Theo Angelopoulos: patricide or respect

.


Theo Angelopoulos and contemporary Greek cinema: Patricide or
respect?

An internationally acclaimed auteur with a distinct personal style,
modernist Theo Angelopoulos made his mark for his epic transpositions of
ancient Greek myths to modern settings. Such transpositions are central
within his films (Létoublon, 2001:31). On the other hand, grand
metanarratives like Marxism, typical according to Lyotard of modernity
(Lyotard, 1979/1984: 36-37), form the basis of Angelopoulos' political
statements, along with family woes of heroes inspired by Greek mythology.
However Angelopoulos, discussing his epic The Travelling Players (1975),
has argued that the way he resolves the contradiction of both portraying
his heroes as part of the ancient myth of the Oresteia and simultaneously
historicizing them, by placing them in a specific historical period, is the
following: "My heroes' motives are different (than those of the tragic
heroes[1] and the ideas that motivate them belong to another historical
space. It is "History" which intervenes, alters and changes the heroes.
There are contradictions inside the heroes' characters, but they don't stem
from the psychological level. Their actions are not amenable to
psychological interpretation". Thus Angelopoulos sets up a modernist text
in which spectators are summoned to become producers of new interpretations
of history, yet within the framework of the grand metanarrative of Marxism.
Films like Ulysses' Gaze of 1995, where an ex-Marxist, tormented by his own
family past and the loss of his ideology after the fall of the Iron
Curtain, reinvents himself as a modern Ulysses travelling around the war-
ridden Balkans of the time, are linear representations either of oedipal
trajectories or of the filmmaker's own self-conscious subjectivity.
Although the narrative in Ulysses' Gaze is set in a postmodern, war-torn
Balkan peninsula, the fact that it is structured around the self-conscious
gaze of a director identifying with the main character is typical of a
modernist, essentially bourgeois signifying practice (Jameson, 1997/2012:
82) and seems to oppose the optimism of avant-garde filmmakers (Komninos,
2001: 107). What, however, may be said to act as catharsis in Angelopoulos
is poetry, as exemplified by the film An Eternity and a Day (1998), where
the main character finds a bigger, redemptive purpose through his exchange
of poetic words with a boy and his quest for meaning in the work of 19th
Century Greek poet Dionysios Solomos (Stathi, 2012: 22). The catharsis of
An Eternity and a Day culminates in an epic homecoming reminiscent of
Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), where the main character returns to his
own roots.

Angelopoulos chronicles in his unique style (slow, extended, camera
movements and a lyrical sense of the relation between landscape and cinema)
this tragic trajectory, mixing the personal and local with the grandest
historical narrative. His later films foresaw and reflected on the rise of
neo-liberalism and global capitalism, which has led to the current Greek
crisis. The Greek tragedy becomes the canvas for Angelopoulos filmic
poetry. As Andrew Horton has said Theo Angelopoulos is one of the
preeminent modernist auteurs of the last century and thus a major
influence for the new generation of the auteurs of Contemporary Greek
cinema.



It is remarkable that in the period 2008-13, a number of young
directors have emerged who made their mark in the big festivals, Venice and
Cannes, and even in the case of Dogtooth was shortlisted for the Oscar for
best foreign film. Strella (2009) took the Berlin Film festival by
surprise. There was a film by Panos Koutras daring to present a tale of
Oedipus transvestite but with style-with undertones of Fassbinder- that was
completely original. Dogtooth (2010) by George Lanthimos with a strange
tale of incest and incarceration took the prize for best film in Cannes, Un
certain regarde, section. Attenberg (2011) by Athena Tsangaris won the
award for best female actress (Arianne Labede) in Venice film festival.
Plato's academy (2011) by Philippos Tsitos won the Silver leopard in
Locarno and Unfair world , Adikos kosmo (2012) in San Sebastian. Miss
Violence (2012) by Alexandros Avranas won the Silver Lion for best director
in Venice and his male protagonist Themis Panou, the Volpi Cup for best
male actor. I propose that these films of contemporary Greek Cinema can be
grouped in three major trends: the "Weird", the social realist and the
modern flaneurs. My question is to what extent the auteurs belonging to
these trends are committing a symbolic patricide or tow the line of the
great master Theo Angelopoulos.


I


The "Weird Wave"


It seems pertinent to compare the four "Weird Wave" films with films
by modernist Theo Angelopoulos, a defining filmmaker of the so-called
period of the "New Greek Cinema". We will show that, compared to the
modernist films of Angelopoulos, these four films mark a departure from the
classical oedipal scenario, both as the driving force of their narratives
and in their portrayal of family woes. Finally, we will demonstrate that,
through postmodern practices like pastiche and the use of language forms
like gay slang and non- or preverbal expression often mimicking animal
cries, the four "Weird Wave" films do not only defy poetry, crucial in both
Greek literature and the auteurs of New Greek Cinema, but they also
ultimately challenge oedipal family structures and language-based
narrativity.


















Thus the contemporary Greek "Weird Wave" seems to combine an adoption
of post-modern ways of expression[2] with a reversal of oedipal
scenario[3]. While oedipal conflicts are central within its structure, they
seem to be challenged in a number of "postmodern" ways. In the Greek "Weird
Wave" subjects are, in postmodern style, desubstantialized (Stam, 2000:
301), as the wholeness of old egos, including that of the auteur,
transmutes into a fractured construct fashioned by the media. This media-
conscious cinema is largely ironic towards its characters (Stam, 2000:304)
and linear narrative is challenged by pastiche, probably the most typical
expression of postmodernism (Stam, 2000: 304). Pastiche is here understood
as non-ironic mimicry and random cannibalization and mixture of styles and
genres of the past (Jameson, 1991:17), confounding highbrow and popular
culture (Huyssen, 1986: 216-217). And finally, traditional language in the
Greek "Weird Wave" defies narration by diffusing into non-verbal or
preverbal seemingly unconnected and not necessarily communicable language
games (Lyotard, 1979/1984).


Strella is at first look a narrative, plot-driven film with an oedipal
scenario. After 14 years in prison, Yorgos, a middle-aged man, begins a
sexual relationship with Strella (Mina Orfanou), a young transsexual.
Yorgos had been jailed for having killed his nephew, who had sexually
assaulted his son. In the course of the film it turns out that Strella is
actually Yorgos' son, the one that had been assaulted, now a transsexual,
and that she had purposefully pursued a sexual relationship with her
father. When Yorgos finds out, a clash occurs between father and child.
Eventually though, in what seems to be an ironic happy end, defying any
known resolution of the Oedipus complex, father and child decide to live
the rest of their lives as a couple, sharing their home with a number of
other transgendered people. Thus, contrary to the films of Angelopoulos, in
Strella the oedipal condition evades its reaffirmation. Furthermore,
Strella does not always follow a typical plot-driven narration. The main
form of narration in the film is pastiche; mixing in Almodovar's fashion
modernist melodrama with Fassbinder-esque queer film clichés, along with
Disney-like cartoon sequences of Yorgos dreaming of himself in a typical
queer way as a squirrel running around free in the woods. Yorgos thus
appears as a fractured gay; however violent subject heterogeneously
constructed by his macho tradition, but also by pop culture and the media.
And finally, probably the most defining form of dismissal of classical
oedipal structures in Strella is the use of language. Gay slang is, along
with gay kitsch aesthetics, ubiquitous in the film. In a defining moment,
where Greek familial tragedy and the ensuing oedipal structures seem to
simultaneously collapse, Mary, an old, dying transsexual acting as
Strella's mother, admits to having had a sexual relationship with her
uncle, while warning her "daughter" that, according to ancient Greek
sissies of the likes of Sophocles and Euripides, sexual union with one's
father is "hubris" (an insult to the gods). To remember Lyotard (1979/1984:
xxiv), Mary's contradictions seem to combine an incompatibility of language
games, typical of postmodernism, which defy rational speech acts. And while
still there, the subjective view of gay auteur director Panos Koutras, as
well as traditional plot with a beginning and an end, seem to be lost
within the heterogeneity of genres and the irony of an apparently happy end
which would never be possible in the grandiose formalism of the auteurs of
New Greek cinema.






Dogtooth portrays a family home where the children, well into their
late teens or even twenties, are kept by their parents (Christos
Stergioglou, Michele Valley) in typical oedipal terms completely confined
from the outside world. The children are taught false word meanings aimed
mainly at appeasing their urges for freedom and sex (i.e. they are told by
their parents that "excursion" is a highly durable material used to make
floors and that the word "cunt" means "large lamp"). The challenging of
this oedipal scenario comes through Christina, a young woman brought in the
home by the father to cater for and thus appease the son's sexual drives.
Christina asks the older daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) to perform
cunnilingus to her. The older daughter accepts, initially on condition that
Christina gives her a headband and later some videotapes. After watching
the videotapes, the older daughter changes considerably. She starts
heterogeneously reconstructing herself through the media she has watched,
performing in unintelligible and nonverbal ways scenes from the videotapes,
which as we infer are of the movies Flashdance, Rocky IV, Jaws, and an
unspecified one by Bruce Lee. Like Yorgos in Strella, the subject "older
daughter" in Dogtooth is constructed discordantly by popular culture,
through a performance of a pastiche of various films, whereby actors' lines
with no apparent connection to one another mix with a boxing scene from
Rocky and a violent reworking of choreography from Flashdance. These scenes
culminate in the film's ending, where the older daughter locks herself in
the boot of her father's car, leading her way out of the family home and
into freedom or asphyxiation. We never find out if she survives. As in
Strella, the dubious ending seems to overturn the oedipal scenario along
with pastiche, references to popular culture and a use of language which
alludes to a "new speak", conditioning the children like Pavlovian dogs.






Similarly, in Attenberg, Marina (Arianne Lebede), a young woman living
a desexualized life in a boring, sterile industrial town (Aspra Spitia)[4]
with her dying father, seems to find meaning in her mimicry of the animal
sounds she hears in the documentaries of Sir David Attenborough that she
regularly watches. She engages in this non-verbal mimicry along with her
father, to whom she has a strong attachment[5]. Quite often, father and
daughter play a language game whereby they hurl to each other random words
with no apparent connection. In this mixture of animal sounds, unconnected
language morphemes and desexualized father-daughter relations, whereby a
father is pictured without a penis, oedipal scenarios demanding a linear
narrative and sexually potent parents are severely challenged. The whole
film seems more like a collection of sketches involving a certain number of
people than a narration of their life-stories. Pastiche makes its presence
again, both in the mimicry of Attenborough's documentaries and in the dance-
like walks, alluding to French Nouvele Vague[6], which Marina takes along
with her sexually promiscuous friend, Bella. Popular culture appears to
have infiltrated Marina, too, as Attenborough's documentaries have
decisively formed her along with songs of the synthpunk band Suicide, which
appears to be about the only music she listens to. Yet pastiche-inspired,
non-linear narrative is reversed when Marina's father is about to die. Only
then does the classical Oedipal scenario emerge, as without her father, she
consummates at last her relationship with an engineer (George Lanthimos)
and becomes a sexually active woman.


Miss Violence, is the story of a fourteen-year-old virgin who on the
day she turns fourteen commits suicide. This acts a catalyst to reveal a
monstrous Oedipus (Akis Panou) who is having an incestuous affair with his
elder daughter, and having fathered his grandchildren not only he has sex
but he also prostitutes them. This violent reversal of the oedipal scenario
leads to full fledged tragic telos. The children have to live through a
suffocating contradiction a father/grandfather who is insisting that they
are strictly committed to performing their school duties yet on the other
hand dresses them like Judy Foster in Taxi driver to have them prostituted.
The only person who defies his will is his granddaughter who by committing
suicide forces the mother ( Reni Pittaki) to take vengeance and liberate
the family. Thus the oedipal scenario is reversed not through the action of
children but from the action of the wife who revolts against the paternal
oppression but it's doubtful whether she will be able to heal the wounds
and keep the family together.


The social realist trend


Films such as Plato's academy, Homeland (2010), by Syllas Tzoumerkas,
J.A.C.E ( 2011), by Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Correction (2007), by Thanos
Anastopoulos are nearer social realism with auteurist overtones and diverge
from the postmodernist tropes of the "weird wave". Though these stories are
also steeped inside the economic crisis that is tearing Greek society apart
they adopt more conventional narrative forms to present their texts and
they can't achieve the unique style which has marked the oeuvre of
Angelopoulos. Though we should note that compared to the third trilogy of
Angelopoulos, the trilogy of the frontiers these films are similarly
reflecting on themes which are inspired the current crisis neo-liberalism
and global capitalism.


Plato's academy that was shortlisted for the Felix Price, tells the
story of Stavros (Antonis Kafetzopoulos) who spends his time with his three
over forty male friends worrying about the Chinese immigrants who are
invading their quiet neighborhood, and teaching their dog Patriot to bark
at passing Albanians. Things take an unexpected turn when Stavros's mother
(Titika Saringouli) recognizes a passing immigrant Marenglen (Anastas
Kodzine) as her missing son. She also starts talking Albanian. Stavros will
realize when his mother dies that in the words of Filipos Tsitos: "That he
has for a long time defined himself as being Greek. He has not asked
himself if he is happy or not".[7]He therefore decides to accept his mixed
identity and try and win back his girl friend. His friends must also to set
aside their prejudices and accept Stavros whatever his ethnic origins. This
bittersweet comedy goes against the moral panics orchestrated by the
popular press and appeal for dialogue as an antidote to social exclusion.


Correction (2007) by Thanos Anastopoulos is narrative of forgiveness.
It narrates the story of a repenting hooligan (Yorgos Symεonidis) who
assassinates an Albanian celebrating his team's victory on the day Albania
beat Greece in soccer for the world cup. After his release from prison he
finds the victim's family and puts them under his protection. Until by
unexpected twist his secret is revealed to the wife's victim but who also
make a gesture of forgiveness.


This film is in line with other films of contemporary Greek cinema
such as Giannaris, Goritsas and Korras and Voupouras focussing on the
plight of immigrants with compassion that runs counter to the strong
xenophobic feelings that were shared by a small section of the population.
Themes that were originally developed in a masterly way by Angelopoulos in
the trilogy of the frontiers, which focused on the plight of immigrants in
the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall.


This film is a sober almost Bressonian tale which went against the
grain of moral panics orchestrated by popular press and television. It is
note worthy how the device of the footage stored in the protagonist's
mobile acts as a catalyst in similar way as the videotapes act in Cache, by
Haneke. In the case of Cache, Georges is feeling threatened when he starts
receiving videocassettes, which show that his house and family are under
surveillance. Yet the Foucaudian scheme is turned into its head, and the
distinction between the surveyor and the surveyed breaks down. In
Correction it's a different matter, the nationalist thugs had recorded the
assassination of the Albanian as a heroic did worth commemorating as
torturers in Abu Graib recorded their degrading acts. In this new
globalised Panopticon no vile act can be performed without some form of
recording. These new archives of evil are no longer apocryphal and
repressed but instead are accessible and preserved acting as memorabilia of
the "banality of evil".










Postmodern flaneurs


Greek women directors had indeed to cope with a heavy legacy, as two
of the leading lights of NGC were Tonia Marketer and Frida Liappa. It is my
assessment that their oeuvre influenced a number of emerging women
directors such as Evangelakou, Flessa, and Malea who resorted to comedy for
painting the discontents and pleasures of Greek women in the new century.
However in the case of both Kostantina Voulgari and Stella Theodoraki there
is return to a more melancholic climate. In their case contrary to
Angelopoulos heroines, who are more or less reflections of the male
phantasies of the protagonists, women take an active part in directing the
plot and their films are embodying a new form of feminine self-awareness.


Voulgari sets her second film Congratulations to the optimists? In
the famous Athens neighbourhood of Exarchia. Her heroine Electra (Maria
Georgiadi), who has graduated from a top UK University lives there and
refuses her parents (Themis Batzaka, Dimitris Piatas) suggestions that she
should look for a "suitable job". Her boyfriend has been arrested for being
part of an anarchist group. Although Electra sympathizes with his
standpoint when she visits him in jail she feels crushed by his
reductionist view of things. Her parents are also totally trapped by their
academic background. Electra only feels happy with the young boy whom she
babysits and for whom she sometimes acts as a surrogate mother. This film
as the Daughter is also a tale of rite de passage as Electra on the one
hand strives to stop being an adolescent yet at him same time she struggles
to sustain her child like optimism and her walks in the city help her
discover that the revolutionary spirit is kept alive.


Theodoraki a French trained director in her third film Amnesia diaries
(2012) won the Greek film academy award for best documentary. As the
director herself writes: "Amnesia Diaries started out when I discovered
some long-forgotten Super 8 footage. My Super 8 films had gotten stolen
while I was a student and, eager to put the incident behind me (it had
upset me greatly), I had totally forgotten about the leftover material.
Among oxidized colors and faces whose identity had faded over time, my
first contact with the Super 8 transfers was a real shock to the system. I
immediately got curious about what would happen if I juxtaposed the 25-year-
old material with contemporary images, so I started documenting everyday
life and found myself getting carried away as the credit crunch
deepened."[8] This personal project allowed the director to combine both
what Derrida has called "archive fever" with new ways for combining
recorded memories and new material from both private and public events in
Athens for sculpturing time. These diaries act as logbook of the director's
itinerary from Crete, to Paris, Australia, London and then back to Athens.
The film is a journey through time and a journey through continents, while
the author observes and comments about her life in periods of love and
happiness and in periods of loss and mourning. Theodoraki establishes a
personal style which marks her as a post-modern flaneur.






BIBLIOGRAPHY






Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1986).

Maria Komninos and Yannis Lambrou "Questions of Postmodernism and Greek
cinema: Language and Family in the New "Weird Wave" paper presented in the
third Annual London Film and Media Conference: The pleasures of the
spectacle, Institute of Education University of London, UK 27-29 June 2013.





Létoublon, Françoise, 'The Odyssey of Angelopoulos', Gazes in the
World of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Irini Stathi (Thessaloniki: Thessaloniki
International Film Festival, 2001), 31-41.


Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. from French Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).


Mulvey, Laura, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Visual and
Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave, 1975/1989), 14-26.


Stam, Robert, Film Theory: An Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2000).



































-----------------------
[1]
[2] Two basic demands of postmodern art, if we follow Lyotard's famous
essay The Postmodern Condition of 1979, are that the postmodern puts
forward "the unpresentable in presentation itself" and that "the work a
[postmodern artist] produces [is not] governed by pre-established rules
and… [should not] be judged according to a determining judgment, by
applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. See Maria Komninos
and Yannis Lambrou "Questions of Postmodernism and Greek cinema: Language
and Family in the New "Weird Wave" paper presented in the third Annual
London Film and Media Conference: The pleasures of the spectacle, Institute
of Education University of London, UK 27-29 June 2013.
[3] In order to theorize the Oedipus complex within realist film narrative,
which seems to deny postmodern demands for a non self-conscious putting
forward of the unpresentable, one should look into the work of
psychoanalytic film theorist Laura Mulvey. As Mulvey claims in an essay
pivotal to contemporary film theory, 'sadism demands a story, depends on
making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of
will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a
beginning and an end'. True to Freud, Mulvey equates in Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema the narrator, or, in cinematic terms, the filmmaker, to a
superego sadistically controlling its subject matter, therefore producing a
story with a beginning, a middle and an end. ibid
[4] The location is emblematic since it is the site of Pechiney aluminium
factory, which was one of the major industrial plants and had played a
crucial role in Greece's industrialisation in the 60s. Today the plant has
been sold and the area is a landmark of white elephant, as Greece is
plunging into a neo-colonial u-turn to backwardness. As a shooting ground
it provides Tsagari with the opportunity to shoot in space resembling
Pescara in Antonioni's Red Desert.
[5] In characteristic scene Marina asks her father if he ever thinks of he
nude. The father denies of ever having such fantasies since they would go
against the incest taboo. Marina after listening to his lecture adds with a
low voice « I think of you naked but without a penis». So she is dreaming
of a castrated father that could be interpreted as censoring her incestuous
desire for her father.
[6] Godard's Bande a part comes to mind.
[7] Interview of Filippos Tsitos to Valerio Caruso.
[8] Stella Theodoraki interview at Flix.