ABSTRACT
This blog proposes that three fiction films officially selected for screening at the 2020 Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, namely, Zacharias Mavroeidis' Defunct (2019, 100 mins), Giorgos Georgopoulos’ Not to Be Unpleasant, But We Need to Have a Serious Talk (2019, 99 mins), and Stefanos Sitara’s The Rocket (2020, 98 mins) are all indicative of Greece's economically unstable and politically tumultuous ‘post-modern’ zeitgeist, i.e., the decline in standard of living, increase in suicide, and financial insecurity. And "post-modernism" here refers to the themes of existential solicitation that are acute outgrowths of twenty-first-century attitudes of social dislocation and qualities of vanity and purposelessness. This blog argues that the three films showcase these existential crises of the contemporary Greek social milieu, as shown by particular choices in both filmmaking and narrative design.
Watch this lecture by director of The Rocket by Stefanos Sitaras for a circumspect understanding of these issues.
INTRODUCTION
Mikela Fotiou and Nikitas Fessas in their article “Greek Neo-Noir: Reflecting a Narrative Crisis” within FILMICON: The Journal of Greek Film Studies, markedly assert that the Greek Neo-Noir genre has a quality of being associated with the vanished past and an unknown future, treading on the notions of alienation, dislocation, and existential despair (Fotiou and Fessas 113); and they assert that these same qualities are born out of the contemporary Greek zeitgeist, reflecting its specific undesirable and disaffected socio-political situation (Fotiou and Fessas 116). However, Greece has undergone such a dramatic change since the publication of their 2017 article, notably, the conclusion of the “Grexit-crisis”, the privatization of Greek assets to foreign owners, and Ex-Prime Minister Alex Tsipras’ declaration of Greece as a “Normal country” (Chained (Agora ll)), which I exhibit as the most efficacious on present-day Greek identity and thus in turn reflected in the films' unique social apprehension. So then this blog seeks to prove that this alienation, dislocation, and existential despair also manifests into the Greek indie-drama genre, and the three feature films, Defunct, The Rocket, and Not to Be Unpleasant, But We Need to Have a Serious Talk contain a disparate neoteric twenty-first-century socio-economic post-modern disquietude.
The documentary, Chained (Agora ll) (2020, 9min), created by Yorgos Avgeropoulos gives an amazingly detailed yet objective perspective of the social and economic turbulence of modern Greece that primarily focuses on the years from 2015 to 2019. Allowing direct insight into the struggle of governmental operations within the left-wing Syriza political party, which was elected into power in 2015 after forging a coalition with a right-wing independent party effectively ending the forty year two-party rule (Bouras and Granitsas), the documentary showcases the personal battles fought on the streets by Greek citizens, and therefore will act as our ingress into the socio-economic state of the country and establish the unique attitudes of the characters situated in their particular late 2010s, early 2020s setting. The promised change of the Syriza party sent shockwaves across the nation-state, with a call to end austerity (high taxes and reduced budgets aimed to improving squalid economic conditions, in this case, imposed by the European Union), but ultimately the Syriza can't manage to reach their lofty goals, and the economic situation of many Greek citizens failed to improve, causing creditor’s departure from flee Greece, a liquidity crisis, the shut down of the stock exchange as well as the banking system; as a result, with the economy in peril, Grexit looming over the state, and a stalemated dialogue with the European Troika, Tsipras and his government have no choice but to take the EU’s bailout in August 2015 (Rakopoulos). Major sectors of Greece's economy were handed over to foreign nations, such as the air travel to German business, railways to Italian business, waterway ports to the Chinese, and the hydrocarbon sector now belonging to the French and American businesses; and in 2018, as Tsipras declared victory to his constituents, “Greece becomes once again a normal country. It regains its financial and political sovereignty” (Chained (Agora ll)). But after this declaration of victory, the state still suffers from extreme poverty and hope is dismal, demonstrating what exactly the collapse of a late-capitalist nation looks like-- average citizens fighting for resources such as food, suicide, depression, economic blight-- forcing many greek people question their place as ‘victorious’ citizens.
The disorganization and turmoil of Greece remains dredged into the country, and the neocolonialism of major business sectors by foreign-owned mega-corporations is pertinent to the contemporary zeitgeist and effectual on the Greek psyche, of which the scholar and professor of Berkeley University, Alexei Yurchak, would likely categorize as a hypernormalized state. Alexei Yurchak, a former citizen of the late Soviet Union noticed an interesting phenomenon within the nation, which can be defined as an apprehension for the future, knowing that the systems of power do not function, but also accustomed and conditioned to knowing there is no alternative, an idea he coined as Hypernormal (Yurchak) which, I believe, aptly applies into the post-2008 Greek state. Greece, while differing from the USSR in its late-socialist milieu, still shares the sentiments of disaffection and social dislocation of ordinary citizens within it’s late-capitalist mileu, and it is the contemporary Greek films of the late 2010s that capture this socio-economic misdirected confusion and anger, most notably, within the film, Defunct.
The documentary, Chained (Agora ll) (2020, 9min), created by Yorgos Avgeropoulos gives an amazingly detailed yet objective perspective of the social and economic turbulence of modern Greece that primarily focuses on the years from 2015 to 2019. Allowing direct insight into the struggle of governmental operations within the left-wing Syriza political party, which was elected into power in 2015 after forging a coalition with a right-wing independent party effectively ending the forty year two-party rule (Bouras and Granitsas), the documentary showcases the personal battles fought on the streets by Greek citizens, and therefore will act as our ingress into the socio-economic state of the country and establish the unique attitudes of the characters situated in their particular late 2010s, early 2020s setting. The promised change of the Syriza party sent shockwaves across the nation-state, with a call to end austerity (high taxes and reduced budgets aimed to improving squalid economic conditions, in this case, imposed by the European Union), but ultimately the Syriza can't manage to reach their lofty goals, and the economic situation of many Greek citizens failed to improve, causing creditor’s departure from flee Greece, a liquidity crisis, the shut down of the stock exchange as well as the banking system; as a result, with the economy in peril, Grexit looming over the state, and a stalemated dialogue with the European Troika, Tsipras and his government have no choice but to take the EU’s bailout in August 2015 (Rakopoulos). Major sectors of Greece's economy were handed over to foreign nations, such as the air travel to German business, railways to Italian business, waterway ports to the Chinese, and the hydrocarbon sector now belonging to the French and American businesses; and in 2018, as Tsipras declared victory to his constituents, “Greece becomes once again a normal country. It regains its financial and political sovereignty” (Chained (Agora ll)). But after this declaration of victory, the state still suffers from extreme poverty and hope is dismal, demonstrating what exactly the collapse of a late-capitalist nation looks like-- average citizens fighting for resources such as food, suicide, depression, economic blight-- forcing many greek people question their place as ‘victorious’ citizens.
The disorganization and turmoil of Greece remains dredged into the country, and the neocolonialism of major business sectors by foreign-owned mega-corporations is pertinent to the contemporary zeitgeist and effectual on the Greek psyche, of which the scholar and professor of Berkeley University, Alexei Yurchak, would likely categorize as a hypernormalized state. Alexei Yurchak, a former citizen of the late Soviet Union noticed an interesting phenomenon within the nation, which can be defined as an apprehension for the future, knowing that the systems of power do not function, but also accustomed and conditioned to knowing there is no alternative, an idea he coined as Hypernormal (Yurchak) which, I believe, aptly applies into the post-2008 Greek state. Greece, while differing from the USSR in its late-socialist milieu, still shares the sentiments of disaffection and social dislocation of ordinary citizens within it’s late-capitalist mileu, and it is the contemporary Greek films of the late 2010s that capture this socio-economic misdirected confusion and anger, most notably, within the film, Defunct.