Greek Weird Wave: A Presentation of Weirdness as Socio-cultural Critic
Since the appearance of the film Dogtooth in 2009 and then at several international film festivals, audiences began to pay attention to the development of Greek films. Yorgos Lanthinos, the director, did present an unusual, or even very strange, film to the audience. We will see a family consisting of a father, mother, son, and two pretty odd daughters. They never left the house for years except for the father, who had to work. In contrast, the other four members constantly interact inside the house without knowing what is happening in the outside world. The only outsider allowed to enter the house is Christina (she is also the only person with a name in the film), a security guard assigned by the father to provide for the boy’s sexual needs.
It was not enough; even their father taught them that the outside world was terrible, and they could only leave the house when their dogtooth had fallen out and — if this could happen — grew again. The children are given new vocabulary daily with its, meaning; that the sea is the soft couch, the pussy is the headlight, and the keyboard is the pussy. They are accustomed to licking when expressing their desire for something. Cats are considered hazardous animals, and we will see scenes of killing cats without censorship. The two girls also learned about identity only after seeing the VCR that Christina had lent, and the older brother decided to name himself Bruce. Also, the father trained the four members of his family to be obedient dogs. At the film’s end, we will see the four standing on their hands and feet while barking like a house guard dog.
Other aspects of this film are also quite different (not to mention weird) from the film in general. The characters act stiffly and ultimately unnaturally, speak with asynchronous expressions, and interact awkwardly with each other. The camera tends to be static with an unchanging focus even though, in one dialogue, two characters talk alternately. The whole thing, from the storyline to the presentation, is odd within Dogtooth. No doubt, at the 2009 Cannes festival, he won the Un Certain Regard award.
Shortly after the release of Dogtooth, several other Greek films appeared that presented similar oddities. For example, Attenberg (2010) is a film about Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who is quite disturbed by the human touch. He was very close to his father, fond of things from the past like documentaries from David Attenborough and music from Suicide.
In the early scenes of this film, we will see Marina and her friends kissing in unnatural ways as an experiment on their curiosity. For two minutes, they tried different ways to enjoy — or at least explore the sensations of — his tongue meeting. All presented with banal without feeling as sexually exciting scenes. In addition, there is also a conversation about how Marina often imagines her father completely naked but without a penis. Also, just like Dogtooth, this film presents stiff acting, expressionless expressions, strange movements (which might be called dances anyway) from some characters, and camera movements that tend to be static.
These two films made Steve Rose dub Greek films with strange aesthetics and stories like Greek Weird Wave. Strange in that they do not use the styles commonly used in films in general and tend to make the audience feel confused and uncomfortable when watching them. While Lars Von Trier, one of the founders of the Dogme 95 wave, said that unique films should be like pebbles stuck between our shoes and socks, Greek Weird Wave presents disturbing uniqueness in another way; it is more like the muddy ground which we step on without any preparation: disgusting but not hurting us.
Mario Psaras, a Greek scholar, stated that the Greek Weird Wave (who also prefers to call it the Greek Queer Wave / Queer Greek Weird Wave to explain its strangeness which is more loose and free to interpret) is a political movement and full of criticism of social conditions of Greece itself. It was born after the December 6, 2008, tragedy that killed Alex Grigoropoulos, a student killed by police in Exarcheia, the central Athens area, which became a haven for anarchists and antifascists. According to Psaras, Greek Weird Wave films respond to this (government brutality and socio-cultural problems in Greece) by making films that are slightly different from the standard and are so multi-interpreted to destroy the established order of signs. You could say what this film does is an attempt to create a crisis of meaning. Yorgos Lanthimos himself, in an interview, once said, “We just do things without explaining why.”
In the Greek Weird Wave, minor themes such as family are often chosen, according to Psaras, because the Greek concept proclaimed by the orthodox church is centred on the family as an organizational model called Nikokirei. This family system also influences the political organization in the country, making it so corrupt and led by a handful of families with nepotism that is hard to avoid. The depravity of Greece can be said not only economically but also spiritually, where it is difficult to explain what a Greek is like in the midst of a culture shaped by the state and the orthodox church.
What is interesting about this wave is this: it tells the stories of marginalized people while railing against the problems in Greek society. Although they do not directly state what social problems are being discussed, the audience is slowly made to understand through strange and disturbing things. Also, on the other hand, we even see how sex — unlike in Hollywood films — is a banal thing in Greek films; watching people have sex here is as common as watching someone mowing the grass in their yard.
Moving on from Dogtooth (2009) and Attenberg (2010), Greek films consistently present strange and disturbing stories to the audience. Alps (2011), which Yorgos Lanthinos also direct, tells the story of people who work as substitutes for dead family members; this film seems to focus more on how these people work and try to be abandoned people rather than on the grief of the client’s family.
Meanwhile, in the following few Lanthinos films, such as The Lobster (2015) and Killing Sacred Deer (2017), I find it difficult to be categorized as part of this wave. Both have used excellent and reasonable cinematography and have gained tremendous popularity because of their enormous budgets. These films are pretty different from other Greek films, which tend to have to be creative due to lack of funds and survive from festival to festival with their uniqueness. Also, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Director Attenberg (2010) and Chevalier (2015) that poverty and lack of funds are coercion that allows them to create charming oddities.
In its development, Greek films since 2014 do look more developed even though they survived from festival to festival. Chevalier (2015), Suntan (2016), and Pity (2018), for example, have given the audience a slicker look while maintaining what their predecessors have done: tragic stories that can also be enjoyed as a dark comedy and sex scenes, which is neither exciting nor romantic at all, and very little coverage of marginalized individuals or families. As Psaras said, their social critique has consistently persisted as a crisis of meaning that undermines the signs established in Greek society.
