stage name 49 cinematography collects the baton of Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rainer Werner Fassbinder when he wrote «movies can free our heads», banishing a doped reality, brandishing a prolonged release sur-reality. It is in sharing portraits of weak flesh, ancient but ultra-contemporary, pop but highly sophisticated, that the Hellenic Trident of the Zero Years Hellenic Trident of the Zero Years - Lanthimos above all, Tsangari and that Alexandros Avranas Alexandros Avranas who shattered Venice with his Miss Violence - became a visionary spokesperson of the industrial and urban desolation of an Athens overflowing into its solitude, rather than into its sea7. It was in Athens that Yorgos Lanthimos was born, in 1973, in the Pangrati district, the same as the Panathinaiko Stadium: erected in honour of Athena, goddess of mind and art - echo of the myth - and place hosting the first Olympics of the modern age - cult of the body. An obscure myth, an inadequate body, which the filmmaker translates into original screenplays - five out of six written together with the dazzled pen of Efthymis Filippou Efthymis Filippou, whose contribution is always highly recognizable - paving in gold his escalation of the international festival escalation of the international festival circuit. And it was in Panathinaiko, on the occasion of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics, that Lanthimos sealed the long collaboration with the artistic director of the two ceremonies, that Dimitris Dimitris Papaioannou today an international testimonial of a dance disconcerting, enchanting, moving, translating into contemporary all the power of the ancient myth, with which Lanthimos continuously collaborated as director of photography since 1999 - after graduating, abandoning his studies in marketing and specializing in film-making at the Stavrakos Film School Stavrakos Film School in Athens. A fruitful exchange relationship culminated in 2005 with Kinetta, whose protagonist is Evangelia Randou Evangelia Randou, étoile of Papaioannou's Edafos Dance Theater Edafos Dance Theater. Dance that, in Lanthimos’ direction, stands as a powerful narrative element. In the olympian observation of the stripped-down bureaucratization to which human nature has been subjected, in the inability to communicate a language that is also a form of control for atomized individuals and crazed cells, that of a dance so free that the grotesque can be afforded is the only non-colonized territory, a free zone for the possibility of an individual expression more and more dictatorially regulated - see tableaux vivants as the possessed choreography of Daughter 1 in front of a bewildered family in Kynodontas; the freak silent disco by Loners in The Lobster [2015]; the court ball in The Favourite [2018] whose steps, more than an ancient quadrille, refer to Tony Manero's Saturday Night Fever. Music that, in Lanthimos’ direction, stands as a powerful narrative element. His first directions are commercials and music videoclips [to which he returned, in 2016, for the metaphorically ultra-violent 30 seconds Instastory within a collective project by Radiohead Radiohead, on the occasion of the launch of their album A moon-shaped pool], which allowed him to deepen the audiovisual possibilities of the camera, as the communicative ones of his vision. As for the structure of the Greek tragedy, Yorgos Lanthimos gives a solid leading role to the soundscape of his films, whether it is empowering or totally alienating in relation to the scene that it surrounds. 5 Greek tragedy resumption is one of the fertile fields of contemporary theatrical dramaturgy, whose most famous examples can be found in the work by Luca Ronconi - from The Bacchae [1973] to Prometheus Bound [2002]; in the Living Theater’s Antigone [1980]; in Medea [1984], Alcestis [1986] and Oedipus [2018] by Robert Wilson; in Iphigenia at the Bridge of Arta and The Aeschilus'Suite, both from 1995, by Dimitris Papaioannou; in Orestea - an organic comedy? [1995] and in Tragedia Endogonidia [2002-2004] by Romeo Castellucci’s Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio; in Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus. To glorify the cult of tragedy [2015]; in the Anagoor’s Oresteia [2018]. Cinematography too has widely experimented with Greek theater; among the best known, Pier Paolo Pasolini with his Oedipus Rex [1967] and Medea [1969], Woody Allen with The goddess of love [1995], Arturo Ripstein with Such is life [2000], Yorgos Lanthimos with The killing of the sacred deer [2017]. 6 Actually, Kinetta follows a co-direction with Lakis Lazopoulos in 2001, although not representative of his vision, to the point that Yorgos Lanthimos will choose not to include it in his biography. 7 In this sense, fierce is a reflection in Attenberg: «It is as if we were calculating the final catastrophe with mathematical precision. Especially for a Country that missed all at once the industrial age. From shepherds to bulldozers, from bulldozers to mines, and from mines directly to small bourgeois hysteria. We built an industrial colony on a sheep pen, and thought we were making revolution».
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