Chapter 3 — Branding the "Greek Crisis": Between Archive and Genre, Matter and Language¶
Summary: The third analytical chapter reads the "Weird Wave" / New Greek Cinema of 2009–2018 as itself an archival practice — a brand-name taxonomy that classified post-2010 Greek films under the rubric of the government-debt crisis. The chapter is split into two halves: the first frames the weird-wave as an archive of crisis and follows a counter-curatorial program (The Shit and the Fan / LabA); the second close-reads three films — Amnesia Diaries, spectres-are-haunting-europe, and vlihi — that mobilize analog film against this branding.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, sections 3.0 through 3.2.4 (lines 2038–3473).
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
Weird as an archive¶
The label "weird wave" comes from Steve Rose's 2011 article in The Guardian: "the world's most messed-up country is making the world's most messed-up cinema." The chapter treats this naming as an inherently archival gesture — one that gleans, compares, and groups Greek films by external aesthetic resemblance (medium-to-long shots, sequence shots, desaturated palette, limited camera movement, symmetrical mise-en-scene, closed/confined spaces). The resulting genre operated, simultaneously, as an exemplification of a larger canon and as a brand that opened festival circuits to Greek production.
Several scholars are tracked: Lykidis, Tzouflas, Papadimitriou (whose "archive trouble" Mademli leans on), Papanikolaou's Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (2021), Nikolaidou and Poupou, Kourelou. The unanimous Greek-filmmaker rejection of the label is also recorded (Elina Psykou is quoted).
Synchronicity, 23 April 2010¶
The chapter's most-cited single argument is built around 23 April 2010 — the day Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreou announced the bailout from the border island of Kastellorizo (with the island's traditional buildings and a fishing boat framed behind him in shallow depth-of-field, in a tone "more commonly found in film, rather than in television"), and the day Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth premiered in European distribution in London. Drawing on Carl Jung, the chapter proposes synchronicity as a methodological tool for analyzing the archive of crisis representation — not to prove a causal link but to treat both events as fragments of one media-ecology.
The Shit and the Fan / LabA¶
Section 3.1.3 is a sustained reading of the 2012 traveling film program "The Shit and the Fan," curated by Vassily Bourikas, which assembled experimental and independent low-budget Greek shorts that "have nothing to do with the old Greek cinema, nor with the recently buoyant New Greek Cinema." The program is treated as a self-reflexive curatorial gesture: a "mini-archive" that exposes both the "shit" (production) and the "fan" (circulation) of crisis imagery.
The program is closely tied to LabA, the makeshift film laboratory co-founded by Bourikas in 2008–2009, which used small-gauge analog film stock, manual development in portable tanks, and the laboratory's own architecture as drying rack. LabA is read through Pickering's "mangle of practice" and Latour's "depunctualization" — the opening of black-boxed technologies through hands-on negotiation. Its location next to the Thessaloniki International Film Festival's Athens branch (and the branch's subsequent relocation to face the Acropolis marbles) is treated as physically diagrammatic.
Amnesia Diaries (Theodoraki, 2012)¶
Section 3.2.2 close-reads Stella Theodoraki's 2012 essay film, released the same year as the second bailout programme and the early-election return of Antonis Samaras as Prime Minister. The film's voice-over opens "It's so good that the date doesn't appear on film, it's such a relief," and the reading uses auto-theory (Fournier) to treat the film as a personal-and-political archive of crisis in which memory's failure is itself the index.
Spectres Are Haunting Europe (Kourkouta / Yannari, 2016)¶
spectres-are-haunting-europe is the chapter's central case study and is given an extended reading (section 3.2.3). Shot in 2015–2016 at the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greece–North Macedonia border railtracks, the film consists of thirty long takes plus a 13-minute final passage shot on 16mm black-and-white with a hand-held camera. The shift in mediality is itself the argument: the digital camera renders the refugees in "hypervisible invisibility" (Arrivé, Fleetwood), while the analog camera, recognized by the refugees as effortful and intimate machinery, restores faciality. The reading runs through Agamben (zoē/bios, bare life), Glissant ("the right to opacity"), Derrida (the "touch of language"), and Resnais's Night and Fog.
The film's screening as part of documenta 14's Parliament of Bodies program in 2016 anchors a long section on documenta 14 in Greece — Yanis Varoufakis's "crisis tourism" critique, and Tramboulis/Tzirtzilakis's framing of d14 as a failed archive that derailed into "political metonymy."
Vlihi (Lanthimos, 2022)¶
vlihi (Greek for "bleat") is read as Lanthimos's own appropriation of the "weird" label. The 35mm black-and-white silent film, performed once with live orchestra at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, is read through Mark Fisher's distinction between the "weird" (presence of what does not belong) and the "eerie" (failure of absence or presence). The titular bleat is treated as an intertextual nod to Nico Papatakis's The Shepherds of Calamity (Lanthimos's stated formative film) and as a metonymy for the nomadic origins of cinema in the region — bringing the chapter full circle back to the manakia-brothers.
A final anecdote — the projectionist Christos noticing a continuity error in the last sequence (Emma Stone appearing on the balcony after having been left inside) — is used to close the chapter on the persistence of subjective gaps in any taxonomy.
Method¶
This is the chapter where Mademli writes most explicitly in the autotheoretical register, locating her own work as translator of film content (from major English to minor Greek) as a way of staying with the untranslatable.