A Problem of Fit: Athina Rachel Tsangari and Greek “Weird Wave” Cinema

Abstract

This article uses Athina Rachel Tsangari's films to interrogate and reframe the Greek “Weird Wave” film movement (largely shaped by her frequent collaborator, Yorgos Lanthimos), revealing how the wave has obscured Tsangari's feminist authorship. In general, the Weird Wave had described a cohort of films beginning around 2009 in which familial dysfunction, violence, ineffectual communication, and corporeal “weirdness” allegorize Greek political, economic, and social crises. In a kind of temporal jumble, Tsangari's first film Fit (Greece, 1994) provides instructions for reading her later, supposedly Weird Wave films. The conceptual capaciousness of the term fit, as both a film title and a concept, refracts across Tsangari's films and career at large. This article exploits wordplay around fit as a technical standard of sound and image cohesion (how image and sound fit together), as a thematic narrative preoccupation regarding space, place, and belonging (fitting in), and as a categorizing metric (fit for inclusion). Reading diegetic and extradiegetic fit in Tsangari's film and television works, including Attenberg (Greece, 2010), The Capsule (Greece, 2012), the short 24 Frames per Century (Italy, 2013), Chevalier (Greece, 2015), and Trigonometry (BBC, 2020), reveals Tsangari's authorial signature and how Tsangari's films ambivalently benefit from “wave” marketing even as their reception bears out the costs of that uncomfortable fit. Paradoxically, Tsangari's auteur signature emerges in her struggle against category, especially Weird Wave and “women's cinema” labels. In diegetic and extradiegetic negotiations of belonging, Tsangari's auteurism emerges.