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Weird Wave / New Greek Cinema

Summary: The umbrella label applied to a set of Greek arthouse films released between roughly 2009 and 2018, beginning with Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009) and including work by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Syllas Tzoumerkas, Yannis Economides, and others. In Mademli's reading, the term is itself an archival operation — a brand-name taxonomy that organized the international reception of Greek film as a co-product of the crisis discourse.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, sections 3.0–3.1.3 (lines 2038–2648).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

The naming

The term "weird wave" was first applied in Steve Rose's Guardian article (2011): "the world's most messed-up country is making the world's most messed-up cinema." Rose grouped Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010), Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009), Wasted Youth (Papadimitropoulos, 2011), Homeland (Tzoumerkas, 2010), and Knifer (Economides, 2010) under a shared aesthetic — "the surreal, deadpan study of family wrongness" and "the tough but artful study of middle-class desperation."

Aesthetics

The shared formal traits Mademli catalogues: medium-to-long shots that hold distance between characters and viewer, sequence-shots that compose entire scenes, decreased color saturation, limited camera movement, closed/confined spaces, symmetrical and laboratory-clean mise-en-scène. The film frame becomes a "generic archival space (a laboratory for experimenting with the taxonomies of the uncharted)."

Reception

Greek-studies scholarship splits roughly two ways. Some (Lykidis, Tzouflas, parts of Papadimitriou) treat the weird as a peripheral critical response to late-capitalist neoliberalism. Others (Kourelou et al., Nikolaidou) emphasize the term's role in exoticization and "consenting self-exoticism": the weird is the European South's offering to a Western core that "still largely stands for the idea of European cinema tout court." Greek filmmakers — Elina Psykou is quoted — have generally rejected the term.

Dimitris Papanikolaou's Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (2021) is the most extended monograph on the label.

The archive argument

Mademli's distinctive contribution is to read the weird as an archive of crisis — a taxonomic gesture that collected films by external aesthetic resemblance and used genre-making to streamline a peripheral cultural economy. The reading borrows Roger Lockhurst's observation that "weird fiction generates its own 'archive fever,' hallucinating into existence phantoms of the catalogue."

Synchronicity, 23 April 2010

The chapter's key argument links the weird to a single date: 23 April 2010, when Papandreou announced the bailout from Kastellorizo and Dogtooth premiered in European distribution in London. Dogtooth's linguistic-displacement plot (where "sea" means "leather armchair") and Papandreou's framed-against-the-horizon broadcast are read together as the founding synchronicity of crisis-as-myth in Greek media.

Counter-currents in the same chapter

  • The Shit and the Fan (Bourikas, 2012) — the counter-program of small-gauge experimental shorts deliberately positioned outside both old and new Greek cinema.
  • LabA — the makeshift film laboratory whose obsolete-media practice is read as a double-structure critique of weird-wave laboratory aesthetics.
  • Amnesia Diaries, spectres-are-haunting-europe, vlihi — three films read for the way they mobilize analog film against the weird's digital festival circuit.

Weird vs eerie

Mark Fisher's distinction — "the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong"; "the eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence" — is used in section 3.2.4 to read Lanthimos's vlihi as a turn from weird to eerie, and from genre-as-archive to genre-as-unarchivable.