Revisiting contemporary Greek film cultures: Weird Wave and beyond

This article reframes the critical discourse around the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ using an approach informed by theoretical work on cosmopolitanism. Focussing on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) and Athena-Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), the critical interpretation of the role of the family is radically rethought. I argue that the privileging of allegorical readings of the family in the Weird Wave films constitutes a form of critical denial of the deeply problematic and specifically Greek ways in which the family (dys)functions. I challenge the absolute and exclusive power that the Greek ‘crisis’ holds over interpretations and evaluations of Weird Wave films, which discursively displaces the problems of the family to broader sociopolitical frameworks. In reclaiming the importance of literal readings of the films, I reposition them as manifestations of a specific cosmopolitan disposition, that of introspection, a process of self-examination that overcomes denial. In turn, the critical reframing of the films outlines the contours of a complex agonistics of introspective cosmopolitanism, an inward investigative disposition that is dialectically linked to cosmopolitan positioning. Jean François Lyotard’s 1989 theorization of the oikos (home/house) provides a conceptual model for understanding the family (oikogeneia), which, in its Greek specificities, is central to the films under discussion.

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Alternative hybrid media in Greece: An analysis through the prism of political economy

Papadopoulou

2020

Journal of Greek Media &Amp; Culture

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This article explores Greek alternative media, records their hybridity and analyses them under the prism of political economy. Drawing theoretically on researchers who emphasize the elusiveness and heterogeneity of alternative media and examining them on account of their ownership structures, production practices and media content, I propose their conceptualization as a vibrant organism in a constant dialectic relationship with mainstream media. These ‘alternative hybrid media’ may borrow people, ideas and practices from mainstream media, but they do not compromise their values for the pursuit of profit or political power. This article focuses on Efimerida ton Syntakton, the country’s first national cooperative newspaper, which emerged out of a collective of laid-off journalists and constitutes a representative example of the hybridity that characterizes the Greek alternative media ecosystem. Based on interviews with journalists and secondary data, this article aims to point to the defining characteristics of ‘alternative hybrid media’ and generate a deeper insight into the complex area of alternative media.

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Revisiting contemporary Greek film cultures: Weird Wave and beyond

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Cited by 3 publications

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Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European Filmmaking: Greece and Scandinavia in Focus

Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European Filmmaking: Greece and Scandinavia in Focus

Introspective cosmopolitanism: The family in the Greek Weird Wave

Alternative hybrid media in Greece: An analysis through the prism of political economy

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