Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema

New filmmaking practices within contemporary arthouse cinema are responding to current socio-political realities with new cinematic im-ages of the human body. They center around grotesque characters embedded within plots of comic absurdity. Particularly, since 2009, a Greek film trend has attracted international attention with the film fes-tival premiere of Giorgos Lanthimos’s social thriller Dogtooth (2009) and its follow-ups Alps (2011) and Attenberg (2010) by Athina Rachel Tsangaris. The films have been produced in the midst of, and as a response to, the current Greek social crisis, which involves an eco-nomic turmoil of rapid transformation and neo-liberalization in a time of ongoing bankruptcy.