Vlihi¶
Summary: 2022 silent film by Yorgos Lanthimos, shot February 2020 on the Greek island of Tinos, performed once on 10 May 2022 at the Greek National Opera (within the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center) with live orchestral accompaniment. Shot and screened in 35mm black-and-white. The title (Βλιχή) is the Greek word for the bleat of goats and sheep. Central case study of section 3.2.4 of cinema-of-marbles and the final case of chapter-3-branding-greek-crisis.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, section 3.2.4 (lines 3276–3473).
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
The event¶
Presented as the flagship of the program The Artist on the Composer, supported by Stavros Niarchos Foundation and NEON cultural organization — both private cultural institutions that emerged or were reinstated in the crisis years and have been criticized for "deterritorializing the cultural product" and undermining state cultural-policy roles.
The film is described as a singular event: shot and screened in 35mm, performed once with live orchestra, the projector visible in the theater plaquet — then covered in a white cube to reduce its noise for the musicians. Mademli reads this hybrid enclave as the literal embodiment of the white-cube / black-box double-structure.
The plot¶
A young white woman participates in a domestic ritual of bereavement, leaves the mourners, slips into the room with the deceased, has sexual intercourse with the dead body, infuses new life. The man awakes, murders and buries her. She rises from the grave and seeks revenge. The film closes with an outdoor silent dance of a solitary crowd.
Cinematography¶
Highly textured surfaces, stark black-and-white contrast, alternating anamorphic and telescopic lenses. Notable shots: hands wearing rings as symbols of inherited power; a woman worshiping a Western-style Virgin Mary icon (deliberately not Byzantine); a replica of Courbet's L'Origine du monde; a slayed goat served on a dish (referencing both Christian tradition and the myth of Iphigenia).
Intertexts¶
Lanthimos has named Nico Papatakis's The Shepherds of Calamity — a film about which little is publicly known and which the BFI mistakenly described as "long-lost" — as his formative cinematic influence. Vlihi opens as a "speculative sequel" to Papatakis's ending (where the protagonists escape to the mountains and terminate their lives surrounded by wildlife).
The title's reference to bleating animals connects the film, via the dissertation's argument, to the manakia-brothers and "the nomadic origins of cinema in the region."
Weird → eerie¶
This is the chapter's pivot from the weird-wave label to Mark Fisher's distinction:
- Weird: presence of what does not belong.
- Eerie: failure of absence or failure of presence.
Lanthimos, the most internationally branded "weird" Greek director, is read here as appropriating the label by turning toward the eerie. The bleat is "the eerie cry" — a sound with intent behind it, suggesting "forms of knowledge, subjectivity and sensation that lie beyond common experience."
The unarchivable image¶
Because the film exists only as a singular live performance and is not accessible in a preserved digital file, it presents what Mademli calls an "anti-archival agency." The researcher cannot scrutinize it in the way the rest of the corpus can be scrutinized. This very condition becomes part of the argument: the unarchivable image as resistance to marmarization.
Projectionist's continuity error¶
The chapter closes with the projectionist Christos (a long-time festival collaborator) telling the author, as they leave the theatre: "Have you noticed the error in continuity in the last sequence? Emma Stone wasn't supposed to appear at the balcony staring at the dancing crowd after the pan shot to the edifice, we left her inside. How come a director like Lanthimos fell in this trap?" This anecdote is used to draw the chapter "full circle, expanding the perceived 'failure', or accident, to the realm of representation" — the persistence of the subjective gap.