The Animal Logic of Contemporary Greek Cinema

The recent wave of Greek cinema—often rather problematically named the “weird wave”—returns insistently to non-human animals. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (GR, 2010) features characters who copy the movements and sounds of wild creatures from the television nature programs of British naturalist David Attenborough, and Greek goats feature prominently in her short film The Capsule (GR, 2012). In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas/Dogtooth (GR, 2010), dogs and cats play a small but crucial narrative role, and his recent film The Lobster (GR/IE/NL/GB/FR, 2015) imagines a social order in which those who fail to maintain normative sexual relations are turned into animals. Animality is a key way in which these films articulate subjectivity, power, and social relations, and yet it is not at all clear that they speak directly about animals. The films have attracted the orientalizing moniker “weird” because they are hard to read, characterized by a narrative opacity that is often understood as allegorical. As claustrophobic tales of often familial oppression and violence, they have been interpreted both by popular and scholarly critics as allegories of the Greek economic crisis or of a breakdown in the Greek patriarchal family, or both.

It would not be hard to fold the films’ animal imagery into this kind of reading and to argue that non-human animals are used instrumentally as allegorical figures that speak in coded form to human concerns. In a recent essay on animal life and the moving image, Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon ask, “How do we look at animals? . . . Is this relation only ever one of capture and appropriation, thereby reiterating dominant structures of inequality between humans and animals?”¹ If we take The Lobster as illustrative, it seems to provide precisely a bad object for Lawrence and McMahon’s critique. The film depicts a society that, although it looks broadly like our own world, operates with alarmingly different social structures and rules of nature. Humans are compelled to live in couples, and, should they become single through death or breakup, they are transferred to a hotel. There, they have forty days to find a new mate or they will be forcibly transformed into an animal of their choosing through an unseen medical procedure. The film thus doesn’t focus on animals as animals, rather, appropriating their performances for a fantastical human narrative in which becoming an animal is the ultimate punishment. The Lobster in no way resists or refuses “objectification or anthropomorphisation of the animal”—we are explicitly told that Bob the dog is our protagonist David’s brother and should be read as such.² Animals consistently signify insofar as they are former humans.

Figure 1.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s short film The Capsule places Greek goats in a surreal scenario.

Thus, just as the incestuous and violent family in Dogtooth is legible to many critics as a metaphor for Greece’s oppressive polis, reading The Lobster allegorically subordinates its onscreen animals to a human narrative in which they can only signify their own cultural exploitation.³ It is not a film like Le Quattro Volte/Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino, IT/DE/CH, 2010), which attempts to animate non-human points of view and subjective experiences, nor is it even like social media cat videos that bring feline life worlds into our quotidian screen experience. When Steve Baker discusses artists “whose concern is with the nature and quality of actual animal life, or with the human experience of actual animal lives,” he is assuredly not thinking about The Lobster’s formerly human animals.⁴ And yet, we see something quite different from conventional animal representation here. Animals are indeed deployed to speak about human culture, but their status as exploitable cinematic subjects is never taken for granted. The film’s representation of formerly human animals is not an unthinking appropriation but rather an explicit staging of the logics of biopower and human sociality that lie at the heart of the narrative. Animals, their lives, and their representability are the very medium of The Lobster’s...