Weird or Not Weird? That Is the Question

In: 49th Drama International Short Film Festival

Film critic Yun-hua Chen examines how a younger generation of Greek filmmakers inherits and transforms the cinematic grammar of the Greek Weird Wave in Free Eliza (Notes on an Anatomical Imperfection), Holterline and The Great Organ.

Almost two decades after Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009) irrevocably altered Greece’s cinematic landscape, its impact, and traces of its style and spirit, can still be discerned in the work of a younger generation of Greek filmmakers. If the term “Greek Weird Wave” was coined by festivals or film critics as a shorthand for understanding the new voices emerging from a country in profound crisis – one in which established modes of socioeconomic and emotional life, largely celebrated throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, were suddenly confronted with their abrupt and brutal collapse, while a new way of facing the world had yet to be established – then the Greek Weird Wave was that generation of filmmakers’ way of reimagining, deconstructing and reinterpreting the society in which they lived, making it strange, sometimes to an extreme, so that a life stranger than fiction might begin to make sense, and surrealism might take root in both body and soul. And if “Greek Weird Wave” was a shorthand categorisation, even a form of pigeonholing born of a particular era, young filmmakers in Greece today – hardly shying away from an affiliation or identification with it, not least because the socioeconomic conditions remain in many respects similar to those experienced by the previous generation, if not worse – nevertheless continue to use it as a lens through which to look at their surroundings.

In the international competition at the Drama International Short Film Festival, this affinity with, or understanding of, the Greek Weird Wave can be discerned in all the Greek films, perhaps with the exception of Vicky Anastasiadou’s more classically social-realist Wheel to Live: Alexandra Matheou’s Free Eliza (Notes on an Anatomical Imperfection), Roxani Krimizi and Michalis Kimonas’s The Great Organ, and Alexandra Ntelitheou’s Holterline. In some cases, science fiction provides the framework through which the filmmakers imagine a world of au-delà – a world in which temporal linearity itself can no longer be taken for granted, and where one can be literally wired up and sent on a journey into the unconscious, as in Holterline. Or it can be a world in which machines have their own ways of communicating with singular human beings through their respective roars and rustlings, and where a gigantic doughnut-shaped dokodemo-like door can transport two protagonists who do not fit in, as in The Great Organ. This time and space beyond the immediate here and now function almost as a mental state, a form of metaphor and allegory historically ingrained in the region’s cultural imagination. In these films, which depart from the world we presently inhabit only to arrive somewhere bizarre yet strangely familiar, the focus falls on those who exist outside society’s norms: whether a young woman with Tourette syndrome, a man who befriends the machines in the factory where he works in The Great Organ, or a young woman who cannot bring herself to smile in Free Eliza.

In Holterline, the protagonist Angeliki, played by Angeliki Papoulia, one of the iconic faces of the Greek Weird Wave, embarks on a 24-hour journey into the unconscious while wearing a Holter heart monitor, as a way of confronting her grief after the death of her father. In a Tenet-like manoeuvre somewhat à la Christopher Nolan, the film opens with Angeliki walking backwards, accompanied by the extradiegetic sound of an alarm clock ringing irregularly. As the continuum of time and space becomes increasingly convoluted, the film attempts to create a mélange of dream space, temporal reversal and a form of therapy enacted through a return to the unconscious, while a goldfish circles inside a glass bowl that Angeliki attempts to catch with her bare hands, a yellow bird is picked up and given CPR, and Angeliki walks across an immense, empty green meadow with a solitary tree at its centre – a tree that appears in the film both as a miniature model and at full, real-life scale. Its formal experiments, the associations carried by Papoulia’s presence, and its deepening exploration of father-daughter attachment all seem to nod towards the earlier Weird Wave’s strategy of using the strange to touch upon something deeply and intimately felt.

The Great Organ, on the other hand, focuses on two marginalised characters: a young woman with uncontrollable tics caused by Tourette syndrome, and a young man on the autism spectrum who is bullied by his colleagues at the factory where he works. Both attend a school for people with special needs, and gradually develop an affection for each other. Here, time remains linear, but it is space that is transformed, transforming and transformative – in the factory, a gigantic doughnut-shaped passageway becomes a point of escape for those who do not belong, transparent and bioluminescent like the deep-sea creatures the pair have watched together at the cinema; meanwhile, the spaces of the factory and hospital are reminiscent of Attenberg.

The most classically “Weird Wave” of the films is Free Eliza, whose protagonist, Eliza, is physically unable to smile yet works at a hotel resort where employees are required to maintain a permanent smile in front of the guests. This paradox becomes a metaphor for a world that worships positivity and superficial happiness, with the resort functioning as a place where everything is packaged as a Disneyland-like paradise on earth, every need is satisfied and there are nothing but smiling faces. In voice-over, Eliza lists her dream jobs, recounts an anecdote about a dolphin’s smile being an illusion, names things that no longer exist and things she likes. And then comes perhaps the scene that most conspicuously inherits the legacy of the Greek Weird Wave: Eliza works a shift as an instructor of group water aerobics to Alexia’s Kalimera, standing and dancing water aerobics in front of a palm tree and, with her resolutely smileless face, guiding the hotel guests through the entire song before declaring: “That was great, girls. I couldn’t be happier. Good job.”

In a way, the Weird Wave has shifted from being a historically situated response to crisis into an inherited cinematic grammar through which younger filmmakers continue to perceive contemporary Greece. It has become a grammar that keeps the national cinema grounded in its own reality, provides fertile ground for reworking its forms, allows symbols, signs and metaphors to persist across generations, while at the same time renewing that grammar and transforming it through the passage of time and the arrival of fresh ideas.

Weird or Not Weird? That Is the Question