Greek Dialogues Online - Greek Weird Wave: a Movement or a Moment?

"Is it just coincidence that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema?" In his article "Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema," The Guardian journalist Steve Rose asked whether "the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari [are] a product of Greece’s economic turmoil..." (2011).

The correlation between the country’s severe financial crisis and a particular corpus of its cinematic production emerged as an interesting hypothesis back in the early 2010s, generating numerous questions about the meanings and interpretations of the crisis, most significantly with regard to its cultural manifestations.

In May's Greek Dialogues Online seminar, Dr Marios Psaras (Cultural Counsellor at the Cyprus High Commission and Co-President of EUNIC, London) revisits landmark films that have been identified as part of the ‘weird corpus’ of contemporary Greek cinema, such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), Panos Koutras’s Strella (2009) and Athina-Rachel Tsangaris’s Attenberg (2010). Dr Psaras reflects on reading “weird” as “queer” and identifies thematic and formal disenchantment with traditional heteropatriarchal values and the representation that guided the national imaginary and experience. He then turns to later works, such as Alexandros Voulgaris’s Winona (2019) and Tonia Mishialis’ Pause (2018), to evaluate the after-effects of the original wave.

Topic: Greek Dialogues Online - Greek Weird Wave: a Movement or a Moment?
Time: Tuesday, 10th May, 2022 at 06:30 PM BST

Join Zoom Meeting
https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95511629021?pwd=SnZWS0Y0NDZYNTFEYWVQbUFRbDFsZz09

Meeting ID: 955 1162 9021
Passcode: 637633

: The Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies Channel

Facebook: CCGS Cambridge | Facebook