Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Violence in any form (verbal, physical, emotional) has been a permanent feature of cinematic over time. Although there is a commonly-hold view that violence in contemporary cinema has increased and flooded the movie screen, in fact, cinema reflects what is happening in the in general in the society that, on the contrary to the past, is more easily made public. As widely known, things the situation has deteriorated in the wake of the economic crisis.
Yannis Economides has touched upon these issues in his own particular way. Aggressive behavior and especially verbal abuse is used both to provoke to analyze human existence. He especially has focused on ‘‘the darkness of the human soul’’ in order to emphasize the archetypical traits of human nature, jealously, hatred, greed. Greek society id depicted in the director's cinematic lenses as a field of power politics and competition among the family members ending up in "hierarchical relations of a new type". Although verbal abuses central in director's work, it is not clear who is the perpetrators and who is the victim after all. Anger, sarcasm, humiliation, insult, ironic and derogatory comments are rampant throughout the story, as if the actors were under a constant influence of psychotropic substances.
The presentation seeks to shed light on this by focusing on how verbal abuses coincide with the general competition of the figures and how this generates endless hostility that traps them all in a deadlock from which there is no way out. Besides this, narrative techniques like dark humor are also commented.
Finally, a major reflection that developed during the research, adopts the perception that invoking challenge through the use of abuse in cinema, is as important as any form of narrative techniques to achieve the final result (fun, introspection, etc.).