Greek Parliament on TV: Aesthetical Sabotage?

Please, look at the shot at the 25'' in the video (or, for a bigger screen, here).




What is that supposed to be anyway? A reverse shot? The fake subjective point of view of the prime minister? Looks like one of those cheap tv show in the 70s, when the digital camaras start to allow more Rec Time for less money.
People in power still ignores that if you mix the formats people respect you for the format you sell them? Or should we consider it an aesthetical sabotage? The ultimate anti-Leni Riefenstahl? Because if that is the case, the success could have hardly been greater.

In the famous interview Orson Welles teach Peter Bogdanovich an important lesson.
The less we understand an actor language the easiest it is to assess his talent.
Clearly Costas Karamanlis is a poor rhetorician. But thank to that reverse shot(and to the lack of production values) we can appreciate MPs for what they really are. The payed audience of a talk show. And not thanks to somebody's words(that may fail to appear or reach a broad public) but through images that speaks for themselves.

When it comes to words few people have spoken clearer than Adam Shatz fron LRB:

The week that followed(the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos) saw mass demonstrations culminating in a general strike, the occupation of universities throughout the country, the torching of public buildings, the firebombing of police stations and the destruction and pillaging of hundreds of shops, with damages estimated at a billion euros. No one in Greece seems very surprised by the scale of the response. Patience had been wearing thin with the government, with the police, and with a state of affairs in which the country’s new rich shop in the stores (now trashed) in downtown Athens while educated Greeks work as taxi drivers and bartenders. Only a martyr was needed. Grigoropoulos was perfect for the role: young, sweet-faced, from a good family. He was also Greek, unlike most of the victims of recent police violence, whose deaths were barely noticed.
(...)
Their protests struck a chord among students in other European countries dismayed by their dim economic prospects and unresponsive leaders. There have been demonstrations of support in Italy, Spain, France and Germany; in a sombre speech on 15 December, Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned that unless other European governments move quickly to boost their economies, they may find themselves facing similar unrest.
(...)
There’s a sense among Greeks that nothing is sacred any more: not with a government that failed to prevent the spread of forest fires in 2007, in which dozens of people died, and then cut deals with developers afterwards; and not with politicians like Karamanlis’s friend Christos Zachopoulos, the former secretary general of the Culture Ministry and chairman of the Central Archaeological Council, who approved a grant to a reforestation project that his own advisers told him would damage Byzantine monuments. (That’s just one of the offences that came to light after Zachopoulos, threatened with blackmail by his former assistant and mistress, jumped off his balcony to avoid disgrace. He survived the fall.) Greece doesn’t brutalise its citizens to the degree that it did under the Colonels, but neither is it providing them with a future, or even a secure present. No wonder a recent survey found Greeks to be the most pessimistic people in Europe.
(...)
Greece now has a higher percentage of students abroad than any other country in the EU. A fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, youth unemployment is 25 per cent, and the minimum wage is half the EU average. The anarchists believe the solution is a ‘total rejection of work’, but most of the protesters would be happy with more work, at a better rate of pay".


Takis Michas from openDemocracy(also quoted in LRB article) makes other important points:

"What was unique about these Greek events - as opposed to, say, the riots in the banlieues of Paris in late 2005 - was the total withdrawal of the government and the security forces from the scene. Civil society was left alone and unarmed to fend off the violent attacks on their property by the hordes of predators. On 9 December, one of the worst nights of rioting, more than 400 shops were attacked in Athens: some were torched, others looted and seriously damaged.

All of this took place while the security forces simply stood by and watched the disaster unfold. They were following the explicit orders of their political masters to assume a "defensive posture" - which in effect meant that they did not try to prevent the orgy of destruction.

Anyone watching this absurd scene could be excused for concluding that a secret deal had been struck between the government and the rioters: we let you torch and plunder to your heart's content, and you let us continue pretending that we are in charge".

...More on the extent of New Democracy Government's failure here.