The mother accomplice: Questions of representation in Dogtooth and Miss Violence

Abstract

Abstract This article seeks to raise some questions and open a conversation on issues relating to the representation of the mother-figure, of motherhood, and by extension of women in contemporary Greek cinema. Focusing on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas/Dogtooth (2009) and Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence (2013), the article argues that, despite their overall unconventional approach in terms of content and form, both films remain rather conventional in their regressive representations of the character of the mother, who is characterized by her paradoxical conceptualization as an active accomplice without agency within the patriarchal universe of both films. In a broader sense, the article (re)turns to established feminist scholarship in insisting on the ‘woman question’ so often neglected in Greek film criticism more generally, and in relation to the selected films more specifically.