Stamos Metzidakis

No Bones to Pick with Lanthimos's Film Dogtooth

While most critical reactions to Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Κυνόδοντας (Dogtooth) (2009) have been positive, as indicated by the Cannes Film Festival award it received, many people find it hard to understand and painful to watch. Combining extreme violence and humor in unusual ways, it includes scenes of extraordinary perversity and depravity. This essay argues that the film thereby constitutes a striking example of absurdist cinema in general and of what has been called the “Greek Weird Wave” in particular. For, it refuses to reassert or privilege certain long-standing artistic norms and conventions or traditional values over others. It thus encourages viewers to put aside qualms (“bones”) they have with several scenes in order to appreciate better the questions the film raises about contemporary Western society, especially the social construction of the family in Greece, as well as the new ways the film allows us to rethink such questions.

Replacing Literary History: With Hypograms or Paragrams?

Riffaterre believed that serious literary studies analyze the transformation/interaction of all verbal forms, thus giving equal weight to textual signifiers and signifieds. His critique of Saussure’s anagrams revealed however his preference for meanings over forms. I argue for a different literary chronology based on Riffaterre’s early underscoring of form.

Capital Punishment and Sexual Politics in Lecomte's La Veuve de Saint Pierre

This essay explores two complex socio-political and ethical questions treated in La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (1999), a recent, critically acclaimed movie directed by Patrice Lecomte. Although Lecomte raises these questions in reference to some unusual events that occurred in the nineteenth century on remote French islands off the coast of Eastern Canada, he takes a more familiar ideological stance on them, one that many members of contemporary audiences, including myself, share with him. For reasons that will become clearer in the pages that follow, Lecomte’s film demonstrates that the director stands squarely against the death penalty and for equal rights for women. As a form of cultural praxis, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre thus seeks to modify and to correct, as it were, certain conservative attitudes and institutions that are often still in place today, but that are, for some people, (Lecomte among them, I would argue) reminiscent of more distant times and places. At the same time, the film implicitly advances what can only be called more liberal opinions on these matters. I intend therefore to examine ways in which Lecomte uses artistic, philosophic and literary allusions to address two questions that continue to confront, and often divide, people today. The first of these questions concerns the institution of capital punishment in general, as well as the particular use of the guillotine for this purpose. In France and former French colonies, the guillotine remained the official instrument of execution for almost two hundred years, from the time of the French Revolution to the year when Mitterrand’s government officially abolished capital punishment (1981). The last official execution in France actually occurred on March 11, 1963. This made France the