Abstract
This chapter focuses on a specific type of recent filmmaking using the concept of biopolitics as its main analytical tool. There is, Papanikolaou argues, a “Cinema of Biopolitics” that reflects on how systems of power manage groups of people (from a family to a population) and the bodies of individuals. It is a cinema equally sensitive to forms of response, to noise, unease, and subversion. In order to speak about what is certainly a much larger trend in contemporary world cinema, this chapter turns to the example of recent Greek films (especially those by Lanthimos, Avranas, Makridis, Tsangari, Tzoumerkas, and Koutras), which critics have termed “The Greek Weird Wave.” Since 2009, these films have engaged with and provoked discussion about issues such as the politics of life and death, national identity and belonging, kinship and gender, modernization and the public sphere, social disturbance, surveillance, and control. Contrary to expectation, the Greek films in question undermined a tradition of cinematic realism and seemed to be proposing a new form of capitalist realism, a biopolitical realism. They merged micro-stories of precarity, control, and resistance with subtle references to the macro-histories of exploitation, uneven economic development, disinvestment, and revolt. Moreover, they turned their focus on the body, as both a discipline and desiring machine, but also as a platform for a poetics of resistance.
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Notes
- 1.
I am paraphrasing here a line of thought that has been prevalent in recent affect theoretical approaches to film, some more phenomenological (as Sobchack 2000; Shaviro 1993) which argue that the body responds before it makes conscious reflective thought of what is being watched on screen, and others more specifically influenced by Deleuze, which theorize on an assemblage of image-sound-space-time-viewer, as does beautifully, for instance, Pepita Hesselberth (2012). Recent discussion on New Extremism makes use of both such approaches (and other affect theory arguments), in order to return to what for many seems an obvious statement: New extremism exploits cinema’s ability to make you feel before thinking (Horeck and Kendall 2011).
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- 3.
A similar, very measured account of the thematic threads of the Greek New Wave, is proposed by Anna Poupou and Afroditi Nikolaidou (2017), who take into account both the Greek and international reception of these films.
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A very well-known indication of that interweaving was the rise in the power and social presence of the neo-fascist group Golden Dawn, who supported outright racist politics, glorified the bodies of “Greeks” and targeted the bodies of “others,” especially the bodies of racially marked refugees and migrants. However, Golden Dawn’s discourse (and its significant sudden rise in popularity) fits in with a larger biopolitical discourse, often also articulated by mainstream politicians and official policies (see, among many others, Kotouza 2019).
- 5.
The economic and sociopolitical crisis that started in Greece after 2008 has had many different turns, has seen diverse developments, and in many ways is still with us at the moment these lines are written, even if it has been officially declared over. We cannot, therefore, easily talk about a monolithic, concrete period. Having said that, there is a public discourse of a prolonged state of emergency, a political debate about it, a certain understanding of it as a historical period, and an iconography, that have resulted in producing a narrative of the Greek Crisis as more concrete and shaped. It is to this shaping narrative of our lives that I, along with many others, refer to as the Greek Crisis, with a capital C.
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The insights of this analysis notwithstanding, Karalis seems to be adopting without nuance the narrative that the Greek governments (which he takes as single, unified actors) kept offering money that was non-existent, and thus created a state in implosion.
- 7.
Note Attenberg’s impact on the more recent Park (dir. Sophia Exarchou, 2016), and the internationally successful shorts Copa Loca (dir. Christos Massalas, 2017), Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (dir. Jacquelin Lentzou, 2018), and The Distance Between the Sky and Us (dir. Vassilis Kekatos, 2019).
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Papanikolaou, D. (2020). Greek Weird Wave; Or, on How to Do a Cinema of Biopolitics. In: Boletsi, M., Houwen, J., Minnaard, L. (eds) Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_11
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