I didn’t go on the weekend trip to the Argolid region (Nemea, Mycenae, with ouzo and wine tastings, etc.) this past weekend, because Nibbler has been in decline. She seems to be doing better, but she is approaching her eighteenth birthday, so we’re realistic about her health and her prospects. She’s been losing weight for the better part of this year. We discovered she has thyroid disease and got that under control, but that revealed her underlying kidney disease, which is harder to control. She’s here with us in Greece because we couldn’t imagine being away from her when it comes to it. She was in a rough patch last week, so I stayed with her while Christina, David, and the students spent a few days out of Athens.
I thought I would tell you a bit more about what I’m doing here as part of the program. Christina is the lead faculty-in-residence, and as such she is teaching two political science courses. David handles the archaeology course and the many fascinating site visits. I am teaching a course that is mostly focused on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos but which also makes some room for talking about the wider so-called Greek Weird Wave. If you don’t know what that is, or have heard the term without much context, here is Steve Rose’s article from The Guardian in 2011 that accelerated the use of the term internationally.
The class I’m teaching is about myth in the films of Lanthimos, but anyone who has seen most of his films knows or suspects that these influences must be more or less implicit. We wouldn’t necessarily expect Lanthimos to do an updated adaptation of Oedipus Rex, even though we do expect him to make films that handle incest and familial violence as prominent themes. So that’s really where we are with this class. We watch all of Lanthimos’s films up through The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017), and we also add in two films by other directors associated with the Weird Wave: Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) and Koutras’s Strella (2009). We read some ancient texts like Hesiod and Euripides as well as some contemporary writing about the films we’re watching. We’re trying to get at this theme of weirdness, strangeness, oddity and hold it up to the light, look at it from as many angles as we can.
Last night we watched and discussed Dogtooth (2009), which is the film that put Lanthimos on the international stage. It is his second feature and firmly established both his directorial style and the thematic concerns that would remain a part of his work up through today. The students had varied and strong reactions to it, which always makes for worthwhile and valuable class discussion. They certainly were not bored, and for those who were made uncomfortable, that did not stop them from having something to say. This was our third film after watching Kinetta (2005) and Attenberg, and it feels like we’re off to an excellent start.
And is if that wasn’t enough film for you, here’s one more. Like many, many other cinephiles I’ve been thinking a lot about David Lynch since his recent death. The combined grief and admiration manifested in concrete ways here in Athens. Two different organizations held screenings of all of his cinematic works. The first ended with an all-day Twin Peaks marathon of the entire series. The second was called The Complete Filmography, and that one ended with a screening of the international pilot for Twin Peaks on Twin Peaks Day, February 24. Virtually all of this latter series was sold out when I first saw the poster for it. The only tickets left were to the February 23 screening of Inland Empire in its 4K restoration. I leapt at the chance and took myself out on a film date Sunday night. The Cinobo Opera is a pretty big theatre near the university downtown, and the place was packed that night. Inland Empire is a three-hour film, and it didn’t get rolling until 9:30pm, but I had fortified myself with an after-dinner americano, which did the trick. Maybe it was the larger context, but I came away from that screening with a deeper appreciation for that film than I had previously. Christina and I are currently in the middle of the Twin Peaks rewatch we began shortly after Lynch’s passing. We watched Episodes 11 and 12 on Twin Peaks Day, and we’ll keep it going. I expect we’ll make it through the whole thing while we’re here.