A frequently appearing subject in Greek Weird Wave films is institutional authority which brings along the discussions on societal administration and lawmaking. As we know, Greece’s more recent social issues center around the government policies. The issues are reflected in Greek films Interruption (Yorgos Zois, 2015) and The Capsule (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2012) where characters of institutional authority maintain figuratively constructed societies of a school and a theater. Because the institutional power cannot be contained within only one human body, authority leaders lose their individual agencies in the attempt to rule the totalitarian regimes.
(one unexplainable scene in which a floating had is doing a girl’s hair)
The Capsule portrays a “school of life” institution isolated from the rest of the society, in which the behaviors of the girls being instructed can be classified into either animalistic or humanistic. The animalistic behaviors of the girls are exhibited in moments such as their climbing on the floor and hissing at each other, but their are also times when they sing and line up like humans do. The contrast between the two kinds of behaviors separate the primal and civil aspects both present in the girls’ bodies and, in effect, establishes for the audience the societal environment of the institution. The female leader/principle/commander initiates and supervises the daily routines of the girls. She is shown in a position of power in a rather animalistic way, instead of a civilized power figure, impersonalizing her to a natural phenomenon, an uncontrollable totalitarian regime. She walks in the front of the pack, vigils as the girls sing and dance, and feeds quail eggs like a parent bird would do to its children. The lack of personality of the leader within the human body makes the audience feel weirdly lacking affect from the character. She holds the power and executes institutional rules, but because of the lack of personality and attitude, her own intention and her own relation to her position of power is never revealed. Towards the beginning, the leader says to the girls: “ I’ve been here since always and forever. I wait for you. I welcome you. I instruct you. I am here for you. To teach you. Anticipation. Fear. Pleasure. Rage. Desire. Thievery. Power. Jealousy. The last thing that I will teach you is to lack.” At the end of the film, the lesson on lacking becomes apparent: the girls need to come to accept the fact that they lack individual identity in the institution: “I must confess to you that you life cycles will end very soon. All of you, you don’t know what you are. I will reveal it to you now. You are women. I am your origin. You are my replicates. Like all of you, I was once a woman.”
(the director taking control of the play from the audience (and a weird illusion of displacement added by the camera angle), with volunteering audience and actors behind him on stage)
Similarly, the performative institutional power takes its form of human bodies in The Interruption. The power of the institution of theater is shown through mostly the instructions of the male director. Here the institutional power controls the play: how the story goes, how it meets the expectations of the audience, and how it reaches out to the audience outside the theater space. In the theatrical society, the institution is founded upon the demand of the artform. In the first attempt of the trial of Clytemnestra, characters in the play decide that Orestes should not kill his mother, which does not allow the theatrical institution to provide enough violence and thrill for the audience. Therefore, the director orders the play to be enacted again when the actress who plays Clytemnestra is killed. Just like the leader in The Capsule, the male director in Interruption have purposes of the institution imposed upon him because of his title. What is different in Interruption is that institutional power struggles to find a human body as individuals resist its possession. In the first and majority part of the film, the male director guides the actors, some of whom are volunteered audience, into a modern reenactment and debates about the ancient Greek myth of Oresteia. When he first walks on stage, the director shares his experience the night before: “Last night I danced with a girl till dawn.” He does so in order to channel his personal identity as he takes charge of the stage. Towards the end of the section of the film, the director struggles to stay in his own identity as the purpose of the theatrical regime demand too much on his moral conscious. On stage, people are killed, blamed, all of which happen within the institution, and all of whom are innocent before the start of the play. The tragedies on stage take place because of his enticement in order to create theatrical value and get response from the audience. There is a moment before the director shoots himself when he starts to question his purpose. “I am nobody,” he says, “We don’t need you anymore, Orestes. We don’t need anyone in the world. We are almighty, we have it all. We’re here to claim our due. This world belongs to us.” The director feels that the institution takes away from the human self, and thus he is indebted in dedicating his life to himself as a person. He starts assuming other individual identities, wishing to be a normal human, instead of the embodiment of the theatrical institutional power. In the end, he takes away his body which the institutional power uses to take presence in the theatrical space, in order to keep himself away from its presence. Whether the power is still present in the theater carried out by the body of the girl that he danced with is unknown, but it should be noted that the institutional power does not just take its place in one body. The role of Orestes, the role which is being resisted by two audience-actors’ bodies, also carries it, and so do other roles that contribute to the play’s development. The fact that many bodies with many outcomes during and after the play suggest that the institution is powerful in influencing the theatrical society and, by extension, the outside world. It raises the question of the extent of institutional influence on individualism.
(the “substitute” of the director seeing the audience at the same angle as the director)
As chiefs of the institutions, the leaders in both films are also victims that are trapped within them. The headmistress in The Capsule is supposedly trapped in the position of power for eternity without the freedom to die and reincarnate until she finds a successor, and the director in The Interruption shoots himself in the head in order to escape from his own mind that has caused the tragedy on stage. In Yorgos Zois’s talk on imagination and reality in The Interruption, Zois says that “there is always a voice, inside or outside of us, that guides us what to do. Sometimes it’s called power, system, religion, ideology, boss, sergeant, family. But there is always a ‘director’ that gives us stage directions. When the director happens to be us, then it’s a bless[ing] or another deception”. In Greek Weird Wave films such as The Capsule and The Interruption, being the director, the supposed controller of one’s own fate as well as the fate of the society is a tragedy. Power had been a problem in our human society in classical literature in stories by authors with historical significance such as Shakespeare and Homer. Even though our society has evolved more democratically, individualism still comes into conflict with the institution. Any member of the society of the two films that take bodily presence in the institutions is controlled by institutional power through bodily labor. In The Capsule, the girls perform tasks as they are instructed which allows the educational institution to exist. In The Interruption, every audience’s body contribute to the theatrical experience, by being the bodies that go through the conventions of sitting in the audience and voting so that the play becomes “interactive” and therefore “experimental”. They are the ones who allow the theatrical institution to exist in the first place. By this logic, the collective presence of the members of the society is what mentally possesses the leaders through the position of power that it creates. This is the contra-perspective of the more common contemporary discussions in which individuals are oppressed by the authority.
(the leader in The Capsule awarding a girl with her ring and kiss on the lip after the girl tells her what she wants to hear)
In The Capsule and Interruption, power takes deceiving appearances that are attractive in the common sense of the viewers. By the end of the viewings, the appearance of power is unraveled. Power seems to be irresistible allure: the fame and authority in the play in Interruption, wearing shiny jewelry in The Capsule. But power might just be a force of nature that cannot be embodied by a single human body. Thus in the attempt, the human body itself is taken over by the institution. The regimes come from the past, from the history of power system, religion, ideology, boss, sergeant and family, phenomenon in the society which consist of failures, and thus every regime is at some level problematic. In a society where institution exist, everyone is physically trapped in the phenomenon because of their physical presence in the society limited by the law, socio-economic status and “personal” (societal, commercially imposed) tastes. But most people make attempts still to find their own sanities as individuals, through accessing otherness and queerness from the society that they exist in, as Greek Weird Wave films such as in stories told in Xenia and Attenburg. However, people in the position of power are mentally trapped within their societies at hand and are incapable of escaping their physical brains that they have given up to the societies, as well as the ideologies that carry with it. This is the form of power that institutional power takes place, it requires law-holders to carry out the regimes.
Both The Capsule and The Interruption end with the notion that the leaders are eventually replaceable. In The Capsule, the German girl attempts to takes on the role to dress as the headmistress, and in The Interruption, the girl carries on directing the play to fulfill the bodily task of the ensemble to give the audience a satisfactory performance. This end note of both films suggests is a major part of the ultimate power of the institution: its spatial and temporal transcendence through time and societies. The institution exist throughout time and space, unrepresentable by human bodies despite the many attempts. The crazy part about the institution is that it takes away individual identities and purposes into identities and purposes that none of us humans can explain accurately, because all of us are subjects of institutions.
Work Cited:
Wilkinson, Amber. “Yorgos Zois on Imagination and Reality in Interruption.”
Holly Cao 