Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Dimitris Papanikolaou (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Dimitris Papanikolaou
• Lydia Papadimitriou (bio)

Dimitris Papanikolaou, Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2021. Pp. xvi + 268. 27 illustrations., Hardback and E-book £90.00, Paperback £19.99.

Toward the end of his introduction, Dimitris Papanikolaou writes that "this is a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very weird history of the Weird Wave" (24). The book is indeed personal: the author explicitly places (his own) affect center stage, writes about how the films "touch" him, and positions "biopolitical realism"—the key concept that structures the book—as a "survival tactic" (23). The book is idiosyncratic for the very same reasons, as well as for the ways in which its author inflects, adjusts, and expands otherwise familiar concepts such as allegory in new directions—most crucially, here, by introducing the notion of metonymic allegory. And it is weird insofar as it combines a certain degree of playfulness (evident at a glance in some of its subheadings) with intense theoretical engagement while also implicitly acknowledging—just as the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers have done through their films—the "unease" of articulating fixed and authoritative interpretations, opting instead to "reclaim … weirdness … as an analytical position" (11).

None of the above qualities makes the book problematic; if anything, they signal its methodological and heuristic strengths. Far from being a formalist genre study, Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics seeks to find connections among form, content, context, and affect within the otherwise rather disparate group of Greek films that emerged in the late 2000s and thrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This was a period overdetermined by the Greek financial crisis, which affected not only the conditions of the films' production (if not initially, then certainly by the time the term "Greek Weird Wave" was coined by British journalist Steve Rose in 2011) but also the interpretative frames projected onto them—frames that encouraged traditional (i.e., metaphor-based) allegorical readings of the nation in crisis.

Triggered by his own emotive and bodily response to the films, Papanikolaou offers an analysis that goes beyond such approaches. He argues that the films' potency lies in their ability to convey "weirdness" as a "structure of feeling" (12) for the conditions of life in the early twenty-first century as experienced—not only, but with particular intensity—in Greece. Borrowing Foucault's notion of biopolitics, understood as the "social and political practices that focus on 'disciplining the living being'" and ultimately subjugating "'corporeal life into systems of efficient and economic controls'" (15), Papanikolaou coins the term biopolitical realism. Of the two words that constitute this neologism—strictly speaking, the phrase is not new, but its previous use was very different [End Page 130] (see pp. 130–132)—it is arguably "realism" that is the most contentious. The biopolitical dimension of the films under discussion is far more evident, and in some instances, such as in Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009), it is very much on the surface. Realism, however, is not—even for those familiar with the intricacies of the inexhaustible topic of realism in cinema.

Aware of the apparent incongruity (perhaps even weirdness) of associating "realism" with these films, Papanikolaou dedicates his fourth chapter to explaining his version of it. He points out that the Weird Wave films knowingly undermine familiar understandings of cinematic realism while seeking "to engage with 'the world we live in' on different terms" (113). The realism we should be looking for here, therefore, is a conceptual rather than a cinematic one. Given that it depends not on external characteristics but rather on a redefinition of possible ways to understand and represent reality, this conceptualization of realism is not straightforward. Fundamental to it is the changing nature of our reality and its increasing—if not already total—subjugation to biopolitical structures of power. Papanikolaou here cites Mark Fisher's notion of "capitalist realism"—the idea that neoliberal capitalism is so pervasive that everything is subsumed into it to the extent of determining perceptions of reality—as a precursor to his own (126–131). "Biopolitical realism," Papanikolaou writes, "is exactly that type of capitalist realism...