A Girl at a Celebration: Miss Violence

First you see a door opening, the door frame just fitting inside the camera frame. We enter the middle-class sitting room of an Athenian family. Confetti, dancing, the celebration of a birthday and of intergenerational kin cohabitation, as you often find it in Greece: a daughter confiding to her mother that she is pregnant; a father and/or grandfather dancing with his young grandchildren and/or children (exactly in this ‘and/or’, as the viewer will soon realise, lies not only the interpretative anxiety that the film provokes, but also the violence structuring the life arrangements of this family group). There is a close-up of the eleven-year-old girl whose birthday they are celebrating. She balances on the window to the soundtrack of Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love. She falls.

The camera then follows her out of the window. We realise that the flat in the previous scenes has been on the fifth floor or so. As the camera pans to a vertical crane shot, the dead body of the young girl now lying on the ground seems like it is being inspected, surveyed – the square-tile pattern now looks more and more like a graph measuring her dead body, blood slowly pouring from it. In the first three minutes of Alexandros Avranas's Miss Violence (2013), we have gone from an opening that alerts to its allegorical potential, to a realist depiction of a family celebration and a suicide, to a body filmed lying still and framed as a sign of something larger. For the two hours that follow in this gripping, harrowing film, which is often extremely difficult to watch, we will be constantly moving between several levels. There is the story of abuse, exploitation, child sex-trafficking and incest during the Greek crisis; a pater familias inflicts all of the above on the members of his family, in order to ‘make ends meet during a difficult period’.

Identity Strategies within Traveller Storytelling

It has been recognised for some time that storytelling practices are intrinsically linked to the educational and cultural development of individuals within their communities. Niles observes that storytelling amounts to the maintenance of ‘social equilibrium by strengthening the bonds of affection between individuals while affirming the beliefs and values on which the continuing existence of a community depends’ (1999: 171–172). Before moving on to Part II of this book and looking at examples of Traveller storytelling in some detail, this chapter sheds light on debates around individual and group identity formation, and what this means in the context of the Travellers’ unique identities. Given the mostly twentieth-century-based perspectives of the opening chapters, this chapter goes on to furnish the reader with insights and perspectives from more contemporary members of Scotland's Traveller communities. We bring together the discussions from previous chapters to think about how Traveller storytelling traditions set themselves apart. Within a Traveller-centric, humanistic framework, it anticipates the detailed discussions of Part II by showing how the Travellers’ storytelling traditions represent a singularly Traveller cultural conceptualisation.

Lauri Honko has suggested that, within identity research, ‘the mainstream is towards analysing the identity of the individual, not necessarily in isolation from groups but as the final result of different group experiences, [and] shared values’ (1988: 14). This is an important insight from Honko which suggests that we can tap into the overarching values and beliefs of the group by looking closely at the identities of individuals from within the group. However, Honko perceives problems with this approach, in that the resulting analysis may reveal more about the individual than the ‘identity strategies of a collective body’ (ibid.).

With the spread of portrait photographs in the modernist period, face studies became more important than ever. Portrait photographs allowed for the reading of faces without the presence of the sitter, inviting close attention to sitters’ gazes, gestures, and ways of presenting themselves to the camera. The beholders could feel their enigmatic attraction: a human face taken out of its everyday context; a gaze that seemed to look through the viewer, infinitely out of reach. An almost ghostlike presence, transported by light. Every analog photograph has a history of pairs of eyes looking at it, investing it with emotion: sympathy, love, jealousy, dismay. Such photographs are touched, held, kissed, and tossed away; they are provided with frames or put into albums. They also have a history of fading and decay; over time, they become shaded, tainted, or folded, dissolving between someone's hands or slowly fading in a drawer.

During the decades before and after 1900, the portrait photograph started to appear as a literary motif. Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf stand out as particularly important in this respect. All of them had personal experiences with portrait photographs and were passionate about the medium. In their work, they reflected upon the phenomenon, depicting how their characters collect, behold, and cherish portrait photographs. Yet they also recognized the disturbing aspects of portrait photographs and paid attention to the difficulty of reading faces, the problem of the unreturned gaze, and the challenge of living with ghostlike doubles. Not least, they employed literature to reflect upon portrait photographs as a medium and the uncertain status of the human face.

In his fiction, Franz Kafka explores a set of inscrutable power relations and the precarious situations they create for his characters. Both metaphysical and profane forces seem to be at work, along with various technological entanglements. Portrait photography plays a role in this blend; in a variety of texts, Kafka displays a remarkable awareness of the powers of photographs. He depicts how they play a role in emotional life, creating attraction, longing, and sympathy as well as distrust and distress. He shows that they can be captivating in a limiting way, but also suggests that they can instigate processes of liberation. This engagement with portrait photographs reveals the fragile relation between human beings and technology and discloses how the premises for contact, communication, and identity formation were subject to change in Kafka's day.

Just like Proust, Kafka was passionate about portrait photographs in his personal life. The strongest evidence of this is his correspondence with Felice Bauer in the period 1912–17, which included an exchange of almost forty photographs. Kafka's letters testify to a deep emotional investment in Felice's photographs, and they reveal that he had a jealous eye and an obsessive interest in details. These letters show that photographs play a key role in creating intimacy and distant love. In Kafka's fiction as well, photographs proliferate, and especially family photographs play a key role. The characters’ relation to such photographs reveal their ties of loyalty, emotional attachments, and imaginary lives. Kafka shows how photographs have a sway over the characters and serve as the compensatory gazes of the family members. Upon closer inspection, however, the photographs are ambivalent; they depict silent gestures and suppressed emotions. Beholding such photographs, his characters undergo both emotional and intellectual processes, sometimes immersing themselves in the pictures, sometimes attempting to interpret them, and sometimes considering their own relation to the photographs.

In some Abbasid palaces of Samarra, a distinct arrangement of halls, which so far have been identified as the throne hall, audience hall or reception hall block, is recognisable. This configuration comprises four longitudinal halls set at the four sides of a square chamber that is thought to have been covered by a dome. Each hall opens directly or through a portico onto a courtyard or a garden. Based primarily on archaeological findings from two palaces – Balkuwārā and the Caliphal Palace – Herzfeld proposed in the early twentieth century that the cruciform complex functioned as the throne hall, whereby the central chamber was used for private audiences and the semi-open halls (iwans) for public audiences. Herzfeld traced the architectural precedent for this arrangement to the early Abbasid palace of Abū Muslim (d. 137/755), the governor of Khorasan, which stood at Marv and was described by the fourth/tenth-century geographer al-Iṣṭakhrī. According to al-Iṣṭakhrī, the governmental palace (Dār al-ʾImāra) contained a domed chamber (qubba) ‘in which [Abū Muslim] used to sit. … The domed chamber (qubba) has four doors, each leading to an iwan, …, and in front of each iwan is a square courtyard (ṣaḥn).’ Herzfeld, followed by Creswell, further suggested that several palaces described in textual sources as having been built during second/seventh–third/eighth century in the Levant and Iraq and referred to as Qubbat al-Khadhrāʾ (translated as ‘The Green Dome’ or ‘The Dome of Heaven’), probably featured a similar arrangement of audience halls.

Washingtonia: A Short History of Metonymic Connections

Big dogs and small dogs. Dogs in cages, dogs being trained, dogs with hairstyles that look like people's hairdos. An Athens that is not exactly recognizable: the unfamiliar setting of a park, a museum of stuffed animals, a suburban house with a big grassy yard and a swimming pool, an empty industrial space and an old bourgeois home past its prime. Characters who speak with what could be called a deadpan delivery, a certain coldness or ironic distance, even though every single time the way in which they speak can actually be attributed to the specific circumstances in which they find themselves: a boy who lives alone without friends, a blind elderly woman alone in an empty house and so on. Scenes of training that somehow goes awry, to tragicomic effects. Awkward camera framing, often cutting off the top and bottom parts of humans and animals. Stasis and only occasional movement, in both the storyline and (it seems) people's lives. Chains of scenes that first fit together visually before one realises a possible narrative connection. Metonymical chains of signification that ask for an effort (by the characters in the film, but also by the film's viewers) in order to see where they are going. And, more often than not, chains exceeding the frame.

The very first image of this film features the long neck of a giraffe, with both its head and the rest of its body outside the frame. As the voice-over is telling us in French at the beginning of Konstantina Kotzamani's Washingtonia (2014), the giraffe has the biggest heart in the animal kingdom. Otherwise it could not pump the blood three metres high to reach the giraffe's head. ‘When the giraffe is flat on the ground, one can hear the beating of its heart, which reverberates through the earth, and all the animals synchronise themselves with the heart of the giraffe’. In the middle of the summer the heart of the giraffe stops beating so fast, and this means that all animals are somewhat disorganised. ‘And here comes the most bizarre moment of all. The last days of the summer, when the first headwinds arrive, we can hear the heart of the giraffe again’.

Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art is a venture that offers readers easy access to the most up-to-date research across the whole range of Islamic art. Building on the long and distinguished tradition of Edinburgh University Press in publishing books on the Islamic world, it is a forum for studies that, while closely focused, also open wide horizons. Books in the series, for example, concentrate in an accessible way, and in accessible, clear, plain English, on the art of a single century, dynasty or geographical area; on the meaning of works of art; on a given medium in a restricted time frame; or on analyses of key works in their wider contexts. A balance is maintained as far as possible between successive titles, so that various parts of the Islamic world and various media and approaches are represented.

Books in the series are academic monographs of intellectual distinction that mark a significant advance in the field. While they are naturally aimed at an advanced and graduate academic audience, a complementary target readership is the worldwide community of specialists in Islamic art – professionals who work in universities, research institutes, auction houses and museums – as well as that elusive character, the interested general reader.

This chapter begins by considering what a narrative's form, or structure, can tell us about its function. We have previously encountered several so-called ‘international tales’ and the present chapter will continue discussing these to present the reader with further examples and interpretations. For instance, at the beginning of Robertson's ‘Traveller-Judge’ narrative discussed in the previous chapter, he remarks that he thinks that his story might ‘come under some of the international tales […] because you find that these Traveller tales are international tales’ (TAD 38131). Considering the ATU classifications described above, Robertson's narrative does not appear to conform to the characteristics of any one tale-type. At the same time, Robertson's awareness of international tale-types is not surprising; strong tradition-bearers often combine, and reimagine, well-known international and local tales. Many Travellers’ stories come to represent a melange of international tale-types that are modified to reflect local conditions. These narrative melanges are palpable demonstrations of the distinctiveness of Traveller storytelling that has been alluded to throughout this book. In the context of the combination of tale-types and motifs, Traveller storytelling can be viewed as a distinctive mode of orality where the narrators create narrative ecotypes (cf. von Sydow 1934: 349).

The reader will recall from the previous chapter that a narrative ecotype is a version of an international tale-type that has adapted to a certain socio-cultural context. This adaptation amounts to combining and manipulating various plots and motifs that can be shown to appear in other discrete socio-cultural contexts. It is not the purpose here to ask how or why these plots and motifs appear in discrete contexts, but to examine how the Travellers’ stories become embedded with nuanced meanings that reflect their unique culture and lived experiences.

Looking at the deserted remnants of the palace gardens at Samarra today, it is perhaps too easy to forget that these grounds once featured vast and elaborate waterworks. Indeed, there are numerous references to large pools, basins, fountains and water channels in contemporary descriptions of gardens and courtyard gardens of the Abbasid palaces in Lower Mesopotamia. However, like the gardens themselves, the water features have rarely been subject to archaeological investigations. The fragmentary evidence is primarily drawn from aerial photographs and archaeological surveys conducted in the early twentieth century, particularly those pertaining to the Caliphal Palace of Samarra. These sources, while sparse, still offer vital clues regarding the abundance of water and its indispensable role in shaping the design of these gardens. By combining this limited material evidence with abundant textual sources, this chapter presents a picture of the diverse water features that once adorned these gardens. It seeks to illuminate their critical role in both garden design and the everyday life at court, offering a comprehensive understanding of how water was intricately interwoven into the fabric of these built environments.

Birkas

Textual sources indicate that a prominent feature of Abbasid palace gardens was a large pool, referred to as a birka. The definitions of birka offered by contemporary philologists help us to understand some of its formal features. The Buyid vizier and lexicographer Ibn ʿAbbād (d. 385/995)1 defined birka as a structure ‘similar to a basin (ḥawḍ) dug into the ground’.2 Kitāb al-ʿAyn (compiled about 184/800 in Lower Mesopotamia) offered a more detailed definition, describing birka as a structure ‘similar to a basin (ḥawḍ), which is dug into the ground and does not have raised sides (aʿḍād: pl. of ʿiḍd) above the ground's surface’.

What's in a Name:

The Greek Weird Wave and the Contours of Interpellation

‘Attenberg, Dogtooth and the weird wave of Greek cinema’ – this was the unassuming title of the two-page spread published in The Guardian to coincide with the British release of Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg in August 2011. Written by the critic Steve Rose (2011), it started by asking: ‘Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece's economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?’

This is how the Greek Weird Wave gained momentum, as a name and as a concept: From the beginning, it was related to the question of how the socio-economic crisis was affecting recent Greek Cinema, and whether the latter would survive ‘in the troubled country’. As a matter of fact, in the years after Rose's article, Greeks did, indeed, continue to make films; the country continued to be troubled; and the term Greek Weird Wave somehow stuck, to denote for world cinema, a full-fledged cinematic movement.

In 2011, when this Guardian article was published, Yorgos Lanthimos's film Dogtooth (2009) had just completed an impressively successful international run that included a nomination for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes (billed as ‘the true Cannes discovery of the year’), various other accolades and, most importantly, distribution in more than twenty countries around the world. Lanthimos's subsequent film, Alps, was to follow suit in the winter of 2011; in the meantime, his close collaborator Athina Rachel Tsangari's second feature film, Attenberg (2010), won two awards at the Venice Film Festival and was also receiving distribution in many European and American countries, to very positive reviews.