ABSTRACT

Film and sports may be considered constitutively interrelated dimensions. Both fields are construable as figurations of difference, prioritizing bodies in motion and relying on media technologies. Figured as scenic ‘film sports’ instead of generic ‘sports films’, aesthetic instances of sports in fictional films promise insight into how human differentiation and corporeality are depicted in a highly condensed manner. This paper focuses on scenes of film sports in Greek cinema of the early 2010s, especially Attenberg (2010) and Alpeis/Alps (2011). Re-reading these films on shifted conditions is accompanied by a terminological and conceptual re-approach to weirdness. As seen through an analytical lens, the corporeally and aesthetically weird initially points to phenomena of crisis related to specific consequences of the European financial crisis in Greece. Eventually, notions of weird precarity have to be extended to wide-reaching issues of subject-formation (pertaining Europe-wide at least). The exemplary study of scenic incidents of film sports shows them depicting different states of corporeality in a neither strictly representational nor strictly stylized but paradoxically ‘documentaristic’ way. If these film-sportive incidents are aesthetically weird, they are so in terms of the diegetically performing bodies and/or their specific cinematic staging.

Keywords: Alpeis / Alps, Attenberg, Cinematic Aesthetics, Figurations of Difference, Sports on Film, Weirdness