Framing the "Weird Body" in Contemporary Greek Cinema: Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010), Alps(2011)

Abstract

New filmmaking practices within European art cinema are responding to current socio-political realities of the European crisis with new cinematic images of the human body. Particularly since 2009, a group of young directors from Greece has produced a number of independent films that feature grotesque characters embedded within plots of comic absurdity. Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009), Attenberg (Tsangaris, 2010) and Alps (Lanthimos, 2011) are by now the core of what has been coined outside Greece The New Weird Cinema.This thesis offers an aesthetic analysis of the films Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps in the conceptualization of the weird body as a new image of the human body in contemporary arthouse cinema. It aims at introducing the weird body as a cinematic trope with which to address lived experience in the shadow of a contemporary societal crisis. In order to sustain its political and aesthetic power, this study will bring Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the body in dialogue with the phenomenological approaches of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks.