Framing the Films by Yorgos Lanthimos

This book examines the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s feature films. Lanthimos’s films have been linked to the so called Greek weird wave in Greek cinema, which is commonly agreed to have started with his Dogtooth (2009), and so they have largely been discussed as national and localised cinematic phenomena allegorically commenting on the Greek economic crisis or society. Lanthimos’s distinctive style is discussed in this book in terms of both national and European cinematic traditions, in the latter case specifically Brecht and the aesthetics of the uncanny. The author provides an in-depth, thorough and systematic analysis of the ‘weird’ mixture of uncanniness and Brecht in Lanthimos’s cinema as performing an uncanny transformation of Brechtian aesthetics within the context of Greek and international cinema. As the author proposes, the Brechtian aesthetics, that we also find in the modernist cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, in combination with the aesthetics of the uncanny and the unnatural narratives, is what marks, and links, formally the feature films by Yorgos Lanthimos. The filmmaker’s radical film form and subversive thematics are linked to the uncanny here, and this Brechtian uncanny, as the author calls it, redefines Brechtian aesthetics. This unique book will interest scholars and students of film studies, media studies, modern Greek studies, cultural studies, theatre studies, psychology, literary studies, philosophy.