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether the so-called ‘Greek Weird Wave’ is indeed a direct ‘product of Greece’s economic turmoil’ (Rose, 2011). For, despite its intrinsic (thematic and formal) alignment with its historical moment, the current cinematic trend draws on a long genealogy of local production that has insistently and self-consciously pitted its oppositional aesthetics against the nation’s official historicity and self-representation, while also being in dialogue with the global art-house cinema and modernist traditions. However, before attempting to explore the cinematic genealogies that frame the emergence of the Greek Weird Wave, it is important to elucidate the ideological context in which it positions its radical rhetoric.

Arguably, the nation’s most characteristic narrative has been the one framed around the problematic triptych ‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’. Despite the undeniable controversy that haunts its historical deployment and appropriation by the dictatorial regimes of the country, this particular triad has in significant ways ideologically framed—if not constituted—the nation’s modernity, underpinning its self-representational lexicon and producing the institutions of family and religion as keystones of modern Greek society, and indeed as the defining core of Greekness. In what follows, I shall investigate the ideological production of the modern Greek national identity and historicity, with a particular focus on the way traditional patriarchal forms of kinship have been inextricably associated with nationalist discourses as well as with the establishment and consolidation of the capitalist construction of the modern Greek state.

‘Fatherland, Religion, Family’: The Birth of a Nation

In his article ‘Inventing Greece’ Peter Bien argues that nationalism ‘acts as bulwark against death, fate, and contingency, providing a way to cheat those everyday forces’ (2005, p. 218). On this he follows Gregory Jusdanis’s interpretation of the metaphysics of nationalism. According to Jusdanis: ‘Nationalist discourse, with its tales of progress, self-fulfillment, and manifest destiny, allows modern individuals to deny their mortality in the face of change. […] [N]ationalism allows [people] to forget contingency’ (1991, p. 165). As Bien suggests, the phenomenon of Western nationalism has replaced religion in the contemporary era, legitimizing even such self-contradictory acts of violence as martyrdom, and thus providing ‘a metaphysical rationale for life and death: a meaning for what would otherwise be our futile, meaningless existence’ (2005, p. 223).

The origins of modern Greek nationalism can be traced back to the late eighteenth century and the movement of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, which, according to Gourgouris, created a new tradition, a new identity involving ‘a social homogeneity, a linguistic tradition, and a geographical continuity: in other words, a native past’ (1996, p. 73). As Bien notes, at the center of this movement was Adamantios Koraïs, a visionary scholar, ‘who amalgamated European Philhellenism’s adulation of pagan Greece with enthusiasm for the French revolution and an utter revulsion against what he considered the superstitions of the Orthodox Church’ (2005, p. 224). Koraïs’s visionary version of modern Greece relied on both an idealized past that would constitute the foundation for the modern Greek nation-state as well as an idealized future, wherein the Western ideas of secular liberalism and humanist enlightenment were to be materialized. In a direct appropriation of the Western philhellenes’ invention of ancient Greece, Koraïs’s idealized and mythicized past obliterated such ‘black pages’ from ancient Greece’s history as slavery, pederasty, internal discord and the brevity of Periclean democracy, which are widely known to us today, yet to a great extent are still silenced in the official Greek national narrative. However, such an idealized version of the past was strategically successful at the time, as Bien notes (2005, p. 226), in conveying to the ‘barbarized Greeks of the Ottoman Empire’ a temporal continuity and a spatial coherence that would unite them under the flag of the War of Independence in the 1820s.

Perhaps Koraïs’s most interesting project was, however, his attempt at a ‘linguistic refinement’ of the ‘Hellenic’ language ‘from the barbarity of Turkish words that kept them chained to their degeneracy’, as Bien notes, a clearly political project that was in accordance with ‘the conviction of his time that language is the essence of nationality’ (2005, p. 226). Koraïs’s katharévousa—literally meaning ‘purified’—was a remarkable example of language construction in the modern era, which sought to bridge the gap between extreme Atticism, a modification of Ancient Greek proposed by the scholars of the time, and the demotic, the vernacular form of Modern Greek. Widely used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state, katharévousa was the reason for the state of diglossia that the Greek language suffered up until 1976, when the demotic was declared as the official language of the Greek state.

As Bien argues, this first form of invented Greek nationality, which was invested in a distortion of both ancient and modern Greek reality, ‘provided at the deepest level a metaphysical rationale for life and death’ (2005, p. 226), not only for the fighters of the Greek War of Independence but also for the future Greek citizens, thus laying the ideological foundations of the modern Greek nation-state. However, alongside the invention of a glorious ancient past and the project of linguistic ‘purification’ and unity, the Orthodox Church was also deployed in the production and consolidation of the modern Greek national identity. Historian Thanos Veremis explains that with the creation of the autocephalous national Church soon after Independence, ‘the state incorporated the Church and its martyrs into the pantheon of Greek heroes and made them integral parts of the national myth. Thus the Church became an accomplice of the state in its mission to spread the cohesive nationalist creed’ (1989, p. 136). Anna Koumandaraki also emphasizes the formative and performative role of the Church in the consolidation of Greek nationalism and the process of national homogenization of the population within the borders of the Greek state. As she explains, according to the first Greek constitution, which was written while the War of National Independence was still under way, Greek citizenship was accorded to ‘all people who were members of the Orthodox Church’ (2002, p. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Meaning of the Crisis or the Crisis of Meaning
• 2. Hardcore: Of the Death Drive
• 3. Dogtooth: Of Narrativity
• 4. Strella: Of Queer Utopias
• 5. Attenberg: Of (Dis-)Orientation
• 6. Alps: Of Hauntology
• 7. Boy Eating the Bird’s Food: Of Response-ability
• 8. Epilogue
• Backmatter