The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos 9781800731974

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on the Transliteration
Introduction: Prolegomena to Theo Angelopoulos’ Life and Filmmaking
Chapter 1 Life and Works
Chapter 2 The Life of Films
Chapter 3 The Construction of Theo Angelopoulos’ Cinematic Language
Conclusion: Final Words Unframing the Political: Angelopoulos Beyond Orientalism
Photo Essay. Transformations of the Gaze in Theo Angelopoulos’ Films
Filmography
References
Index

Citation preview

The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

 Vrasidas Karalis

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Vrasidas Karalis All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Karalis, Vrasidas, author. Title: The cinematic language of Theo Angelopoulos / Vrasidas Karalis. Description: New York : Berghahn, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and filmography. Identifiers: LCCN 2021020410 | ISBN 9781800731967 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800731974 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Angelopoulos, Theodoros, 1935-2012—Criticism and interpretation. | Motion picture producers and directors—Greece— Biography. | Motion pictures—Greece—History—20th century. | Auteur theory (Motion pictures) Classification: LCC PN1998.3.A53 K37 2021 | DDC 791.4302/33092— dcundefined LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020410

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-196-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-197-4 ebook

To my sister Aimilia Karalis, whose love for Theo’s films and dedication to his social vision were my continuous inspirations during the prolonged period of this book’s gestation.

Contents



Acknowledgements Note on the Transliteration Introduction. Prolegomena to Theo Angelopoulos’ Life and Filmmaking

viii ix

1

Chapter 1. Life and Works

18

Chapter 2. The Life of Films

56

Chapter 3. The Construction of Theo Angelopoulos’ Cinematic Language

120

Conclusion. Final Words

155

Photo Essay. Transformations of the Gaze in Theo Angelopoulos’ Films

163

Filmography

177

References

193

Index

200

Acknowledgements



This monograph was first conceived in 2014 a er a brief email exchange I had with the editorial manager at Berghahn Books, Mark Stanton, about the necessity for a new monograph on the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos. It was meant to be an accessible and readable introduction to his life and work, updating Andrew Horton’s book and introducing global cinephiles to the full scope of Angelopoulos’ cinematic project. Mark was succeeded by generous and enthusiastic editors, who insisted on completing this book. I have to thank Chris Chappell, Soyolmaa Lkhagvadorj, Mykelin Higham and finally, and especially, Amanda Horn, whose persistence and dedication made this monograph possible despite a series of obstacles, including health problems and the restrictions of the pandemic. My deepest gratitude to my colleague Achilleas Dellis from Athens, who, during the prolonged period of lockdown, found and sent me rare material on the reception and the interpretation of Angelopoulos’ films. Also, deep thanks to my colleague Be y Kaklamanidou from the University of Thessaloniki for her graceful encouragement and help. Finally, my gratitude to Yannis Dramitinos for his assistance with the photographic snapshots. I would also like to thank Phoebe Economopoulou and Eleni Angelopoulou, for the permission to use a number of stills and photographs from Theo’s films: their enthusiasm has been invaluable. My thanks to Kiriaki Orphanos, David Po er and Sophia Sakellis for looking a er the textual editing at different stages of its progress. Vrasidas Karalis The University of Sydney January 2021

Note on the Transliteration



There will always be problems with the transliteration of Greek names. Sometimes direct equivalence is possible although phonetic transcription is employed (Giorgos or Yorgos: Giorgos Arvanitis, but Yorgos Lanthimos. Giannis or Yannis?). As a general rule, I followed the form found at the IMDb website. All translations from Greek are (mostly) by me.

Introduction

Prolegomena to Theo Angelopoulos’ Life and Filmmaking



Exploring the Oeuvre This monograph aims to present the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos as a global auteur by contextualising his life and work, delineating central elements of his cinematic language and analysing crucial motifs of the political, aesthetic and mythopoetic visual imagery embodied in his movies. It a empts a synoptic but thorough interpretation of his films and their poetics, pointing out continuities and discontinuities between them while interrogating the wider questions embedded in their narrative and visual structure. Overall, the book is about Angelopoulos the me eur en scène, the screenwriter and the image-maker, rather than the political thinker, le -wing ideologue or ambassador for a national culture. Despite the usual framing of his work as representing the epitome of political modernism in the European periphery, and of Angelopoulos as the symbol of a ‘national or local cinema’, I argue for the global and transnational significance of his oeuvre by unframing it from its ‘marginal’ or ‘peripheral’ character. My intention is to explore the cinematographic poetics of Angelopoulos’ visual idiom, his cinécriture, in the sense that Robert Bresson understood the term, as ‘writing with images in movement and with sounds’ (Bresson 1986 [1975]: 7). I will also discuss the various problematics Angelopoulos incorporated in his images, or indeed brought out with his images, with the intention of providing an alternative to the hegemonic regimes of occlusion that popular culture, and its cultural

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privileging by postmodernism, imposed on cinematic production a er the mid-eighties. The book engages with Angelopoulos’ works in three main chapters, each one with a different perspective and methodology. Each chapter presupposes and leads to the other, aiming to investigate the full scope of Angelopoulos’ creative output and critically address his overall achievement. Each chapter aspires to foreground what is determined by immediate historical context and what transcends it while discussing Angelopoulos’ conscious a empt to articulate a global language for cinematic representation by synthesising various genres, filmic discourses and heterogenous styles. Ultimately, of course, we are trying to be er understand the work and the life of Theo Angelopoulos, since, as Jean Cocteau would have stated, ‘a film, whatever it might be, is always its director’s portrait’ (Cocteau 1972: 77). Indeed, within the political and aesthetic form of his movies, a complex, contradictory and somehow tormented portrait of an ambitious artist emerges, one that asks for cautious and systematic analysis. Chapter 1 gives a summary of Angelopoulos’ life, situating him within the historical and social realities that formed his world from his early years until his sudden death in 2012. However, I am not presenting his films and life as commentaries on the upheavals of his native country. On the contrary, I examine them as the symbolic extensions in time of their social contexts and their implied subtexts. Nevertheless, I will draw on various contributing factors, including the biographical, that led to the formation of Angelopoulos’ cinematic language starting with his decision to become a filmmaker. To that end, I have consulted a variety of sources about his life, including interviews in Greek journals and newspapers and, especially a er 1990, on television. I have also si ed through various and, occasionally, contradictory statements, which were o en coloured by personal feuds, bi er frustrations and professional bias. Yet I have avoided any Freudian interpretation, since psychoanalytic biographism does not fully account for the many invisible texts we find emerging from Angelopoulos’ films and that cannot be explained by reductionist references to personal or contextual particulars. Within this loose biographical sketch, I have a empted to incorporate details about the production and reception of Angelopoulos’ films in a coherent narrative that could function as the hermeneutical background for certain aspects of his work in general. (A comprehensive account can be found in my previous book, A History of Greek Cinema (2012), and a more detailed analysis of his visual problematics in Realism in Post-War Greek Cinema (2016) with specific reference to his ‘ocular poetics’.) Perhaps, in another study, a more biographical and probably Freudian or even Laca-

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 3

nian analysis of Angelopoulos’ films is needed in order to explore the psychological ‘mirrorings’ encoded in the structure of his cinematic language; the recurring themes of returning fathers, incestuous psychodynamics and maternal absence. Some of these aspects will be raised briefly while discussing Angelopoulos’ filmic texts during critical moments in his professional life and the external circumstances governing the reorientation of the film industry in Greece, such as, for example, the Restoration of the Republic, a er July 1974. Chapter 2, which is the longest, provides a systematic and chronological presentation of Angelopoulos’ works on their own terms and independently from the wider over-texts of their time. There are many detailed presentations of his films and their storylines: in Andrew Horton’s brilliant monograph (which unfortunately ends at 1998) or Acquarello’s1 lengthy article, for example, both of which I recommend. Furthermore, Artificial Eye has released a three-volume collector’s edition of Angelopoulos’ films without, however, any commentary or an accompanying booklet but that nevertheless gives the opportunity to study his films in their entirety. Since this monograph is wri en for an international audience, I have avoided including unnecessary references, reviews or articles in Greek. I make an exception for the essays by Vassilis Rafailidis (1934–2000), who followed the development of Angelopoulos’ work from the beginning as a friend, co-worker and intellectual comrade in arms until his death. Chapter 3 focuses on how Angelopoulos constructed his cinematic language by combining, inventing, or reinventing different components from various genres in classical and experimental filmmaking. The central theme of this chapter is the constant transmutation of Angelopoulos’ visual vocabulary; a radical transmutation that reflected wider cultural revisions in the social dimensions of film production as well as in his personal ideological perspective and philosophical hermeneutics of cinematic representation. It also briefly addresses the various elements his filmic visuality is comprised of, like acting, sexuality, religion and ideology. Finally, it argues that in his perplexing evolution as a filmmaker, he aspired to explore and elaborate a new dimension in the field of cinematic visuality, which I would term as the cinematic sublime. Consciously or unconsciously, Angelopoulos was working towards the construction of the sublime as an aesthetic dimension within the moving images of cinema, and this is what his best films are about. My belief is that he did succeed in creating the sublime in his best films, although we find fragments and isolated elements of its presence in most of them. His cinematic sublime was the outcome of his constant struggle to expand the expressive potential of cinema so that as a filmmaker he could give the ‘audience the credit of being intelligent, to help them understand their

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own existence, to give them hope in a be er future, to teach them how to dream again’ (Fainaru 2001: 149).

Following Angelopoulos’ Journeys Angelopoulos made thirteen films and a small number of shorts and documentaries. He started with a materialistic, Marxist understanding about the function of cinema in contemporary societies, which was dominant in the sixties through the work of the French structuralist Marxists Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. Coming out of the militant Marxist period of the Cahiers du Cinema between 1966 and 1969, he firmly believed in the revolutionary or liberational potential of cinema – through the principles of historical and dialectical materialism – as the only true public art in modern capitalist societies, characterised by the exploitation of the working class, the alienation of their social existence and the reification of their individual consciousnesses. This approach runs deep throughout Angelopoulos’ whole career. Even when he grew disappointed with the Le , as late as 2010 he still believed: ‘I remain le -wing emotionally, although I don’t know what to be Le -wing means anymore.’2 Furthermore, Angelopoulos’ early work was in a constant, implicitly agonistic, dialogue with Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, particularly in its anti-Aristotelian de-dramatisation, its relative independence from all conventions of realism, its unemotional picturing of the world, and in being able to shi the position of the spectator from empathy to detachment outside action, amongst other things (Brecht 1964: 35). However, his Brechtian period ended rather abruptly with his fourth film, never to be revisited except as self-quotation and self-parody. In the end, Aristotle returned triumphant, and his understanding of tragedy as ‘catharsis’ (Aristotle 1995: 46) through pity and fear (di’ eleou kai fovou) can be found at the heart of Angelopoulos’ most distinct contributions to filmmaking, avoiding all forms of referential or indeed mimetic fallacy that has framed the hermeneutics of Aristotle’s Poetics for centuries. Aristotle’s influence dialectically surpasses, in the Hegelian sense of au eben, all Brechtian elements in Angelopoulos’ work a er 1977 and o en even seems to resynthesise Brechtian performative stylisation through clsssical mythopoetic narratives. The changes in Angelopoulos’ cinematic language manifested a growing pessimism about the Le , pessimism, or melancholia, he gradually transferred, politically and psychologically, to the anti-realism of grand utopian quests while at the same time struggling to ‘visualise’ their specific formal poetics. Despite such disenchantment, Angelopoulos main-

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tained his fascination with the enduring political impact of cinema in the age of neoliberal, post-ideological and post-metaphysical consumer capitalism, when images became disposable commodities and the working class, which in the past he thought of as the central social force for revolutionary action, appeared to have all but lost its ‘revolutionary’ potential for political liberation and social emancipation. His disillusion with the organised parties of the Le , and his repudiation of them as bureaucratic managerialism, led Angelopoulos to explore but never quite endorse a certain aesthetic autonomy of art bespeaking the diachronic, if not perennial, ‘essence’ of cultural imaginary. The last chapter functions as a counterpoint to those that have preceded it. It aspires to unframe Angelopoulos from the heavy politicisation of his films and the constant a empts by critics to see them as visual notes, or indeed footnotes, on the political tragedies of contemporary Greece. For this purpose, it explores his films as a sustained autobiographical visual narrative, or a cinematic roman-fleuve in the form of mythobiography,3 by foregrounding the personal and sometimes personalist themes present in the works that are based on Angelopoulos’ own experiences, relationships and encounters (pragmatic details of which are given in the first chapter). On the other hand, Angelopoulos himself stated: ‘All my films are autobiographical. There is an internal and an external autobiography. Even in the Reconstruction one could find autobiographical elements.’4 Despite the dominant tropes in the interpretation of Angelopoulos’ work as a political director who was afflicted by mal-du-siècle melancholia a er the collapse of socialism in 1989–91, this study also explores certain existentialist themes embedded in his images, which address questions of freedom, personal identity, ethical choice, memory and subjectivity, together with a peculiar nostalgia for a lost absolute, sometimes full of religiosity but totally devoid of religion. Ultimately, a pa ern of evolution emerges that brings Angelopoulos’ intellectual and spiritual quest close to a reverse form, as it were, of Soren Kierkegaard’s stages of development; especially in the last two decades of his life, when the temptation of an aestheticised history became dominant in his thinking, confronting the nihilistic implosion of meaning pervading Europe a er 1989. A prevailing misconception about Angelopoulos’ work is that viewers need to know about Greek political history in order to understand it. Talking about The Travelling Players, David Thomson noted that ‘we know a er half an hour, that, as non-native watchers, we are always to be cut off from the roots of this extraordinary ritual [which became] a film’ (Thomson 2008: 910). This is not the case; no sensitive or responsive viewer can feel cut off from Angelopoulos’ films because of their historical subject ma er. Each film not only reconstructs history but also constructs its own

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

history and both forms the expectations of its audience and is informed by them. Therefore, there is no need to read books on Greek politics before watching Angelopoulos. The film is itself the historical event, a spatiotemporal osmosis of collective and individual experiences through its images, a synergy between the formal intentions of the its director and the projections of its spectators, transforming it into a social encounter. With the belief that cinematic images provide both the text and context for their experience, this monograph minimises superfluous information about local politics regarding production, conflicts with other directors over funding, or personal squabbles with journalists and reviewers. The otherwise respected Greek film critic Dimitris Danikas, for example, loved poking malicious fun at all Angelopoulos’ films and has stirred considerable controversy about their reception. Such debates went on for long and were acrimonious, without ever elucidating or accounting for the visual dynamics of Angelopoulos’ overall achievement. The central point of my analysis is that there is no single ‘Angelopoulos’ cinematic language but rather four stages constituting the visual articulation of his work. The first is the period of political films, structured around Brechtian theatricality and a persistent tendency to demystify political power. The second is the period of delving into existentialist dilemmas through the discovery of introspective conscience in the individual psyche (a new parameter in his poetic vocabulary). In the third, Angelopoulos either assumes the mask of the cultural icon exploring collective myths across borderless regions or identifies with the archetypal poet of nationhood in times of crisis. Finally, in the fourth Angelopoulos oscillates between scepticism and nihilism; from the ideological enthusiasm that promised a new social and political life to the pulverisation of existence in modern cities inhabited by virtual realities, spectral presences and groundless ontologies. However, the ultimate question about visual temporality remains unanswered, as his last film, The Other Sea, in which he would have formulated a coherent presentation of the predicament of displaced refugees, as embodying the ontology of homelessness and deterritorialization, was le unrealised because of his violent death. Overall, Angelopoulos’ cinema is characterised by complex fluidity, an urgent quest for innovation, and the persistent search for what we might call visual historicity. The filmmaker was for him both historian and history, sometimes with the initial le er capitalised (which indeed might be problematic for his early historical materialism). His cinematic images were both res gestae and historia rerum gestarum, being themselves historical events that challenged and provoked viewers and invited them to think critically about the past and act radically in their present.

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They were also images encapsulating a philosophy, a way of thinking, a specific form of life; this philosophy of image-breaking and imagemaking is at the heart of Angelopoulos’ visual project throughout his work. Images as collective histories are central to his iconographic legacy, constructing representations that do not simply epitomise the historical experience of the Greeks but also elucidate many frustrated or aborted projects of European modernity. My ultimate suggestion is that all these elements frame and point to a cinematic visualisation of the sublime, to the degree that cinema has been able to encapsulate and construct a specific, non-literary perception of sublimity as primarily a mental event, as a noumenon in the Kantian sense of the word. As Immanuel Kant would have stated: ‘a noumenon is not for our understanding a special [kind of] object, namely, an intelligible object; . . . For we cannot in the least represent to ourselves the possibility of an understanding which should know its object, not discursively through categories, but intuitively in a non-sensible intuition’ (Kant 1999: 273). Such intuited objects, which Kant aptly called ‘intellectual intuition’ (‘nicht sinnliche Anschauung’) (Kant 1999: 267), are expressed through concrete visual forms without being completely determined by them, presenting metonymically the emerging non-correspondence between the specific form and its meaning: the viewer intuits the surplus meaning that comes out of each image without being able to define its specific location. Aimilia Karali relates a story about Angelopoulos looking for locations for his film Alexander the Great/O Megalexandros (1980): he wanted to find a mountainous village with its buildings arranged in semi-circular order and a central square in the middle. They were looking for quite some time for such a village, but they couldn’t find it. But Angelopoulos insisted: ‘since I thought of it, it exists,’ he said to his associates. At a certain moment, one of them saw a documentary on television about the village Deskati, in Grevena. That was the village that Angelopoulos had thought.

The sublime in Angelopoulos is a mental event, a visionary transfiguration of the real, which he, simultaneously as the me eur en scène and the auteur, felt compelled to extract from his visual unconscious and bring out into the light of material existence. Angelopoulos’ sublime can be drawn out of what Hegel called ‘the flight beyond the determinateness of appearance that constitutes the general character of the sublime’ (Hegel 1975: 303), which accounts for the asymmetries between images and significations that proliferate in his most mature and accomplished films. The visual form of the sublime and its mental intuitive content are, despite their connection, at the same time in an entropic relationship: they materialise each other, but what is le out collides with its own realisation.

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

As Andre Bazin, a theorist whom Angelopoulos did not really appreciate much, suggested: ‘What is imaginary on the screen must have the spatial density of something real’ (Bazin 2005: 48). Such existence of the real, but not of the realistic, in his poetic imaginary, as expressed through his emblematic long take, provoked ambiguous emotions in his viewers and critics. Indeed, in Landscape in the Mist (1988), the broken finger of the colossal hand seen pointing at the viewer and yet lost on the closed horizon of modern architectural brutalism is probably one of the most sublime images conceived to illustrate the lost unity of a reality that may never have existed in post-war Europe, unless, perhaps, as a dream or an alibi. But it is precisely the thinkability of being in the realm of the beyond while experiencing reality through the confines of material necessity that makes Angelopoulos’ cinematic sublime so significant and so elusive. Furthermore, it is the imminent presence of the numinous within the material object that renders this specific image sublime in the Kantian sense. Such asymmetry between the real and the ideal expresses precisely the tragic character of sublimity that led Angelopoulos, unexpectedly and from the back door, to the empathic mimesis and catharsis of his renewed Aristotelianism. In stark contrast to the gigantic statue of Jesus Christ in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) or Lenin’s statue in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Angelopoulos’ broken hand is both numinous and ominous, framing the sublime through its absence but also foregrounding it by the enormity of the emptiness around its vestiges. Overall, Angelopoulos’ cinematic language was a systematic and persistent a empt to achieve the cinematic sublime: the sublime as immersion and emergence, the catalysts for ecstatic and oneiric experiences through filmic images.

Preliminary Notes on the Auteur and His World I must point out that Angelopoulos is a difficult director to watch; I could claim that he is consciously and deliberately a director’s director, an auteur’s auteur, and not a filmmaker courting large audiences. As with many post-war directors, like Robert Bresson, Satyajit Ray, Yussef Chahine, Miklós Jancsó and Glauber Rocha, and more recently Abbas Kiarostami, Milcho Manchevski, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he never made films intended for amusement, escapism or entertainment. With a consciously contrarian a itude, he made films to cinematically explore the formless or more appropriately the ‘unfilmed’ – sometimes even the unfilmable – existential dynamics that he observed or intuited in the historical experience and the individual mind of his viewers.

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As I argue here, Angelopoulos was both filmmaker and mythmaker, producing collective and personal ‘biomythographies’, emulating to a surprising degree, given the small market of Greek filmmaking, some of the greatest names in world cinema. Through his scripts, he was a veritable auteur, synthesising mise en scène, screenwriting and visual se ings in a uniquely personal (and impersonal) style. Furthermore, he placed his individual stamp on all the elements of his movies: music, colour patterns, acting style, location choice, camera movement and editing. So, the purpose of this study is to facilitate a sensitive yet critical and judicious understanding of the scope of Angelopoulos’ achievement with his films’ distinct styles, diverse perspectives and multiple imaginings. Being ‘difficult’ to watch, Angelopoulos’ films have been scorned and rejected by many prominent film critics for their ‘pretentious’, ‘funereal’ or ‘self-indulgent’ style. Such facile reactions say more about the spectators (and the critics) than about the films. The reception of movies depends on many external factors that are not always about the unmediated or implicit relationship between audience, movie-production and filmmaker. It also changes according to new contextual realities, cultural reorientations and aesthetic revisions (or advertising promotions) from decade to decade, even from year to year. Indeed, forgo en, neglected or lost films are rediscovered, reinterpreted and gradually restored to the canon, where they sometimes achieve commercial prominence; like the neglected films of the late Orson Welles, for example, or the underrated melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The truth, however, is that Angelopoulos as a name or a brand never became part of the ‘film industry’, and his films could never have become sellable products for exports (as is the recent case with Yorgos Lanthimos). They existed within the ‘film culture’ as expressions of experimental marginality and creative inventiveness but were only peripheral in the realm of film as industry and production, although their contribution to establishing international co-production strategies should not be underestimated. The commercial success of a film might be purely circumstantial and not connected to any intrinsic qualities, especially in the current era of dizzying eclecticism and ‘imaginal politics’, in which, as observed by Chiara Bo ici: ‘images are no longer what mediate our doing politics but that which risks doing politics in our stead’ (Bo ici 2014: 178). Today, cinema is mostly dominated by digital effects and computer-generated imagery, which totally erase narrative, plot, characterisation and, most importantly, any sense of a creative mythopoeic imaginary. In a sense, cinema has been transformed into post-cinema or non-cinema, which indicates a profound and radical problematisation of its nature and function as new media of virtual representation become more widespread.

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How can an average viewer whose visual experience is saturated by digital effects, celebrity icons and escapist extravaganzas watch an Angelopoulos film today? Perhaps the post-cinematic condition is a victory of technology over representation, in which, as Marshall McLuhan aptly summarised, ‘the medium is the message’. And if the current state of affairs has proven anything, it is that there is nothing else beyond the medium. We pay more a ention to the ingenuity of the special effects than the imagination of the director as the creator of films, the acting styles of their performers, or even the story of the collaborative synergies between the two. In a way, here we return to Francois Truffaut’s statement: ‘There are no good or bad films; only good or bad directors.’ In this study, I strongly defend the idea of the auteur director, the person whose singular vision of reality indicates a critical interpretation of the act and the art of filming, and in a telling gesture towards a particular way of reinterpreting the auteur approach, I draw on Andrew Sarris’ suggestion that we must put ‘. . . a greater emphasis on the tantalising mystery of style than on the romantic agony of the artists’ (Sarris 1996 [1968]: 272). The dynamic equivalence between the vision of filmmakers and the power of their style is essential for the understanding of the complexity or even the very structure of their films. This has nothing to do with directors as celebrities but instead with directors as culture-makers who construct mythopoetic narratives through which collectivities can recognise themselves or find traces of their own realities in the field of visuality – something that may contribute to their commercial success but of course does not depend on it. Their mythopoeia is essential for understanding the structural form of their films and the pa erns of cinematic ‘visual thinking’, since, as Rudolf Arnheim argued, eventually in an era dominated by images ‘. . . visual perception [becomes] a cognitive activity’ (Arnheim 1969: v). Ultimately, in the hypermodern temporality of today, commodified images define what is visible and what remains unvisualised. Yet instead of seeing images only as funereal monuments, or as monumentalising ‘gods that failed’, Angelopoulos also saw them as spaces of emancipation and topoi of existential rupture, leading to ‘an upsurge of individual autonomy and a lessening of people’s subjection to collective frameworks’ (Lipovetsky 2005: 76). However, even perceptive film critics are o en mistaken when it comes to Angelopoulos, such as when Geoff Dyer accused Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) of being ‘another nail in the coffin of European art cinema’ (Dyer 2010: 12). Indeed, the link between directors and their audience (or film critics) has been totally severed by today’s blockbusters, screened in shopping malls and cinema multiplexes. Implicitly, the association between commercial

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success and the quality of films remains strong even when the opposite is most obviously the case. The experience of going to the cinema and watching films of the recent past has been profoundly and perhaps permanently changed by the internet, new technologies and the privatised world of hypermodernity. In this study, we will address some of the radical ways of looking that Angelopoulos elaborated in his films in order to counteract the abnormal stimulation of the senses that commercial cinema employs to manipulate spectators and commodify the psychological impact of the cinematic experience. While, as Angelopoulos stated, ‘cinema is a disease’ (Fainaru 2001: 35), it can also be its own cure, and he addressed both diagnoses in his films, elaborating a unique philosophy of visuality that has been thus far underestimated. Angelopoulos was one of the first directors to oppose the new visual regimes of hyper-stimulation that characterise movies made since the late seventies. Undoubtedly, he is a transitional figure in a period marked by experimentation (the sixties and seventies) and then by the retreat from radicalism through the gradual re-emergence of the studio system and the commercial competition between cinema and television. The retreat from radical experimentalism coincided with the avoidance of what was called ‘slow or dead time’ or ‘long take’ and the replacement of its condensed temporality with fast jump-cuts, continuous action and digitised montage. Film culture, which co-evolved with the film industry, suddenly found itself trapped in the new managerialism of the studios, with films made by commi ees and targeting specific focus groups, and effectively dispensing with the critical function of cinema and the personal vision of its auteurs. Many commercially successful movies, like Jaws, Star Wars, the Indiana Jones sagas or the Alien series, were being made at the same time Angelopoulos was producing his films. What made these films successful was the fact that they resembled extended fast-moving videos or television programmes through their condensation of visual time into ninety minutes of relentless action, sharp dialogue and constant camera movement. Angelopoulos, like many filmmakers from Europe, South America and Asia, responded with the discovery of energetic slowness as visual experience, which is one of his most important contributions to contemporary filmmaking. Not, of course, that we did not have ‘slow’ filmmakers before him: Michelangelo Antonioni, Glauber Rocha, Andrei Tarkovsky and even Stanley Kubrick are the direct antecedents of Angelopoulos’ style. Following on from the early Antonioni, for Angelopoulos slowness was a restorative method for visually embodying the complexities of the human psyche in an era of existential and political implosion. These complexities were unspoken and indeed unfilmed, but their visual vestiges in

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

his images allowed viewers to enter the dark territory of their own unconscious and unvisualised personal shadows. He called that ‘dark territory’ melancholia, which, in the late eighties, became the dominant mood of Angelopoulos’ films, expressing his ambivalence towards the cunning of history and its broken promises of emancipation, especially a er the collapse of the so-called socialist countries. Yet still upholding Hegel’s suggestion that ‘ultimately History fulfils its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner’ (Tucker 1956: 269), Angelopoulos nurtured the hope that the cinematic screen could still liberate a modern audience from its oppression, reaffirming rationality and ecstasy as existential realities at the same time. Such fusion of Enlightenment’s emancipation project and romanticism’s integrative perspective was for him the final frontier in order to combat ‘the powerful dynamic of individualization and pluralization within our societies’ (Lipovetsky 2005: 29). Cinematically, the slow movement indicated that the camera did not simply record or reflect; it mainly revealed and foregrounded unvisualised realities. Thus, Angelopoulos’ visual rhythm was in fact a method of uncovering ‘formal invariants’ under conflicting and antinomic layers of human interactions. In a personal note sent to Yve e Biro, Angelopoulos stated: A film’s rhythm is an inner rhythm, therefore a personal sense of time. In my films the rhythm resembles time dilation but in actual fact it is not. The ratio of filmic time to real time is 1:1, the fact that it appears like a time dilation of the sort that in music terms, we would call ritenuto or lento allows the viewers, if they let themselves, to savour or breathe time. (Biro 2008: 166)

Angelopoulos used the term time dilation to describe his a empt to translate the inner temporality of his viewers into a structural element of cinematic visuality. As on many other occasions, he used the metaphor of different movements in music: lento is mostly the tempo of his images, which might either expand into monumental cosmic symphonies or be transformed into intimate chamber music, or indeed into solo sonatas for piano or wind instruments. He persistently focused his efforts on making slowness, which was for him ‘the real sense of time’, an organic element of cinematic experience. This meant that slowness was not simply an artificial delaying of action but the actual visualisation of a world’s inner temporality, one which is felt by viewers when they reflect on their own act of seeing and the sense of being. In a distinctly personal way, Angelopoulos equated unvisualised time with the oneiric structure of the unconscious. Susanne K. Langer observed that ‘cinema is “like dream’” in the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual present, ‘an order of direct apparition. This is the mode of

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dream’ (Langer 1953: 412). Angelopoulos wanted his spectators to enter a dream-like or even daydreaming mode by depicting the equivalence between the sense of slowness in their mind and its active presence in their social world. The energetic slowness of Angelopoulos’ films aspired to transform all cinematic experience into an oneiric state of being, as in the works of Fellini, Tarkovsky, Chahine and Terrence Davies. Robert Eberwein suggests that the narrowing of the gap between viewer and director in cinema happens because films ‘replicate activities associated with oneiric experience’ (Eberwein 1984: 82). In that respect, Angelopoulos builds on and carries further the oneiric slowness of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) and Antonioni’s L’ Eclisse (1962) and The Passenger (1975). He also builds on the chaotic temporal simultaneity of the unconscious mind in films by experimental directors like Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren and, especially, the early Alain Resnais. Oneiric yet energetic slowness is indeed the most significant formal invariant of Angelopoulos’ films, encapsulating his own philosophical and anthropological understanding of cinema. On the other hand, from his first film Angelopoulos understood that his cinema had to be different from everyone else’s in his country. In an early discussion with the film critic Vasilis Rafailidis, to whom we will return frequently in this book, Angelopoulos stressed that he followed the ‘Brazilians of the cinema novo, [who made films] as if they had forgo en European cinema, looking for an expression almost national’. So, in other words, he was also looking ‘thematically, to make films that constituted testimonies about space’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 153). In order to achieve this, Angelopoulos wanted to totally discard any form of ‘picturesque’ image: that is, clichéd images and any other derivative representations. In his conversation with Rafailidis about his first film, Angelopoulos stated: ‘I have bypassed the danger of picturesqueness. The whole story is seen with so much abstraction, which makes it impossible to fall into picturesqueness’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 143). To the fast-moving, narratively exciting and thematically melodramatic films of the dominant cinematic genres, Angelopoulos developed an antithetical, almost oppositional style that was to completely re-envision and reorganise the cinematic language of his native tradition, and at the same time offer a differential alternative to the hegemonic visual idioms of world cinema. Michel Ciment, who explicitly includes Angelopoulos in his list, contextualised such an approach in his well-known address about ‘slow cinema’, claiming that: ‘Facing this lack of patience and themselves made impatient by the bombardment of sound and image to which they

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

are submi ed as TV or cinema spectators, a number of directors have reacted by a cinema of slowness, of contemplation, as if they wanted to live again the sensuous experience of a moment revealed in its authenticity.’5 The discovery of duration as the visual rhythm of cinema is probably one of Angelopoulos’ most interesting contributions to the temporal foregrounding of filmic images in the human mind. Visual duration was for Angelopoulos the translation into cinematic images ‘of pure temporality, of the lived consciousness, which is continuous and indivisible and can be only known through intuition’ (Bergson 2001: 75). His cinematic language aspired to visually ‘think in duration’ and create a cathectic sympathy between the viewer and the screen, thus intensifying their emotional responsiveness. In that respect, it is through cinema that Greece became his ‘imaginary homeland’, a place of the imagination and in the imagination. His material was primarily ‘Greek’, but its framing, visualisation and conceptualisation was transnational and universal, therefore purely cinematic. At the same time, we can infer from his work that Angelopoulos never felt he belonged to any periphery, or that he needed in any way to address himself to a hegemonic centre, whether in Europe or Hollywood. His cinematic ontology was founded on a universalising vision of polycentric visualities. In a strange way, Angelopoulos never reflected on his position agonistically or, even more, antagonistically to the presumed centres of cinematic culture. Even in his use of international film celebrities, like Marcelo Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz, Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Irène Jacob and others, he seems to deliberately demythologise their cinematic personas by debunking their glamour and mystique yet elaborating forms of their cinematic anti-types. Angelopoulos tried in his movies to synthesise modes of representation and forms of presentation in which various problematics and experiences converged and diverged. He never had any dilemmas about belonging, or about the Greek position between East and West, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, or generally at the centre or the periphery of Europe. His main concern was with being as visually expressed, in an a empt to make cinematic images ‘the house of Being’ – a role that originally Martin Heidegger had a ributed to language (Heidegger 1998: 239). His camera was part of the continuum of life and history, not an external or detached observer and recorder. Being in Time and Being with Others as events born out of and through cinema were at the heart of Angelopoulos’ project. Furthermore, his cinematic eye was the catalyst for more interpersonal ways of seeing and being in society. In a way, his camera is at its best when it resides in the eye of the beholder, when it absorbs spectators in ways that do not annul their freedom but instead intensify their respon-

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siveness to the exigencies of history, the impasses of their existence and the dilemmas of their creative imaginary – these were the focal points of his comprehensive visual project.

Summing Up The present monograph reconceptualises the study of Angelopoulos’ films through the perspective of transnational cine-aesthetics, investigating the complex ways his films are linked with major post-war and postcommunist European cinematic exchanges, ethical anxieties and political projects. It argues that his early films deal not simply with Greek history but more significantly with political power as existential reality, with its mechanisms of oppression and domination and the various ways it was exercised by post-Enlightenment, pseudo-modernist elites in the European periphery. The films of his second period deal mainly with loss, absence and trauma through the representation of displaced individuals and their existential homelessness and broken interiority, indicating the crisis of authority and legitimacy that Angelopoulos observed taking place in European cultures. During his third period, which followed the collapse of ‘existing socialism’ and the end of the last utopian project of revolutionary enlightenment, Angelopoulos transgressed state borders and explored the proximity of otherness; although, strangely enough, in order to do so he had to invest himself with the mantle of the prophet, or the representative ‘poet’, of the nation and its language. In his final period, which coincides with the new millennium, his camera explored the rise of European nihilism together with the hegemony of a capitalist globalisation that homogenised cultural expressions and imposed strategies of surveillance and control, stripping the individual naked from their mystery and enigma, and, indeed, stripping them of their very freedom. His last film is a long, rather pessimistic elegy on the death of a whole world image, as the quest for ‘lost movies’ in which the gaze was innocent and young is replaced by death, suicide and the ‘dust of time’. If studied carefully and sensitively, Angelopoulos’ films have the potential to change cinematic thinking. Indeed, some of them were catalysts for wider and permanent reconsiderations of dominant practices. The fact that his films radically challenged visual thinking indicates that they also constitute historical events, ruptures in the horizon of conformist politics in a period of mediocracy, can still potentially challenge the dominant contemporary regimes of cinematic visuality. How Angelopoulos employed cinema and imagined the cinematic is essentially the ultimate

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

question that emerges from his films. Despite the fact that he never elaborated a detailed or systematic theory about cinema, we can extract from his work itself a firm belief of the purposeful intentionality of visual images; through this, we can also examine his ideas not only on how to make cinematic images but about their telos within the historical world of their viewers. In a way, this study explores what Robert Sinnerbrink called Angelopoulos’ ‘cinematic ethics’, since, as he states when concluding his study: ‘Angelopoulos’ films, both early and late, serve as ethically and politically significant memorials to the (o en tragic) intersection of cinema and history over the previous century’ (Sinnerbrink 2015: 96). Ultimately, this study situates Angelopoulos within the macro-narratives that have dominated European cinematic production since the seventies. It argues that, whilst belonging to Greek society and expressing the specific elements of the Greek historical experience, Angelopoulos gradually transcended the barriers of his native culture and produced an oeuvre that was truly transnational, multidimensional and cosmopolitan. Dina Iordanova placed Angelopoulos’ films in their appropriate context and directorial perspective when she wrote: Angelopoulos’ Balkan films are also historical collages, raising issues of displacement and lost homelands, and trying to go beyond the geopolitical intricacies that dominate the approaches of other film-makers. His trademark atmosphere of lonely wandering through the mist prevails in all his films which deal with issues of universally distorted harmony, irrecoverable identities and fin-de-siecle sadness. He is the only one daring enough to claim that problems of universal identity lurk from within the peculiar Balkan universe. (Iordanova 2001: 107)

Angelopoulos’ cinema is Greek, Balkan, Mediterranean, European and global; it belongs to what Kriss Rave o-Biagioli called ‘Mythopoetic Cinema’ (Rave o-Biagioli 2017: 64–123), although not solely focused on the ruins of European identity (in itself a Eurocentric perception) but on something wider and much more foundational: the uneasiness that permeates culture, as Sigmund Freud would have called it. His films are precisely about how such uneasiness impacts individuals and societies and seriously impairs their need to dream and the desire to be otherwise. Because of its profound anthropological concerns, Angelopoulos’ mythopoetic cinema belongs to, or indeed comes out of, the wider project of establishing a global culture of cinephilia, tentatively articulated by Thomas Elsaesser as that which ‘reverberates with nostalgia and dedication, with longings and discrimination and evokes, . . . more than a passion for going to the movies, and only a li le less, than an entire a itude towards life’ (Elsaesser 2005: 27). Cinephilia is a movement in which every local visual tradition contributes forms, pa erns and iconologies, constituting the grand mosaic

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of world cinema that we see being formed today: diverse, contradictory and palimpsestic. Angelopoulos’ contribution to the emerging global cinephilia constitutes an important chapter in its historical process, and the present study wants to elucidate certain aspects of his achievement. Furthermore, drawing again from Thomas Elsaesser, we can understand the complex intersection between local power structures and international institutional alliances that made Angelopoulos a global auteur, as he achieved ‘. . . a paradoxical kind of autonomy and agency that that has the potential to reinvent the cinema, not as an art form, nor as a life form, but as a form of philosophy . . .’ (Elsaesser 2017: 39). Indeed, Angelopoulos is a global auteur because he created and imagined an intricate, complex and challenging philosophy of visuality, one that needs more a ention and further exploration.

Notes  1. For more on Acquarello, see h p://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/ angelopoulos/ (Retrieved 1 December 2020).  2. See a selection of Angelopoulos’ commentary on his films: h p://www.cine philia.gr/index.php/prosopa/hellas/606-agelopoulos-6 (Retrieved 1 December 2020).  3. I borrow the term from Audre Lorde’s book, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982), which is a blend of memoir, history and myth.  4. On Eternity and a Day (1998): h p://www.cinephilia.gr/index.php/prosopa/ hellas/606-agelopoulos-6 (Retrieved 1 December 2020).  5. Michel Ciment, ‘The State of Cinema’, delivered at the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival (2003). See Unspoken Cinema: Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, 10 March 2006, h ps://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2006/10/ state-of-cinema-m-ciment.html (Retrieved 1 December 2020).

Chapter 1

Life and Works



Elements of Biography Theodoros Angelopoulos was born 27 April, 1935, into a middle-class family of modest means. His father was a shopkeeper, and his mother stayed at home looking a er their children, Theodoros, Nikos, Paraskevoula and Anna. One of the most traumatic events in his life was the death of his sister Anna in an accident when she was eleven years old. Theodoros studied at the local schools and entered the Law Faculty of Athens University in 1953, but he never sat for the final exams. As a young man, he read voraciously, mainly Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Stendhal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Greek writers – particularly poets, like C.P. Cavafy, Yannis Ritsos and especially the modernist poet George Seferis (Nobel Prize winner 1963). Early in his life, Angelopoulos fell in love with the cinema. He watched all the Hollywood films that screened at the growing number of movie theatres in Athens during the post-war reconstruction. He was especially enthused by the films of John Huston, Howard Hawks, Abraham Polonsky, Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz, whose Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) had a permanent impact on his cinematic imagination. A er completing his military service in 1961, Angelopoulos moved to Paris where he initially enrolled at the Sorbonne for studies in French literature and cinema. He also a ended lectures on ethnology by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and those on film history by the Marxist historian of cinema Georges Sadoul and the phenomenologist Jean Mitry – the influence of these thinkers can be easily detected in Angelopoulos’ own understanding of the social function and aesthetic epistemology of cinematic images. Between 1962 and 1963, he studied at the famous L’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), the Institute for Advanced Cin-

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ematographic Studies, which, under the leadership of Marcel L’Herbier, was the centre to which many aspiring directors from all over the world came to study (amongst them Glauber Rocha, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Żuławski, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and the Greek expatriates Costa-Gavras and Tonia Marketaki). In a legendary dispute, Angelopoulos fell out with one of the professors of filmmaking and terminated his studies there. However, he enrolled in special classes at the Muse de L’ Homme, where he studied under Jean Rouch, who was in charge of the Comité du Film Ethnographique. Rouch was one of the initiators of cinéma-vérité in France, following Alexander Astruc’s camera-stylo. Furthermore, with his famous and controversial film Moi, un Noir (Me, A Black, 1958), he used jump-cuts, non-professional actors and long continuous shots, all of which were to become dominant filmic practices a er the rise of Nouvelle Vague and the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960). Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1960) can be seen as a background reference to Angelopoulos’ first short film The Broadcast (1968). Angelopoulos worked in Paris during the early heroic years of the French New Wave and watched most of the films by Jacques Rive e, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, the directors who expressed that ‘certain tendency of the French Cinema’, which was labelled as the auteur tradition. During this period, he made the short film Black and White for his exams, ‘the story of someone who is being chased all over Paris’ (Fainaru 2001: 129), but it was rejected by his film professor. This first foray into filmmaking exemplified the main characteristics of his later work: loose (or no) script, long takes, self-conscious acting and improvised movement of camera, minus découpage (editing). In 1964, Angelopoulos returned to Greece and together with Tonia Marketaki, who was to become one of the most important directors of the period, established the journal Democratic Change/Dimokratiki Allagi in which he wrote his early film reviews (its publication was banned in 1967 by the military dictatorship). In 1965, he started working on his first film, an urban road movie modelled on Richard Lester’s The Beatles mockumentary A Hard Day’s Night (1964), about the Greek pop group The Forminx. The producer did not like the spontaneity of the filming process and the total absence of a script, so Angelopoulos resigned from the project. The film was completed by Kostas Lychnaras and released under the title Adventures with the Forminx/Peripeteies me tous Forminx (1965) and still included scenes shot by Angelopoulos. A er his first effort, Angelopoulos embarked on the production of a short film, The Broadcast/Ekpompi (1968), which received the Critic’s Prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, despite the strict censorship imposed by

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

the 1967 military junta. This film is an extremely interesting early example of his experimentation with cinematic form, especially camera movement, and his a empt to fuse the techniques of direct cinema with the new televisual modes of filming. In September 1969, in collaboration with his lifelong friend Vasilis Rafailidis (1934–2000), Angelopoulos established the journal Contemporary Cinema/Synchronos Kinimatografos as a project in which advanced theoretical reflection, applied film criticism and continuous dialogue on the ideology of the cinematic medium would be encouraged and conducted seriously. As a tribute to Rafailidis a er his death, Angelopoulos wrote: Rafailidis did all the work and the complete responsibility was with him. The journal was to become the central instrument of what was to be called New Greek Cinema, because it gathered all the new filmmakers of the period, the whole world of Greek cinema. In the middle of the Dictatorship, it was used as a place of coming together, resistance and rebellion towards both directions: political, in regard to the junta but also towards the quest for a substantially ‘other’ cinema – a new cinema which would go along – both thematically and ‘linguistically’– with the currents which were prevailing at that moment not only in Europe, but the whole world. And this was supported fanatically by Vasilis, until the day he handed over the journal to certain younger people and departed. Things, however, didn’t evolve as we expected them – neither with Greek cinema nor with politics. (in Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 172–73)

Some of the most important young cinematographers of what was later to be called the New Greek Cinema worked with them on the journal; George Korras, Yannis Smaragdis, Michel Dimopoulos, Takis Lykouresos, Kostas Sfikas, Lakis Papastathis, Hristos Vakalopoulos, Stavros Tornes, Demos Theos, Roula Mitropoulou, Pandelis Voulgaris and many others were involved in its production, editing or distribution. In its pages, we can find detailed critical writing about the work of many international directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, the Taviani Brothers, Elia Kazan, Miklós Jancsó, Eric Rohmer and Nagisa Oshima, whose work was screened in selected art-house cinemas in Athens. At the same time, they published theoretical and critical articles problematising – or, rather, dismissing – established expectations and practices of the dominant, so-called Old Commercial Cinema of the studio era (dominated by Finos Film and James Paris Productions) while critically exploring the ideological, historical and aesthetic foundations of Greek cinema and its institutional and cultural specificities. For the first issue, Angelopoulos translated a short essay called ‘Goals of New Cinema’ by the otherwise unknown French writer Francois Liberet into Greek. The essay seems to encapsulate Angelopoulos’ own concerns about cinematic language and

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. . . a new view of the world, a view both critical and poetic at the same time. Critical because it doesn’t accept old traditional truths that were imposed on us since our birth, but questions and refutes them; Poetic because ‘crisis of conscience’ means choice, therefore art. The effort to disseminate culture is meaningless unless it takes place together with a renewal of structures in all aspects. (Angelopoulos 1969: 11)

In the same issue, we also find articles on the ‘authenticity of new cinema’, the articulation of a new synergistic model of spectatorship, and a rather nervous interview between Angelopoulos and Lakis Papastathis, representing the journal, with Alexis Damianos, the director of the film Until the Ship/Mehri to Ploio, alternative title Cornerstone (1965), which can be considered a precursor to the ‘New Greek Cinema’ as advocated by Angelopoulos. The interviewers are critical of the organic cohesion, music and folklore elements in Damianos’ film while praising his choice of amateur actors. The journal, which defined the development of cinephilia in Greece, lasted until 1984 under different editors and took on various ideological orientations over its lifespan, ranging from militant Marxist to ethnocentric, navel-gazing narrative quests for national identity. Angelopoulos le its editorial board rather early in 1971, a er having helped the journal articulate, mostly through his presence and his first film, a solid theoretical reflection on the nature and function of cinema, both aesthetically and politically. His dialogue with Rafailidis in the third issue (November 1969: 20–29) remains to this day the foundational declaration of what was to be called New Greek Cinema/Neos Ellinikos Kinimatografos and one of the few documents of cinematic self-reflexivity in the country. During this period of intense questioning of the studio system, Angelopoulos discovered his own independent and, to a certain degree, critical trajectory towards the politique des auteur approach, as expressed in the Cahiers Du Cinema. Despite the obsession with the visual representation of ‘Greekness’ that preoccupied some members of the original group, Angelopoulos initiated his own quest for a renewed understanding of history and historicity, as opposed to the ideological and sometimes defensive pursuit of an elusive national identity expressed in cinematic form. For him, what always preceded this quest was the special vision of the auteur, which translates as ‘creator’ or ‘poet’ in Greek; so, his films are the cinema of the creator or the poet who desires to reconstruct the pristine vision of his gaze in a unement with analogous visions of collective movements. In his discussion with Rafailidis, he called it ‘. . . a cinema that is culture, . . . a form of cinema that raises claims of influencing the intellectual evolution of Greeks . . .’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 135). A er 1973, due to a long dispute about a grant from the American Ford Foundation, which brought to the surface many personal feuds and antip-

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

athies, the journal was unfortunately taken over by a group of ostensibly anti-American ‘radicals’, who denounced Rafailidis and, implicitly, Angelopoulos. ‘My Friend Theodore,’ Rafailidis wrote later, ‘Don’t be confused because, a er I resigned, they a acked you from the journal which we both established. Envious and dysfunctional people will always exist in this world. We did what we could. They did what they could and closed down the company and the journal Contemporary Cinema’ (Rafailidis 1992: 464). A er this incident, Angelopoulos followed a rather lonely path in Greek filmmaking and, on many occasions, his old comrades criticised not only his films for not being ‘Greek’ enough but later him personally for being either a formalist or pessimistic reactionary. In his problematisation of the cinematic past, Angelopoulos initiated a fusion of genres and styles, establishing gradually the foundations for a cinematic language that expressed a deep awareness of the technological and aesthetic potentialities of the medium. He also framed a new sense of temporality that emerged during the political oppression and consequent psychological repression a er the 1967 dictatorship. His work defined the aesthetic and stylistic parameters of the New Greek Cinema as a radical movement towards cultural revisionism. Angelopoulos’ first completed film The Broadcast/I Ekpompi (1968) – on which he worked with Nico Mastorakis, who was soon to become notorious for his collaboration with the dictatorship – showed his ability to use the cinematic medium in a novel and distinct manner. Through Angelopoulos’ discussion with Rafailidis, we come to understand the problems surrounding the production of his first feature film Reconstruction/Anaparastasis (1970), which received three major awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. This film brought Angelopoulos global a ention a er receiving the French award for best foreign film of the year. His second film Days of ’36/Meres tou ’36 (1972) explored the atmosphere of fear and oppression the Greek people endured a er 1967, drawing a historical parallel with the previous dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas. With his third film, The Travelling Players/O Thiasos (1974–75), Angelopoulos singlehandedly reshaped the landscape of filmic (re)presentation, constructing a ‘thick’ visual narrative of epic scope that was totally new in the small market of Greek cinema and linked more to the grand cinematic experiments elsewhere in the world in the sixties. The success of this extraordinary movie, which was awarded the Critics Prize at the Cannes Festival in 1975, essentially internationalised Angelopoulos and allowed for his exodus from both the restricted borders of Greek cinema and the official policies of the Greek state. Despite the Restoration of the Republic in July 1974, the government withheld, indeed practically banned, all funding for his films and sabotaged his foreign

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distribution. Yet ironically, the film’s success also brought about the internationalisation of Greek cinema, which until then was predominantly known for Michael Cacoyannis’ Zorba the Greek (1964) and Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960). With his next film, The Hunters/Oi Kiniyoi (1977), Angelopoulos secured producers from outside the country for the first time since Zorba the Greek. Most of his later major films were also produced or co-produced by centres like the Italian RAI, the German channel ZDF and the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel through the funding bodies of the European Union, which Greece had joined in 1980. The Greek Film Centre, which was established as part of the Ministry for Industry by the dictatorship in 1970 and then reorganised within the Ministry of Culture in 1978, started partly funding Angelopoulos’ films only a er their recognition beyond Greece. In 1979, he met Phoebe Economopoulou, who was the production manager of Alexander the Great/ O Megalexandros (1980) and who became his lifelong partner. They had three daughters, Anna, Catherine and Heleni, names that recur in his scripts as evocative signs of Angelopoulos’ personal emotional landscapes. O Megalexandros marked a change in the style and the form of his filmmaking while paving the way for an international career unprecedented by any other Greek director. A er the Japanese release of this film, Akira Kurosawa invited Angelopoulos to Japan, where he stayed for three months. Kurosawa himself had wri en a short but succinct review of Angelopoulos’ film,1 and years later Angelopoulos appeared in Catherine Cadou’s documentary Kurosawa’s Way (1991) alongside ten other global filmmakers, praising the ‘multiplication of points of view’ that he detected in Kurosawa’s films as opposed to the usual Hollywood tradition of flashback, indirectly addressing the relationship between Rashomon and his first film Reconstruction. In 2001, Angelopoulos wrote a brief introduction, under the title ‘Three Meetings with Kurosawa’, to the Greek edition of Kurosawa’s Autobiography. He mentions Kurosawa’s comment about the quality of the colour black in the uniforms of the bandits in Megalexandros. Angelopoulos wrote: ‘For me the greatest Japanese director is Mizogushi. . . . Yet I was deeply impressed by the living encounter with Kurosawa. His finesse, his concern of the quality of what he did, manic and relentless . . .’ (in Kurosawa 2001: 6). During the eighties, especially a er the election of the Socialist government of PASOK in October 1981, Angelopoulos became more mainstream and was soon elevated to the status of a cultural icon, despite the fact that most of his films were not commercially successful. His presence in the media, and his ongoing debates with many film critics, made him a house-

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

hold name. It was he who presented ‘Greece’ as a cinematic culture to the world, especially through the international film festival circuit. In 1984, he shared an apartment with Andrei Tarkovsky in Rome for several months before his death in 1986. Tarkovsky mentions in his diaries that Angelopoulos helped with the editing of a television film about him, where Angelopoulos mentions a colourful debate between the two of them about the origin of the word ‘nostalghia’ (Tarkovsky 2018: 298). There, Angelopoulos also met Michelangelo Antonioni and befriended Tonino Guera (Tarkovsky’s close friend and screenwriter), who would work with him and the writers Thanassis Valtinos and Petros Markaris on most of his subsequent scripts. Furthermore, his increasing use of international stars brought him global acclaim and paved the way for transcultural filmic modes of production, representation and distribution, since his films were no longer exclusively ‘Greek’. During this decade, Angelopoulos released four films, Voyage to Cythera/ Taxidi sta Kythera (1984), The Beekeeper/O Melissokomos (1986), Landscape in the Mist/Topio stin Omihli (1988) and The Suspended Step of the Stork/To Meteoro Vima tou Pelaryou (1991). They were all international productions and received awards at film festivals throughout the world. One has the impression that Angelopoulos tried to revive the force of the grand experiments of sixties cinema by using ambiguously the evocative star-power of actors like Giulio Brogi, Marcello Mastroianni, Serge Reggiani, Jeanne Moreau and later Jean Maria Volonte and Erland Josephson, whose presence can be seen as a symbolic gesture to Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti and Bergman, and an oblique delineation of his personal cinematic genealogy. A er the confused atmosphere of political disenchantment in Greece and Europe, the collapse of communist regimes, and the ‘end of history’ neoliberal optimism of the eighties, in the nineties Angelopoulos and his work came to represent the ‘lost spring’ of creative modernism, with its failed projects of political renewal, novel formal representations and fairer pa erns of sociability. His films of this decade, partly funded by his own production company, made him one of the best-known names at international art-film festivals, including in the Americas, Europe, Japan and later China, and a number of documentaries were made about him by directors from various countries. Two of his most important works, Ulysses’ Gaze/To Vlemma tou Odyssea (1995) and Eternity and a Day/Mia Aioniotita kai mia Mera (1998), were generally well-received and became landmarks of the new production realities in post-communist Europe. They indicated a remarkable renaissance in Balkan cinema, also seen in the work of Emir Kusturica, Cristi Puiu, Radoslav Spasov, Yilmaz Erdoğan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Exploring the European unification project, its shared past and tragic present, together with the possibilities offered to directors of the periph-

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ery, these films had a distinct impact at a European and global level. The use of the American superstar Harvey Keitel and the German cultural hero Bruno Ganz, who had starred in Wim Wenders’ film The Wings of Desire (1987), created another career for Angelopoulos in the United States, opening the American market and culture of film criticism to his work, with varied reactions and interpretations. The reviews of Angelopoulos’ films listed on the website Ro en Tomatoes website proliferated a er 1998, with wildly differing critiques by, for example, Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum and David Thomson. Angelopoulos received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival in 1998 for Eternity and a Day, earning the unconditional praise of Martin Scorsese – whose subsequent film Gangs of New York (2002) was aesthetically permeated by an Angelopoulos-like mood. Scorsese’s recognition vindicated the persistence of an auteur’s cinematic style, despite the domination of commercial blockbusters. A er this point, many prominent film scholars like Andrew Horton, Dan Georgakas, David Bordwell, Fredric Jameson and David Thomson, amongst others, started studying Angelopoulos’ work in the first collective volume on his work (Horton 1997). Andrew Horton’s lengthy monograph under the title The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (1999 [1997]) gave international impetus to the promotion and understanding of his films, offering a coherent and systematic framework for their contextualisation and appreciation. Furthermore, over three decades Dan Georgakas’ essays systematically explored, with clarity and empathy, the ideological subtexts of Angelopoulos’ films and their affinity with major global cinematic movements. In Greece, his success at Cannes in 1998 made Angelopoulos a ‘national treasure’, to be revered and parodied simultaneously. At this point, we must stress the continuous political and aesthetic elucidation of Angelopoulos’ films by his friend and associate, the film critic and cultural theorist Vasilis Rafailidis, an essential source for the appreciation of his work. Until his unexpected death in 2000, Rafailidis defended Angelopoulos’ films belligerently against their many cultural despisers; however, because of their acerbic tone, his essays on Angelopoulos’ films are marred by an aggressive fanaticism, despite their perceptive and sensitive interpretations. Ιn 2002, Angelopoulos, as the President of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, awarded its special grand prize, known as Golden Alexander, to the most important director of the old ‘commercial’ cinema, the vernacular auteur Yannis Dalianidis: a gesture of reconnection and reconciliation with the past of Greek cinema, as well as an act of recognition for the contribution Dalianidis made to the development of film culture. Angelopoulos’ late films, The Weeping Meadow/To Livadi pou Dakryzei (2004) and The Dust of Time/I Skoni tou Hronou (2008), were made possible

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

with international collaborations and productions. The Dust of Time, in particular, was a multilingual production across many different countries, with the American superstar Willem Dafoe cast as its central protagonist. However, the presence of actors like Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irène Jacob, among others, made it a site of contested equivocations, rooted in an uneasy coexistence of differing styles, cultures and genres. While this film on its release generated renewed interest in Angelopoulos’ complex and ambitious experimentation with visual temporality throughout his career and showcasing him to the wider audience of American cinephiles, most reviews were reserved, if not hostile. In the so-called ‘years of crisis’, which began in 2009/10, and with the rise of what was misleadingly called the ‘weird wave’,2 spearheaded by Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, Angelopoulos became one of the most recognizable voices in the Greek media: a prophet lamenting the future of culture, cinema, Greece and Europe. He talked unequivocally about himself, sometimes conveying a sense of despair or even sentimentalism, which caused considerable consternation but also implied a confession of powerlessness and surrender, and indeed gestured towards a sense of an ending. From 1999, Angelopoulos had already fallen into a state of melancholic self-examination. ‘I want to make a film in the colours of rust,’ he said, ‘because of the melancholy I feel. Such melancholy is one of the dominant elements of our times since they all talk about collapse. Melancholy before the end of the century’ (Soldatos 2015: 214). Angelopoulos died 24 January, 2012 in an accident while working on his final film, The Other Sea/I Alli Thalassa. He had been checking the lighting of a tunnel at night but neglected to wear a yellow safety vest (a frequent symbol and omen in some of his films) and was hit by a motorcycle. With his death came the recognition that an entire historical period in the cultural creativity of Greece had ended. It was the ultimate expression of the demise of a cinematic movement that had dominated film production for decades and given Greece and Europe some of their most enduring images and stories. Directors, cinematographers, actors and film critics praised Angelopoulos for being so unique and therefore so isolated; an artist determined to do pure cinema untrammelled by commercial concerns, and without pretending to represent anyone other than himself and his personal vision of the cinema. He was the ultimate model of an auteur filmmaker who never made concessions to the expectations of audience or producer. A er his death, a number of significant studies and serious testimonials about Angelopoulos’ life and work were published. In 2015, Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven edited The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, bringing together various lines of research on his work, including two

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short but powerful studies by Nagisa Oshima and a brief introduction by Alexander Kluge (Koutsourakis and Steven 2015: 39–45). Kluge stated: ‘In film history, there is one sentence that is for me irrefutably true: the nonfilmed criticises that which is filmed’ (Koutsourakis and Steven 2015: x). How Angelopoulos managed to talk about the unfilmed through what he filmed is probably one of the most important and unanswerable questions regarding his work. Angelopoulos knew all too well his precarious and ambiguous position in the history of the cinema in both his country and the rest of Europe. In 1982, a decisive year for both himself as director in the middle of his career and for his country, he wrote a cryptic poem about the destiny of his work, which he later incorporated into his film The Suspended Step of the Stork: I wish you health and happiness but I can’t take part in your voyage. I am just a visitor. Everything I touch hurts me deeply. And then it doesn’t belong to me. There is always someone to say: ‘That’s mine!’ I don’t have anything that is mine . . . I arrogantly said one day. Now I’ve learned that nothing . . . is nothing. That we don’t even have a name. And that each time we need to borrow one. Give me a place to look at. Forget me in the sea. I wish you health and happiness.3

This is a strange confession by a director whose camera transformed absence and loss into profound visual revelations about the human predicament in history.

The Contextual Webs of History Throughout Angelopoulos’ career, the history of his country and of various ideological, political and aesthetical trends intersected on the filmic texts and subtexts of his work. Indeed, within his films one can detect the collective and the personal converging and diverging in many intriguing ways, transforming them into symbolic spaces of contested histories, aesthetics and visualities. Angelopoulos was born during one of the most turbulent periods in Greek history. His work is sometimes unfortunately interpreted as the visual representation of this time, and there are good reasons for this. In 1936, General Ioannis Metaxas imposed a fascist dictatorship, inflicting extensive political oppression and persecution on those he considered enemies of the state, especially communists, liberals and social deviants. This decade was culturally dominated by the so-called Generation of the ’30s, a modernist movement focused on questions of national identity and its aesthetic form, unofficially led by the poet George Seferis. Against the background of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the mass wave of

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

refugees that sought refuge in Greece, the Generation of the ’30s debated liberals and Marxists on the ambiguity and elusiveness of ‘Greekness’ and the quest for national identity in all forms of artistic production. Having grown up in a neighbourhood full of Anatolian refugees, the predicament of displaced people was a constant theme for Angelopoulos throughout his entire career. At the same time, cinema had become the most important event for the socialisation of the newly urbanised population and was rapidly transforming into a large-scale industry. The process of ‘commercially industrialising’ Greek cinema began with the production of the first feature films, such as the famous Astero (1929) by Dimitris Gaziades, Daphnis and Chloe (1931) by Orestis Laskos, Social Corruption/Koinoniki Sapila (1931) by Stelios Tatasopoulos and later the first talkies, which were mostly costume dramas about an idyllic past in the countryside. Ideal ‘Greekness’ resided mainly in the villages and rural areas outside the traumatic spaces of urban centres, which were inhabited by anonymous industrial workers and refugees. Angelopoulos’ references in The Travelling Players to the costume dramas of this period take on a political and subversive character, forming the great underlying mythos of what he called ‘the deep Greece’. The remote rural land was beyond and above history; there, the trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe had never taken place, and the peasants enjoyed a life of pure innocence, in mythological atemporality, unstained by the fall into the confusing realities of urban alienation, industrial exploitation and existential fragmentation. Among Greece’s early directors, the unwi ing pioneer of direct cinema, Stelios Tatasopoulos, paved the way for many innovations in the practices of filming both in feature movies and documentaries. In his first work, he filmed real-life scenes of the underworld of drug dealers and prostitutes, which were embedded in the story. In 1951, Tatasopoulos repeated the use of amateur actors and a documentary style in his impressive neorealist film Black Earth/Mavri Gi, made on an impoverished island with a script that changed in situ according to the circumstances (reminiscent of Giuseppe De Sanctis’ Bi er Rice (1949) and Bunuel’s Los Olivados (1950)). The industry gradually established itself through the enthusiasm and dedication of people like the producer Filopoimin Finos and started examining the ambiguities of national identity, making the screen the only space in which its contradictions, conflicts and flaws could consciously and aesthetically materialise. Because many people were unable to a end school, there was a high illiteracy rate during this period; cinema became the only place where the population could be educated and entertained at

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the same time while also functioning as the main site for socialisation and even politicisation. Angelopoulos’ childhood was marred by the brutal force of history. Between 1936 and 1944, the Monarchy was restored and the Republic replaced by the Metaxas dictatorship (during which the Greek-Italian War was fought), and the Germans invaded. In the capital, the Angelopoulos family experienced the famine brought about by the Occupation. He later confided that the silence that permeates his films is an a empt to replicate the silence he ‘heard’ when the Germans entered an empty and silent Athens on Sunday 27 April 1941. The Occupation was merciless, with famine, executions and collective punishments, but the situation became worse when the Germans le Athens on 12 October 1944, as the first manifestations of a civil war between communist partisans and conservative pro-British forces were becoming obvious. The terrible events of 3 December 1944 in Athens, in which British forces killed peaceful demonstrators without warning or justification, and the retaliation by the communists, remained deeply embedded in Angelopoulos’ memory and are found in some of the most emblematic scenes in The Travelling Players. The Civil War that ensued (split between two periods, 1946 and 1947– 1949) was to become the central mythopoetic temporal and spatial background for many of Angelopoulos’ movies, both actual and inferred. The ethical ambiguities that came out during that fratricidal conflict remained with him as both the political and existential realities in his films, especially those produced a er 1984. The moving, and tragic, reconciliation of the old opponents in Voyage to Cythera indicated a kind of closure to Angelopoulos’ own inner conflict about those sha ering events, which fractured not only the country’s body politic but also its cultural imaginary. The conflict had a profound personal impact on Angelopoulos as a young boy. During this period, between 1944 and 1945, Angelopoulos’ father was abducted by his nephew and sentenced to death by the procommunist terrorist militia. ‘My cousin, who was a communist, arrested my father and sent him to be executed. . . . With my mother we started searching for his body. We went to Peristeri [a suburb in Athens] where open fields existed full of dead bodies and searched through them. We didn’t find him. This marked me more than anything else in my life and made me aware of the reality around me’ (Archimandritis 2013: 19). Angelopoulos described time and again how he felt as he searched with his mother for his father’s corpse in the mortuaries around Athens. The quest for a lost father, indeed for one violently abducted and presumed dead, is one of the most salient psychological undercurrents of his films.

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

Angelopoulos returned to these early traumatic memories in many interviews, including in 2009: Three months later I was out in the street playing. Suddenly I saw someone in rags approaching. It was my father. He was not executed. They had taken him hostage to Thebes. There, he was liberated by English tanks and returned to Athens on foot. I called out for my mother. I remember her, dressed in black, running towards him. They met in the middle of the street. A er a moment of total immobility, they came close to us. We went back in and started having soup – the only food available. Emotions were so intense that no one could say anything. This family reunion is the first scene of Reconstruction, my first movie. (Archimanditis 2013: 19–20)

Those formative years between 1946 and 1961 are crucial to understanding Angelopoulos’ work. At first, the liberation brought immense hope to the Greek people, but it was soon followed by complete disillusionment. Because of the ruthless censorship imposed on the population by the victorious anti-communist conservatives, the atmosphere of persecution, mutual suspicion and generalised fear could only be expressed indirectly in the cultural production of the period, culminating with the famous The Ogre of Athens/O Drakos by Nikos Koundouros (1956), the only other Greek film that Angelopoulos ever praised unreservedly. Angelopoulos made this atmosphere of dark foreboding a central element in his cinematic imaginary, cemented by his own experience in cinema a er watching Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). When he saw the film in 1946 or 1947, he was emotionally scarred by the final scene in which the protagonist, played by James Cagney, screams ‘I don’t want to die’ as he is taken away to be executed. Angelopoulos says that the scene ‘haunted his nights for a long time. Cinema came into my life with an expanding shadow on the wall and a scream’ (Fainaru 2001: 125). What cinema could achieve became the focus of his intellectual and aesthetic quest. Despite his anti-Hollywood and anti-illusionist beliefs, which he expressed in many of his reviews, Angelopoulos’ connection with the formal accomplishments of Hollywood storytelling was deep, and he returned to its pa erns frequently in the final decade of his life. The end of the Civil War in 1949 did not end the bi er divisions in Greek society. Most le -wing intellectuals were sent to remote, arid islands, which functioned as internment camps and places of torture, humiliation and execution. The image of the exile returning home a er leading a dreadful existence on one of these islands is present in almost all Angelopoulos’ films. Cinematically, these tumultuous experiences are also present in the way that Angelopoulos rejected the dominant images of Greece as a country of subliminal sunshine and Mediterranean euphoria, as perpetuated through a national cinema of entertainment and facile

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comic relief. On the contrary, for him Greek islands, indeed the whole Greek territory, were ‘memorials of death and loss, and their images were trauma-scapes: symbols of oppression, violence and exile’ (Tumarkin 2005: 12–20). Angelopoulos lived in Paris from 1961 to 1964. There, he encountered the Nouvelle Vague in all its festive rejection and jocular assassination of the dominant cinema de qualité, or the cinema de papa, and everything it had achieved. Angelopoulos singled out Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless/À Bout de Souffle (1960) as the film that changed the way he understood cinema. In an interview, he claimed that he had watched the film while he was still in Athens, at a movie theatre frequented only by working-class people and, at that moment, decided to become a filmmaker. French cinema was indeed at the centre of radical changes in the understanding, appreciation and practice of filmmaking, introducing a profound theoretical problematisation of the role of the medium and of the practices employed to construct cinematic visuality. Angelopoulos watched films by Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Rive e, amongst others. The origins of Angelopoulos’ distinct directorial presence with his characteristic compositional pa erns, lighting arrangements and acting styles can be detected in the epistemological conversations of French cineastes about the connection between images and ideology, especially those featured in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema between 1959 and 1969. During his time in France, where he worked at the Cinematheque, headed at the time by Henri Langlois, Angelopoulos was actively imagining his own cinematic language. There he had the opportunity to watch Japanese, Italian, Russian and German films, especially those of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Miklós Jancsó, Francesco Rosi and Pier Paolo Pasolini, along with the early movies of Bernardo Bertolucci and the later works of Roberto Rossellini. In his short homage to the Japanese master, Angelopoulos talked about the impact that Kurosawa’s Rashomon had on his cinematic thinking with its ‘overlapping narratives’, its fusion of ceremonial theatricality and the grandeur of emotions ‘as in the Greek tragedy’. In the pages of Cahiers and in the work of these directors, Angelopoulos encountered the theory of the director as the auteur of a film, which was a rebellion not just against the cinema de papa but also against the restrictions of the bureaucratised studio system. Against such impersonal perceptions of filmic representation, Angelopoulos raised the idiosyncrasy and the specificity of the individual. At the same time, he tried to avoid the idea of the director as superstar, expressing the Hollywood illusionist dramatisation of individualism.

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

The central idea that ultimately an auteur’s films exhibit the tension between his personality and the cinematic material (Sarris 1968: 32) can be felt in much of Angelopoulos’ work, although his collaboration with director of photography Giorgos Arvanitis was essential for developing his own version of the auteur. Upon his return to Greece and the establishment of the journal Democratic Change, we can see Angelopoulos starting to develop his own critical approach to local and international cinema. Maria Chalkou systematically studied Angelopoulos’ early film criticism and concluded: ‘Characteristic of his critical texts was his purely cinéphilic and surprisingly apolitical perspective. His writing was not didactic and he did not discuss the films in ideological, moral or political terms (dominant practices among his fellow critics) but only made occasional and brief comments on socio-political issues and with li le relation to Marxist ideas’ (Chalkou 2015: 25). It is important to point out the pre-existing critical projects within Angelopoulos’ cinematic thinking, most dominant among them the idea of the poetic cinema of the auteur. It is also interesting to note that a er he started making his own movies Angelopoulos abandoned film criticism, following the Cahiers principle that ‘the only true criticism of a film is another film’ (Bickerton 2009: 31). A er 1970, most of his thinking on cinema was geared towards elucidating his own work and constructing the conceptual framework for its proper contextualisation. Meanwhile, the country entered a tumultuous period of political instability a er the first centre-le government, elected in 1963, was overthrown in July 1965 by an ‘apostasy’, leading to a prolonged period of unrest that culminated in the imposition of the 1967 dictatorship. We cannot understand the development and evolution of Angelopoulos’ cinematic language without reference to the contextual restrictions imposed by the dictatorship of the Colonels. The military Junta lasted from 1967 to 1974 and played a pivotal role in the structural opaqueness of his early work, and in the form of the coded language he employed to address the oppression and persecution, and indeed the lack of freedom in general, not only for political experiences but also existential realities. During that period, the split in the Greek Communist Party revealed the looming crisis within the ranks of the le -wing believers, artists and activists. This crisis can be traced back to the thirties and the conflict between ‘Orthodox’ communists, who were loyal to Stalin and defended the Soviet Union, and dissidents like Pandelis Pouliopoulos, Agis Stinas and Cornelius Castoriadis, who initially sided with Leo Trotsky and the Fourth International. The ri between the groups grew deeper during the Civil War, when the hard-line communists turned against the dissidents in a vicious campaign of terror and extermination, and became even more

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marked a er 1956 with the denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult and the invasion of Hungary. In 1968, the Greek Communist Party split into two groups: the interior and the exterior. Eventually, the former became aligned with what would be called Euro-communism and the la er remained faithful to Moscow. Nevertheless, political oppression and ideological divisions are not sufficient to explain the scope and the ultimate achievement of Angelopoulos’ early films. He came gradually to see himself as a figure of common acceptance: a true believer of the Le , fighting for social equality and political liberation. Until the end of his life, he maintained a humanistic commitment to this vision, coming ever closer to marginal political and ideological formations that privileged utopian politics and the anti-statist ideals of perpetual resistance. An understanding of the complexities of the Greek film industry, with its pa erns of production, its star system, studio codes, mechanisms of distribution and dominant genres, is also fundamental to an appreciation of Angelopoulos’ intervention in its main practices. Between 1945 and 1970, the industry had developed robust production dynamics, with prominent filmmakers working in a variety of genres and a multiplicity of ideological orientations and formal achievements. It was mostly organised around big studios and producers, like Finos Films, Spentzos Films, Karayiannis-Karatzopoulos, James Paris and others, who vied for popularity and commercial success. Actors like Melina Mercouri, Aliki Vougiouklaki, Ellie Lambeti, Mary Hronopoulou, Irene Pappas and many more had become the local stars of a thriving studio system that was commodifying their images. Some of them succeeded in becoming known beyond Greece. Melina Mercouri, for example, gained visibility through Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960) and Phaedra (1962) and was for a period in the late sixties quite famous worldwide as an activist and fashion icon simultaneously. Popular composers like Manos Hatzidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, Nikos Mamangakis, Yannis Markopoulos, Mimis Plessas, Kostas Kapnisis and others brought new perspectives to the function of the film soundtrack, with music and songs becoming integral to its formal aesthetics. They influenced pa erns of spectatorship in the period while also contributing decisively to the symbolic imaginary of a rapidly industrialised society. Specific musical styles were associated with specific genres in Greek cinema, and one of Angelopoulos’ main projects in his films of the seventies was to fuse different components and a ributes from various genres into unexpected formal juxtapositions. At the same time, the transition from a culture of books privileging the historical continuity and prestige of the Greek language to a culture of

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

images still in search of structural parameters and iconography was one of the seminal realities during the formative years of Angelopoulos’ cinema. An astounding 117 films were produced in 1968 a er which their numbers began to dwindle with the arrival of television. The establishment of the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1960 heralded a new era in the way the state promoted and simultaneously tried to control cinematic production. Accomplished directors like Yorgos Tzavellas, Gregoris Gregoriou, Michael Cacoyannis, Maria Plyta and Nikos Koundouros all constructed successful plot-structures with their own discursive identifications for general, and especially urban, spectatorship. The ‘plot-structure’ as a specific genre was mostly Aristotelian, keeping the unities of time, space and plot intact, and culminating, mostly, in happy endings. Actors also followed the Method Style as defined by the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, which asked for the total empathic identification between actors and their roles. However, even from the early sixties the first cracks in the system had started to show, and between 1965 and 1970 the dominant model was brought into question, particularly by Roviros Manthoulis and Alexis Damianos. Angelopoulos would dissociate himself completely from these models of production, screenwriting and acting style; consequently, it is easier to delineate his artistic genealogy outside the mainstream history of Greek cinema, and sometimes in opposition to it. As already mentioned, at the same time, going to the cinema created a vertical society, cu ing through all social classes, and the theatre itself became a place of socialisation and interaction between the old rivals of the Civil Wars throughout the country. Going to the movies, especially during the dictatorship, became not only a form of escapism but also an act of defiance and resistance, as all venues were under police surveillance. Subversive and anti-national films were only very rarely permi ed to be screened and even then people were ‘profiled’ for a ending. Overall, local film production was dominated by urban melodramas, technicolour musicals, gripping film noirs, derivative costume dramas and, soon, so porn. They were all based on linear, sequential narrative structures, offering predominantly sentimental and feel-good escapism to an emerging middle class who were a empting to forget their peasant origins and cope with the traumas of immigration and urban anonymity. In in the early sixties, Takis Kanellopoulos, Manousos Manousakis, Dimos Theos and especially Roviros Manthoulis de-structured the rules of the prevailing genres and paved the way for experimentation with the cinematic medium with a visuality based on cinematic practices and, most importantly, experimental cinematic thinking. Manthoulis’ Face to Face/Prosopo me Prosopo (1966) is the first film in which a new form of

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imaginative and somehow disconcerting perception of montage appeared in Greece, as if the film, conscious of its own existence, was now able to expose its own artificiality and materiality. ‘Montage,’ wrote Manthoulis, ‘ignores natural and human laws. And it astounds all spectators’ (Manthoulis 2015: 33). The same can be suggested about Dimos Theos’ Kierion (1968), a film banned by the dictatorship. Using film noir shots to depict the dark machinations of political power, it was made with a minimal budget and an extemporised, ‘work in progress script’ and filmed in a completely cerebral and iconoclastic form. Soon, the ‘opening-up’ of cinematic form (Karalis 2012: 108) was taken over by the new generation of filmmakers, like Tonia Marketaki, Vangelis Serdaris, Pandelis Voulgaris, Pavlos Tassios, Nikos Nikolaides and others, who produced their films independently, without the restrictions imposed by the studio system. A remarkable number of short films also illustrated the persistent experimentation with form and production that we witnessed before 1970. Although 1967 to 1975 saw the most popular blockbusters (produced by Finos Films in particular) as well as the rise of the prolific vernacular auteur Yannis Dalianidis and the shining cheesiness of superstar Aliki Vouyiouklaki, Greek cinema was entering a period of self-reflection and deep questioning of its formal accomplishments, brought about by the disintegration of the studio system, especially a er the introduction of television in 1967. The journals established by Angelopoulos and his fellow travellers stimulated a surprising degree of self-consciousness and self-problematisation regarding cinema, a er two decades of euphoric and anarchic improvisation during which no serious reflection on the function of the medium ever took place, even by significant directors like Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros. Angelopoulos’ position was central to the transition to the new era of problematised cinematic praxis, which started in 1969 and which, in its critical stages, almost coincided with the political vicissitudes of the 1967 dictatorship. His films, especially Reconstruction and Days of ’36, built a new visual form with their own temporal grammar and structural syntax –expressing the claustrophobia of the period, its oppression and lack of transparency – and created a visual matrix that implied the invisible histories of exclusion and marginalisation that had remained silent until then. His adoption of the Oresteian myth as the scaffolding for his epic film The Travelling Players was also partly due to the aesthetics of silence imposed by the political realities of the period. He was actually given permission by the censors to make the film a er submi ing Aeschylus’ Oresteia as the official script for the movie, ‘set in modern times’ as he explained. The Travelling Players is not simply about the history of political oppression in Greece between 1936 and 1952, or

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

indeed a metaphor for its struggles in 1967; it is mostly about conscious historicity and the ways the people, especially ordinary people, exist under the oppression of omnipotent but invisible institutions as alienated and objectified non-beings. It is also a film about visual historicity, and how historical experience can become cinematic experience without employing the conventional filmic devices of emotional identification or conformist, linear narratives. The message of the cinematic irregularity that The Travelling Players represented was so strong that even a er the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974 the newly democratically elected conservative government under Constantine Karamanlis (who legalised the Communist Party, liberalised political institutions and abolished censorship) felt under threat. This monumental but totally anti-heroic film was deliberately rejected as Greece’s official entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. However, a single reel was smuggled illegally out of the country, but the prizes and accolades it garnered were not enough to change the a itude of the State. The conservative government continued the same approach towards Angelopoulos with his next film, The Hunters. For its production, he had to secure the funds himself (he sold his house), while the government gave millions to the production of Michael Cacoyannis’ extravagantly lavish, hyper-acted and un-tragically glamorous Iphigeneia (1977). Yet the success of Angelopoulos’ films had already a racted international sponsors, especially German, Italian and French television channels. These sponsors, with some assistance from the newly established Greek Film Centre, produced his next film O Megalexandros. By then, in Greece, as in the rest of Europe – particularly France, Spain and Italy – politics had been transformed by the election of the Socialist Party under the slogan of ‘change’. Angelopoulos’ film seems today eerily prescient of what was to happen with the rise of the socialist parties in Europe and the domination of a new kind of leadership – as embodied in the contradictory personalities of ‘sophisticated rebels’ (H. Stuart Hughes 1988: 22) like Francois Mi errand, Felipe Gonzales, Benede o Craxi and Andreas Papandreou – at the very moment when the movement of Solidarity in Poland was paving the way for the collapse of the Soviet Socialist Republics in Eastern Europe. The elections of October 1981 brought the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), with its charismatic leader Andreas Papandreou, to office. The party was to dominate the next decade until the scandals of 1989, which brought about its temporary demise; it subsequently resurged in 1994. The newly appointed Minister for Culture, Melina Mercouri, a prominent advocate for the film industry, introduced solid but time-consuming bureaucratic policies for the funding and production of new films through

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the enhanced role and increased budget of the Greek Film Centre. The Centre was soon to monopolise the funding of most films, eliminating all independent and non-mainstream productions. At the same time, the video market began to flourish as the emergent VHS technology became cheaper and more widespread, which led to movies being made specifically for that market. These new visual technologies made films more accessible to viewers, who could now watch them on small screens in the comfort of their living rooms. In their first term in office, the socialists introduced many policies aiming to heal the traumas of the past, especially those stemming from the Civil War. They recognised the resistance against the Germans, burned all police files of le -wing citizens, and allowed the unconditional return of all political refugees, who a er the end of the Civil War had escaped to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union. However, a er their second election victory in 1985 they gradually transformed into a power-seeking organisation acting primarily for the benefit of its members, which created immense disenchantment for all true believers of le -wing causes. This is illustrated by films like Christos Siopahas’ The Descent of the Nine/I Kathodos ton Ennea (1984). The optimism of the early eighties was replaced by an intense sense of anguish at the end of the decade, expressed through a perpetual Freudian mood of mourning and abjection – a mood characteristic of all cultural creativity of that period. Angelopoulos’ movies continued to be made specifically for the big screen in an a empt to maintain the socialising character of movie-going just when television was emerging as the main space for production, and the new video-casse e market was privatising the experience of watching films. In the face of rising technologies, which were bringing about deep changes in the audience’s ways of seeing, as well as the resuscitation of Hollywood action movies as a genre, Angelopoulos’ films expressed a strong sense of visual time – one that was gradually becoming both obsolete and somehow parochial, encapsulating the experimentations of an era that was already gone. The symbolism of a refugee returning to a changed and hostile country permeated Angelopoulos’ films in this period. It expressed his growing frustration with the socialists through his moody camera framing and chromatic composition, in an active search for new ways to visually encapsulate the country’s imploding visions of change and his own personal disenchantment. Angelopoulos’ emblematic landscapes were the craggy mountains and the declining towns of the Greek countryside, and particularly the border regions shared with other Balkan states. However, not everybody was impressed, even with his international recognition.

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

Angelopoulos was to meet his nemesis, Bishop Augustinos Kantiotes, in the city of Florina. A er having stolen the script of The Suspended Step of the Stork, Kantiotes ordered church bells to toll endlessly for days to prevent Angelopoulos from filming his ‘anti-Hellenic’ movie, which supposedly promoted ‘anarchy, atheism and debauchery’ in the seat of his bishopric. Thousands of faithful, holding black flags and placards, rallied against Angelopoulos’ presence. On 17 December 1990, an official edict of excommunication was issued against him, the crew and everyone else, man or woman, who had had anything to do ‘with this anti-national and obscene film’.4 Akira Kurosawa responded with a vigorous defence of his friend and colleague, and in his next film Angelopoulos included a whole scene inspired by the eerie rituals of religious fanatics. Stavros Tzimas reports that the excommunication also included storks that had nested on the belfry top.5 The horizonless, melancholic frames in Angelopoulos’ films became more intense a er the gradual collapse of the socialist countries and the immense number of displaced people escaping totalitarian regimes. Starting with The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), his films explored liminality as a condition of self-definition, or indeed personal de-definition. This is probably Angelopoulos’ first truly European film, belonging to the rather elusive Trilogy of Borders, whose purpose was to visually explore the plight of refugees and displaced peoples as the main concern of the new century (though Angelopoulos had already begun planning this film in 1988 before the fall of the communist regimes). The collapse of socialism and the human tragedy exposed by the waves of refugees that followed created images that haunt Angelopoulos’ movies of the nineties; it le behind a vast political and intellectual vacuum along with the sense of an existential void, to which Angelopoulos responded by aestheticising the cinematic medium as a transcendental signifier, existing above time and space. The idea of ‘Je suis perdu! Dans quelle terre etrangere suis-je encore arrive?’, which can be found in Angelopoulos’ 52-second short film (made to celebrate the anniversary of the first movie by the Lumiere Brothers), expresses the dominant mood of his filmmaking, one that remained with him until the end. Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) in particular – which is a film demonstrating how cinematic images save fleeting and ephemeral phenomena, or indeed even the illusions of the human condition – also exhibits a strong element of aestheticism that seems to gradually take over Angelopoulos’ disenchantment with the dead-ends of history. His later films became more enigmatic and elusive, full of cryptic symbols that needed to be deciphered and interpreted. The finest achievement of his final period, Eternity and a Day, made Angelopoulos an internationally recognised master of the art-house movie. And until his untimely death,

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his name was synonymous with the tradition of radical modernism that marked cinematic production in post-war Europe. From the new millennium until 2010, when the Global Fiscal Crisis had a devastating effect on Greece, the country and its film industry went through a radical transformation. The rise of neoliberal policies within an increasingly globalised and deterritorialised social space created a sense of nostalgia for a world of lost communitarianism, expressed at a global level in the films of Alexander Sokurov, Bella Tar, Terence Davies and Terrence Malick, as well as younger directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Wong Kar-wai, Park Chan-Wook, Jane Campion and Nanni More i, amongst others. The postmodern cinema of Lars von Trier became dominant, together with the visual pastiches of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. Here we must also stress the revival of interest in the pioneering work of Agnès Varda, who during the nineties developed a new form of cinematic imagism with her essay film The Gleaners and I (2000), which fused storytelling with the personal relationship between the medium and the filmmaker. The end of Ulysses’ Gaze is about the redemption of both personal life and collective history through images in the strange land of cinema: a redemption that can also be seen in his most interesting film of the period, Eternity and a Day (1998), and especially his final, and least successful, film The Dust of Time (2008). Meanwhile, the Greek film industry changed rapidly with the rise of unregulated private television channels – which were by law obliged to partly subsidise films – and by the construction of multiplexes, through which watching movies became part of a more stereotypical consumer experience of purchasing objects and killing time. At the same time, the country joined the Eurozone and changed its currency, creating an illusion of affluence that the Greek economy and technological infrastructure never really supported. The 2004 Athens Olympics gave the opportunity for the movie industry to celebrate its achievements globally, although it was already becoming clear that something ominous was about to happen. New visions started emerging with Nikos Grammatikos, Sotiris Goritsas, Tassos Boulmetis, Constantine Giannaris, Panos Koutras, Vangelis Mourikis, Margarita Manda, Yannis Economides, Angeliki Antoniou and Dennis Iliadis, who collectively destabilised and decentred the medium in an act of cinematic patricide against the father of the New Greek Cinema, Angelopoulos himself (despite the fact that some of them had worked with him). The coup de grâce was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kine a (2005), which can be seen as the first conscious postmodern pastiche and aesthetic deconstruction of Angelopoulos’ first film Reconstruction. Angelopoulos’ films of the new millennium were looked upon with suspicion, even as his old associates Pantelis Voulgaris and Yannis Sma-

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

ragdis produced blockbusters like Brides/Nifes (2004) and El Greco (2007). Voulgaris’ films in particular seemed to popularise a new cinematic visuality that could trace its origins to Angelopoulos’ style, albeit diluted by heavy melodrama and overblown sentimentality. Voulgaris ‘antagonised’ Angelopoulos by using his long-time collaborator Giorgos Arvanitis as director of photography but then making everything too obvious and too glossy. Voulgaris’ later films – Deep Soul/Psihi Vatheia (2009), Li le England/ Mikra Anglia (2013) and The Last Note/To Tele aio Simeioma (2017) – seem to try hard to position themselves vis-à-vis the Angelopoulos tradition, only without the restraint and discipline that characterise Angelopoulos’ approach to script, mise en scène and acting styles. With his three last films, Angelopoulos tried to explore cinematic images as the topoi of affect and emotion, something that the ever-increasing commercialisation and industrialisation of the medium was using for easy sentimentalism or cheap comic relief. Despite his prominence, Angelopoulos felt traumatised when the fiscal crisis hit Greece, internalising both the gradual demise of his society’s reckless illusions and Europe’s grand (but false) proclamations of solidarity. In his last interviews, Angelopoulos bemoaned the implosion of meaning and sociability brought about by the economic crisis and the dominance of social media. ‘There is a kind of disorientation,’ he stated to Fani Zozia. ‘The way that events are presented disorientates completely. You have the impression that there exists a sadistic obsession with the propagation of evil, with sensationalism but never with the truth. Television changed Greek life for ever. Both truth and lie. Both aesthetics and ethics. And this is not simply a Greek phenomenon.’6 In preparing what was to be his last film, about the predicament and the hopelessness of the hundreds of thousands of refugees that had been arriving in Greece since 1991, and the inhuman way they were being exploited by local traffickers, Angelopoulos rewrote the script one hundred times according to anecdotal accounts. Angelopoulos was killed during the production of The Other Sea/I Alli Thalassa while searching for the ‘right shot’ in the dark in Drapetsona, a suburb of the harbour city of Piraeus. Known for the Rembetica songs, Drapetsona is one of the poorest areas of Greece, inhabited by the working underclass, Anatolian refugees, lumpenproletariat and social deviants. Angelopoulos’ cinematic project ended just as it was morphing into something truly risky, bold and adventurous, leaving unanswered many of the questions raised by his previous work. His religious funeral was an all-encompassing homage to the man and his work, a ended even by those who disliked his work. Politicians, actors, internationally renowned directors and a great many cinephiles took

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part in the ceremony, chanting folk-tunes, poetry and rebellious songs from his movies: a strange farewell for an artist who constructed images of silence.

Contexts and Paratexts Beginning with his first film and ending with his final, incomplete work, Angelopoulos can be considered an irregular force in the cinematic production of his country. Yet his contribution to the wider questions of cinematic culture, production and cinephilia in Greece is undisputed. The New Greek Cinema emerged in 1970 with Angelopoulos’ first feature film Reconstruction. However, as I have indicated in a previous book (Karalis 2012: 145–60), this film was the final result of a continuous fermentation that had already started in the early sixties (some scholars would claim even earlier). The transition from the old cinematic modes to the new representational experiments may have happened gradually and organically, but there is no question that the catalyst and accelerator of this transformation was Reconstruction. Angelopoulos’ first film not only inaugurated a new perspective and scope for the medium, it also reinvented the function of genre and image, bringing Greek cinematic culture to a potent self-understanding of its own formal and thematic complexity. Until then, only three great directors, Yorgos Tzavellas, Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros, had succeeded in taking the camera out of the controlled environment of the studio in order to explore urban spaces as the loci of visible or invisible conflicts during the process of modernisation and industrialisation. Yet even when they explored the Greek countryside, as in the case of Koundouros, they filmed it from the point of view of urban politics, rendering it exotic and symbolic. Angelopoulos, however, believed that the greatest praise he ever received came from an ordinary villager in a café in the mountains of Epirus, who told him that although he understood nothing about what was happening in the film, he felt very much at home watching it because it was about ‘us and our life’. The degree of empathic union between camera and landscape in Angelopoulos’ films astonishes and unnerves; he managed to problematise the representation and perception of ‘deep Greece’, foregrounding it as the lasting topos of a perennial, archetypal drama. From then onwards, the implicit tension between actuality and perennialism, between the now and the forever, was constantly felt and delineated in all of his movies. This tension culminated with a peculiar exercise in iconological style, the film O Megalexandros, a er which the epic mode gradually receded from

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

Angelopoulos’ cinematic language, overtaken by a new form of fluid visual lyricism, which favoured grainy, desaturated hues, ‘with a tendency to abstraction and cold shades of colour’, as Dimitris Theodoropoulos observed (Theodoropoulos 2009: 185). Indeed, between 1970 and 1980, the most difficult period of Angelopoulos’ professional career and personal life, he launched breathtaking experiments with image-making, screenwriting, performance, editing, camera movement and, ultimately, mise en scène. At that period, he was interested in structures, especially structures of power, and less in individuals and their adventures in history. His films posed obvious challenges to the prevailing tropes of perceiving images, contextualising their meaning and interpreting their semiotics. A er 1984, however, Angelopoulos submerged himself in human interiority and discovered the inner world of historical agency. His characters were no longer signs or structures; they struggled to experience their identities and even struggled against their own sociological positions as representatives of something beyond themselves. Their identities emerged within them and through them as interaction and self-revealing otherness, almost as something unknowable to their own minds. Within the context of the increasing reification and commodification of human existence in the rising consumer societies during the grand wave of neoliberal economics – when Margaret Thatcher’s dictum ‘there is no such thing as society’ prevailed – Angelopoulos’ films dealt with the tyranny of the present order over the past, and the loss of a connection with the ideals of collective solidarity that had inspired the youth of post-war generations. His characters during this period were epigones: the descendants of great fathers, whose presence they simultaneously admired and feared. The premonition for the return of the terrifying father figure is also at the heart of Angelopoulos’ subsequent films, felt variously through complete disappearance (Landscape in the Mist), voluntary exile (The Suspended Step of the Stork) or Freudian absorption in the sexuality of young siblings (The Weeping Meadow). Yet the father who returns in these films is not terrifying; he is broken, vulnerable and disorientated. He has no authority, and the children who waited for him must deal with his demise and reimagine their life through his paternal weakness and vulnerability. Sensing in these films a moral indictment of the hubris of the Socialist Party in power and their whole social project, neither the audience nor the critics were impressed, and they declared Angelopoulos pretentious and self-indulgent. His films of the eighties, in particular, exposed the pretensions and the illusions of an entire generation, with the socialists having managed to neutralise every project of renewal and change a er taking power. When they held power, the socialists instrumentalised and deper-

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sonalised individuals to the same degree as had the conservative bourgeoisie. This demoralising truth informed the strong political element in Angelopoulos’ films, which a racted only minimal ticket sales and were soon confined primarily to art festivals and courses on film studies, becoming extremely popular amongst scholars. Furthermore, very few of his films received a wider release in theatres for general viewership, as they were increasingly perceived as closed filmic texts for elitist consumption, addressed only to hyper-specialists and film theorists. Nevertheless, with the praise of celebrated directors like Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni and Martin Scorsese, Angelopoulos’ films gradually gained the support of a passionate, albeit small, audience, who understood the great risks he took with the medium and the new possibilities he established. His last films, especially, made a virtue of precariousness, gradually dismantling the coherence of his own cinematic language and reconfiguring its semantic visuality. It was obvious that by 2009 Angelopoulos was grappling with a radical transformation in his visual universe; he was looking for ways to explore the narrowing horizons of the democratic perspectives. His last short film was commissioned by the San Paolo Film Festival in Brazil. It is a dazzling experiment with camera movement and action without script and, like his very first experiments with cinema in Paris, explores the luminous chromatic scales of unexpected epiphanies. In it, a preacher sermonises about sin and the end of times while the camera moves regally over the faces of unsuspecting commuters on the São Paulo underground, immersing them in the absolute unity of pristine whiteness. Sky Below/Céu Inferior (2011) is Angelopoulos’ most spectacular affirmation of the sacrality of the real world and the opening-up of the camera to its mysteries. The camera became the ‘firm point of reference’ he was looking for a er the death of all paternal figures, touched upon in this short film with the presence of the Christian preacher. With it, he framed one of his final images with a unique denouncement of political implosion that he discovered on a wall in São Paolo: ‘The people have been deceived.’

Visual Temporality and its Parameters A er a long and convoluted journey through the unpredictable upheavals of his society and his own ideology, Angelopoulos reached a state of profound disenchantment. For more than forty-eight years, he produced his films under various political circumstances and institutional frameworks. He started his career under the censorship imposed by the Greek junta, funding the production of his films himself through loans from friends

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

and associates. A er the restoration of the Republic, Angelopoulos faced the suspicion and persecution of a conservative government through his official exclusion from all state subsidies. Even under the socialist government a er 1981, he was subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning a er his films failed to achieve financial success. It was only later in the eighties, when he was recognised as a reputable auteur, that Angelopoulos was able to achieve financial independence by way of bank loans from European and international media corporations. Yet despite such extreme changes in their production pa erns, Angelopoulos’ films form a distinct and unified whole, embodying a singular and comprehensive cinematic vision and unfolding in trilogies (a division that is followed by most scholars): namely, the trilogies of History, Silence and Borders.7 However, although some do form trilogies (there is definitely a stylistic and thematic connection between Days of ’36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters in the Trilogy of History), we could claim that Angelopoulos’ most important works are his transitional movies, which show the reorientations in his cinematic evolution and function as bridges between the different stages of his development. O Megalexandros and Eternity and a Day, for example, only loosely fit the pa ern of a trilogy, and his last two films are related rather remotely in their subject ma er and visual style. These are the films that show the wider reorientations in the perspective of his filmmaking. His short film on Athens, too, is an important marker of the turn in his filmmaking towards the second period of his development. If we could use another term to link the common threads of Angelopoulos’ films, it would be be er to use triptychs, as they unfold an integral theme or a story in different dimensions and forms. Ultimately, all of his films, one a er the other, enact a poly-visual unfolding of a comprehensive polyptych, in the manner of renaissance paintings in panels or the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e – aptly translated as ‘pictures of the floating world’ (Bell 2004: 137) – a term that brings rather appropriately together the pictorial, visual and compositional dimensions of his work. Like Robert Bresson, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos made relatively few films. He was tireless in writing and rewriting his scripts, collaborating with screenwriters, and occasionally taking over the production. He quipped once that directors make only one film, probably the first film they release. Angelopoulos stressed that in his first film we can find concentrated all his cinematic parameters and their various elaborations, as if he had condensed his career and technique into a nutshell. Of course, this is not the case: his style evolved and changed over the decades, becoming more complex, multilayered and heterogeneous. The complex visuality of The Dust of Time only vaguely resembles

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the geometric minimalism of Reconstruction, if at all. Certainly, his first feature film paved the way for both the new cinematic temporality and the fluid perceptions of cinematic experience Angelopoulos would construct over the course of his career; as these developed, they radically changed his relationship with filmmaking, compositional structure and the audience and helped him explore the ever-expanding potentialities of the medium. Angelopoulos never articulated a consistent theory of cinematic aesthetics, as Eisenstein did in his essays, Godard in his Historie(s) du Cinema, Robert Bresson in his monumentally short Notes on the Cinematograph, and Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time. However, his persistent quest for an adequate cinematic form can be clearly delineated in both stylistic and conceptual terms. In fact, one of the most intriguing elements of Angelopoulos’ directorial unpredictability is that his work was never programmatic but remained extremely explorative, fluid and constantly hybridising. Angelopoulos revealed that his first love was literature, especially poetry; this was expressed through his screenwriting, which can be read as prose poems or poetical sketches. His scripts are replete with references to George Seferis, Mihalis Katsaros, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Paul Celan and the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos, who even appears as a character in Eternity and a Day. In a revealing interview conducted by Michel Fais, Angelopoulos explained his work process especially as screenwriter: I worked always on my own stories, on original scripts or on stories that I find in the fine-print of newspapers – as in the Reconstruction, on a crime. I have worked the same way on Greek myths. As in the Atreides, or as now on the Theban Cycle. Completely free, a empting a re-inscription of myth onto contemporary material and projecting them onto today’s historical time.8

Angelopoulos’ scripts are loose in narrative unity, frequently avoiding dialogue altogether, and with what li le dialogue there is being on many occasions improvised by the actors during filming. The Travelling Players had no script at all, only some notes and the outline of the ancient myth of Oresteia. The actors were asked to improvise or recite long diatribes as personal commentaries on the story, looking straight into the camera. His script for The Hunters is ekphrastic – a verbal description of a painting, or even like a prose poem: On the quay next to the lake. Dusk. On the rostrum, an orchestra waiting. Further, the hunters in official suits and their wives in lavish evening gowns. Suddenly, from the town far away, some small boats are seen approaching full of people. Their lanterns can be barely seen through the mist. As they come closer, you can see men and women dressed like the hunters, almost ceremoniously. (Angelopoulos 1977: 80)

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

In Ulysses’ Gaze and especially Eternity and a Day, many scenes from the script were never realised, but they can be read in the published screenplays. Even on paper they maintain a very strong pictorial quality, with dialogue interspersed by poetic stage directions. ‘Sunrise. Pale light filtered through white curtains slides into the small room and trembles uncertain on the sculptured iron bed. Silence. Distant sound of sea and the rustle of curtains’ (Angelopoulos 1998: 11). On many occasions, Angelopoulos simply improvised on the set, filming the interactions between the cast and piecing together the story in his mind. The published scripts include voice-overs, dramatic monologues and disconnected episodes, and even include pages from his personal diaries and professional notebooks. Fluid and unstable, most of them are based on the mnemonic value of a scene and show Angelopoulos as both dramaturge and poet. In his brief prologue to the screenplay of Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos reflects on how he conceived and constructed the story, revealing the subconscious workings of his filmmaking: An old and persistent question. How is an idea born? The idea of a film. Whoever says that the idea was born by looking at a tree, would have said both a truth and a lie. . . . The period before the writing of a script is a period of humidity, with strange changes, and ostensibly unjustifiable sensitisations. Alternations between absent-mindedness and alertness. It is a period of double life. The noisy part of your self lives its daily existence as usual while the noiseless weaves mystically, with visible materials, what will come out when mature, in an unsuspected moment, piercing with astonishing easiness through all filters of everydayness. Whoever says that the idea for a film was born by looking at a tree would have said the truth. (Angelopoulos 1997: 7–9)

Angelopoulos also states that: ‘The final form of the film does not correspond to certain aspects of the original script and its structure. The changes relate to the repositioning of certain scenes from their initial place or the addition of new dialogue or soliloquy between one scene and the next’ (Angelopoulos 1997: 101). It is obvious that, despite the fact that most of his scripts were wri en in collaboration with important and professional screenwriters, Angelopoulos maintained a very significant degree of control over the script, although he improvised extensively during the filming process. If in his scripts Angelopoulos maintained the final ‘supremacy’, it seems that in his collaboration with the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis he made space for a convergence of choices. Arvanitis is one of the few Greek directors of photography who has built an international career, and he deserves special a ention here. From his early films with commercial directors out of the traditional studio system – like Dinos Dimopoulos, Dinos Katsouridis and Yannis Dalianidis, for example – the pictorial qual-

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ities of Arvanitis’ camera were distinct and recognisable. However, his collaboration with Angelopoulos changed his cinematography, in that he began to explore formal texture, sharpness and plasticity, even as he continued experimenting with shades of colour, chiaroscuro and all the nuances in between. Arvanitis was to Angelopoulos what Eduard Tisse was to Sergei Eisenstein, Kazuo Miyagawa to Akira Kurosawa, Sven Nykvist to Ingmar Bergman, Robert Burks to Alfred Hitchcock, and Jörg Widmar to Terrence Malick (a discussion of the parallels between Arvanitis, Takao Saitô, Shôji Ueda, Emmanuel Lubezki and Darius Khondji would be equally interesting on another occasion). His photography changed over the decades, and together with his use of colour, composition, volume and movement, Arvanitis introduced an anti-illusionist style of filming based on a minimalistic use of contrast and variation, thus enhancing Angelopoulos’ own flat, perspectiveless and uninterrupted imaginal continuum (with Ulysses’ Gaze being a striking exception). Arvanitis tried to avoid the overcrowded mise en scène and the horror vacui of mainstream cinematography by focusing on spatial emptiness, austere geometry and formal minimalism with imperceptible spatial transitions while insisting on chromatic complementarity with subtle variations. In certain films, such as The Hunters and O Megalexandros, he worked with an almost expressionistic intensity, in much the same way that Freddie Young worked for David Lean, or Vi orio Storaro for Bernardo Bertolucci. In his most sublime moments in The Travelling Players, Voyage to Cythera, Landscape in the Mist and Eternity and a Day, Arvanitis reached the peak of his powers, achieving something analogous to the cinematography of Vadim Yusov and Alexander Knyazhinsky for Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) respectively, or even Andrey Moskvin and Edouard Tisse for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944). In those four films, as well as partially in the Days of ’36, Arvanitis explored what he called ‘the power of non-colour’ on surfaces – that is, the use of ‘photo-sculpture’ in order to bring out the visual identity and the chromatic complementarity of images. As he stated: ‘Proper light makes good photography. This needs to be worked daily and that’s our job: sculpting light.’9 Later, a er his international success, he also stated: A er making many commercial films, working with Angelopoulos was a great shock to me. . . . I operate within what I call ‘cinema of poverty’ where there not many luxuries. This is the reason I love old cameras. I can film everything with them. I am impressed by the potentialities of light and shadow, and colours. As both technicians and artists we must employ all available strategies to serve faithfully aesthetics and emotions. The aesthetic and not the technical result ma ers.10

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

It would be unfair to deny Arvanitis credit for his part in Angelopoulos’ achievement of essentially liberating Greek cinematography from the replication of its ‘national’ style and the restrictions of its dominant pseudorealistic visuality by opening it up to novel experimental investigations (some would even call them stylistic improvisations). Arvanitis and Angelopoulos jointly potentialised the camera, enhancing its field of visual identifications and expanding the spectator’s responses to them, elevating their images to what Gilles Deleuze called ‘planes of immanence’ through their non-referential and autotelic composition (Deleuze 2001: 26). Their most significant and sublime images are pregnant with an absolute immanence that ‘. . . is in itself. It is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject’ (Deleuze 2001: 26). Despite the fact that their images depict something, it is the depiction itself that becomes the focal point of its compositional structure beyond its actual subject ma er. In the synergy between Angelopoulos and Arvanitis, we can detect the autonomisation of the cinematic image as an experience not determined by its constituent parts. They are so complete in themselves that they gain their very ‘singularization’, as Deleuze would put it (Deleuze 2001: 29), by causing an emotional reaction beyond mere informational content. Their collaboration necessitates we expand our understanding of the concept of the auteur to include enhanced cinematic experiences arising from the osmosis of many artistic visions and perspectives. In more historical and general terms, their collaboration allows us to see that, through a fusion of local knowledge (Arvanitis) and transcultural perspectives (Angelopoulos), cinema consists of local responses to global questions. Both employed the technological potentialities and epistemological frameworks invented elsewhere, using them to respond to local industry challenges alongside their respective personal and creative quests. That which separates them is also interesting and is perhaps indicative of the transition to a more lyrical and fluid chromatic fusion that we see in Angelopoulos’ later films, for which he worked with Andreas Sinanos. The other parameter that defined the reception of Angelopoulos’ films was their sonic universe. Post-1984, Angelopoulos ingeniously (though not always organically) superimposed Eleni Karaindrou’s hypnotic and minimalistic music non-diegetically over the cinematic experience. Her music is o en rather extra-diegetic to the actual imagery and not integrally linked with the story and action like the music of The Travelling Players and O Megalexandros. In the former, Loukianos Kilaidonis’ melodies creatively imitate dominant melodies of the period in an urban vernacular style, generating a sonic anti-reality as an implicit comment on the action. The same can be argued about O Megalexandros and Christodoulos Halaris’ autochthonic and neo-Byzantine score, incorporating instruments of the

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Balkan and Hellenic folk traditions, and occasionally juxtaposing them to the Italian bel canto style. The acoustic universe of elemental echolalias of native demotic sonorities enhances the sense of the archetypal drama – analogous to Sergei Prokofiev’s score for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) – and, despite its density, foregrounds the pictorial qualities of the film.11 Karaindrou’s music, however, is totally different, playing quite the opposite role vis-à-vis the story and its unfolding. In the past, I have called this deliberate strategy ‘disjunctive aesthetics’ (Karalis 2006: 76), arguing that Angelopoulos uses so minimalistic music as a counterpoint to the composition of the story, with the strong emotionalism of the melodies counterbalancing the distancing effects in acting styles, chromatic patterns and storyline. Her music provides a consistent structure of ‘theme and variations’, experimenting with different orchestrations of the same melodic lines and subtly reassembling them for single instruments (mostly wind or string), or for large orchestras with a complex interplay of sounds. This offers the films she scores underlying non-verbal and non-visual rhythms to their narrative and visual experience. Angelopoulos also thought that most of his films followed the structure of Antonio Vivaldi’s music, especially ‘Double Concerto for Two Mandolins’, an affinity echoed in Karaindrou’s circular compositions. Karaindrou manages to coax sounds from her musicians that enhance and derealise Angelopoulos’ images, creating a symbolic atmosphere of unconscious correspondences. Here we must mention Jan Garbarek’s expressionistic saxophone solos on the soundtrack for The Beekeeper and, probably the most haunting of all, Kim Kashkasian’s romantic and virtuosic viola outbursts for Ulysses’ Gaze. As Karaindrou stated: We begin, in most cases, before there is a screenplay, working outwards from the film’s underlying concepts. Angelopoulos is a man who feels much and says li le, so it’s important for me to understand the ideas at the root of his work, and how I can help convey the things which will not be verbally expressed in the film. Sometimes I’ve already found the main theme by the time we have a script.12

However, the balance between story and its sonic mirroring is not always perfect. The strong sounds of the saxophone and the viola can overpower the cinematic images and overwhelm spectators; ultimately, they become autonomous and extrinsic, almost ornamental additions. In Karaindrou’s best scores, like Landscape in the Mist, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow, the music discreetly follows the emotional reverberations of each scene; it connects cautiously their psychological associations without substituting or eclipsing them. In the same interview, Karaindrou indicated that:

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I express my emotions in my music. Certain things have hurt me, the fact that my mother died when I was seven, the move from the countryside to Athens. As a child I ran barefoot through the forest, the running water, the snow. I’ve lost that. A erwards came the Greek dictatorship, these are all examples of separation and loss. Yet I do not believe that my music expresses black melancholy. It does not break you. You feel a deeper dimension of life. Maybe nostalgia is a be er word to describe it.13

In a way, there was an asymmetry between Angelopoulos’ melancholia and Karaindrou’s nostalgia; the emotions are related but move in opposite directions. In his last film, music is totally external. Perhaps in the end, Bresson’s experiment with ‘absolute silence and silence obtained by a pianissimo of noises’ (Bresson 1986 [1975]: 28) provides the appropriate justification for the ‘silence of love’ that we see in Angelopoulos’ best films.

Problematising Filmmaking More than any other Greek director, Angelopoulos interrogated and problematised the cinematic representation of politics, memory and history without succumbing to the illusionist melodrama that usually defines filmic plots. The usual framing for the interpretation of his films insists on him as a political director with le -wing, Marxist views about cinema, identity and culture. Yet Angelopoulos was not simply the kind of director to rely on general statements or counter master-narratives; he actually questioned these and destabilised their significance for his audience. His films did not try to dismantle or deconstruct grand visual narratives about ethnicity, identity or the self. He never used overt humour or Godardian subversive jocularity to undermine hegemonic genres and discourses, as many in the French nouvelle vague did (although Andrew Horton detects the ‘spirit of “tragic comedy” or dark triumph’ (Horton 2006: 208) in his best films). In a way, even Angelopoulos’ political views appear uncertain, or sometimes even deliberately ambiguous. Is The Travelling Players an ‘anarchist’ or a ‘communist’ movie? Is The Hunters a political thriller or a Hitchcockian ‘black comedy’ in the form of an inverted musical? Is The Weeping Meadow a film about political nihilism or sheer nostalgic sentimentalism? Are films like The Dust of Time or Ulysses’ Gaze Greek or European films? Is Landscape in the Mist an allegorical fable about the Death of God or a fictionalised narrative about immigration? Is Eternity and a Day a film about death and dying or about Proustian involuntary memory? These ambiguities are constitutive of the structure of his films – ambiguities that also become ambivalences towards his own material. Angelopoulos

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was a master of ellipsis and evasion: an architect of invisible structures in which many storylines, visual pa erns and acting styles intersect and interact. We would diminish his achievement if we tried to a ribute it to one singular principle or element of his ever-changing and heterogeneous visual style. Ultimately, from the interaction, and collision, of so many disparate elements something unique emerges: the embodiment of a singular aesthetic quest, one which remains a provocative code of representation in the field of cinematic visuality. Angelopoulos was fully cognizant that he sometimes a empted the impossible. He knew that he had to go against the viewing practices imposed by Hollywood storytelling and equally go against the visual rhetoric of the revolutionary cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, Mikhail Kalatazov and even Jean-Luc Godard. His mixed feelings towards Eisenstein and his theories of montage, in particular, was legendary: ‘We loved him; he didn’t love us,’ a character says in Ulysses’ Gaze. His considerable efforts to create a platform of convergence for such opposing perceptions of filmmaking became more obvious over the years. Yet unlike Godard, Angelopoulos avoided satire and the cult of the cinematic, although he was one of the first directors who dared to parody the symbols of his own movies and make them into objects of questioning, and even self-questioning, within his visual frames. Above all, he avoided the illusionism created and enhanced by montage, revealing to Fani Zozia that ‘a movie with absolutely no montage is my own unapproachable temptation.’14 This approach remained with him, somehow unfulfilled, until the end, and it represents one of the elemental postulates of his visual style. In an interesting contribution to the film website MUBI, Angelopoulos compiled a list of his ten favourite films, which in their multiplicity and heterogeneity indicates the diversity of his implied cinematic dialogues. The list includes: 1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 2. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944), 3. Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955), 4. 8 1⁄2 (Federico Fellini, 1963), 5. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), 6. L’ Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), 7. The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), 8. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizogushi, 1953), 9. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959), and 10. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966).15 The absence of many names that we usually associate with Angelopoulos’ work is noteworthy, such as Jancsó, Godard, Kurosawa and of course Tarkovsky. From another point of view, the absence of any Greek director is equally puzzling and revealing. Nevertheless, these films are pointers towards his own aesthetic borders and their discursive semantics. What we must infer is that there exists a conflict of visual paradigms in many of his films, which leads to the

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‘disjunctive aesthetics’ in their architectonic form I referred to elsewhere. This may account for the incommensurability of certain formal elements in Angelopoulos’ later works. In films like Ulysses’ Gaze and The Dust of Time, the viewer sometimes feels that the tenor of representation is in direct conflict with the images; although it is also true that critics occasionally over-amplify this effect, my suggestion is that Angelopoulos acts deliberately and with full consciousness of the formal asymmetries in his most ambitious films. In this we can detect Angelopoulos’ response to the predicament of filmmakers in the late period of capitalist neoliberalism, when cinematic images became part of what Guy Debord called ‘the society of integrated spectacle’, based on ‘incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; and eternal present’ (Debord 1998: 11–12). The domination of an ‘eternal present’, which abolishes a new collective project and which Angelopoulos called ‘a new utopia’ (Archimandritis 2013: 93), is explored in his final film. Here, the eternal present of generalised secrecy and technological surveillance seems to prevail in the end, and it imposes a cold, detached and deemotionalised social reality. What is missing from Angelopoulos’ final movies was also missing from the horizon of Greece and Europe: The Grand History [is missing],’ he said, ‘which intervenes in our life, makes it more beautiful, and influences us in all possible ways. I said this in Thessaloniki: in the past, as Bruno Ganz says in the movie, we thought we were ‘the besiegers of heavens’. In the past, many years ago, we thought that we were the subjects of History, that we write the History. However, as another character in the movie says: ‘On a êtê balayès par l’Histoire’, which means we have been thrown aside by History.16

In reconfiguring his filmmaking to combat the fetishisation of images and their commodified utility in a world without political projects of renewal, Angelopoulos re-visioned the relation between image, sound and audience. He tried to construct a language for the silences of history and the non-verbal complexities of the human psyche. The paradox is obvious: a language for silence makes silence audible and therefore materially present, even if asymmetries and irregularities can be detected in the formal paradigms Angelopoulos had to work with. Colliding epistemological paradigms of aesthetics and cognition allowed him to confront head-on the technologisation of society, and later the instrumentalised rationalisation of human life. Politically, this enabled him to confront the gigantism of the modern state and the violent vanishing of ordinary people, even the total eclipse of the traditional life in the countryside. The difference between the gigantic hand of an unknown

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God and the broken statue of Lenin is probably the most obvious example of the transition in his work from the representation of open horizon to the silent reverential a endance of a funeral cortège. However, both of these symbols vanish; the first in the immensity of a transcendental horizon, the other in the industrial kilns of Germany. They are later replaced by machines that strip people naked, allowing the oppressive vision of power to inspect the deepest secrets of their bodies. How can we be political and maintain any faith in politics when we already live in the dystopian surveillance societies imagined by Yevgeny Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell? Is there still a place for miracles in the era of consumers and voters that has replaced the society of citizens and active participants? Angelopoulos’ late films explored ways out of the generalised conformism of contemporary societies. Ultimately, they framed the ongoing anxiety to keep alive a traumatic memory of the past in societies that have already opted for oblivion. Yet, even with his last incomplete film, in which the old political fighter was replaced by the disruptive break of homeless refugees, the past was remembered through the liberating projects of renewal and restoration that inspired individuals and societies to critically reflect on themselves and construct the visual equivalents of their self-reflection. In aesthetic terms, such dialectic of oblivion and memory found its expression in his choice between divergent approaches to representation as defined by the great theorists of the Western world, Aristotle and Brecht. The oscillation between opposing and contradictory modes and codes of representation is expressed by the tension between genres and their modalities – namely the epic and the dramatic – and the principal strategies of affect. In the end, the polemical embrace between Bertolt Brecht and Aristotle – and the conflict and yet complementarity they enact between epic and drama – found a cathartic closure in Angelopoulos’ cinematic surrender to a renewed Aristotelian ocular mythopoetics for cinema. In a sense, Angelopoulos’ works demonstrate how the director, who defined himself as creative auteur, is above and yet within his work, and by exploring his films, we are able to reconstruct the unique ways Theodoros Angelopoulos, the individual as cinematic mythmaker, looked at reality, at specific historical moments and circumstances. ‘What was I for you?’ asks the wife of Willem Dafoe’s character in The Dust of Time: the anonymous ‘A’ replies: ‘You knew it from the beginning. I have no other form of redemption besides the stories I could narrate. They are my only home. Otherwise, I am lost . . .’17 By looking at Angelopoulos’ films closely, we are able to uncover and engage with the forms of existential redemption that cinema can still offer; some of these forms are so

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potent and resonant they might as well come directly out of the life of each viewer and their own unique and unrepeatable experiences.

Notes  1. Theo Prasidis. 2016. ‘The Magnificent Two: A Transnational Dialog between Theo Angelopoulos and Akira Kurosawa’, Cult Antics. Retrieved 12 January 2020 from https://cultantics.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/ the-magnificent-two/#_ n11.  2. Steve Rose. 2011. ‘A enberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave in Greek Cinema’, The Guardian, 27 August. Retrieved 21 January 2020 from h ps://www .theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/a enberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema.  3. An unpublished poem of 1982 by Theo Angelopoulos. See h ps://apody optes.com/2018/01/25/ena-anekdoto-poihma-touchilia-enniakosia-ogdontadyo-toy-thodoroy0angelopoulou/.  4. Vena Georgakopoulou. 2010. ‘When a Metropolitan Excommunicated Angelopoulos and Mastroianni’, Eleutherotypia, 30 August. Retrieved 21 January 2020 from h p://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=197613.  5. Stavros Tzimas. 2020. ‘When the Storks Were Excommunicated, Kathimerini, 13 January. Retrieved 21 January 2020 from h ps://www.kathimerini.gr/1059585/ gallery/proswpa/proskhnio/otan-sth-xwra-aforisthkan-akomh-kai-pelargoi.  6. Fani Zozia. 2009. ‘Interview with Theo Angelopoulos: We Live in a World Which Does Not Know Where it Goes’, Camera Stylo Online, 22 February. Retrieved 15 June 2020 from h ps://camerastyloonline.wordpress.com/2009/ 02/22/theo_angelopoulos_interview_about_the_dust_of_time/.  7. See Acquarello. 2003. ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos’, Senses of Cinema, July. Retrieved 15 June 2020 from h p://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/ angelopoulos/.  8. Fais, Michel. 2012. ‘“You Small Lemon-Tree”: In Conversation with Theo Angelopoulos’, Ele herotypia, 26 January. Retrieved from h ps://www.pro tagon.gr/apopseis/blogs/mwri-kontoula-lemonia-o-misel-fais-gia-ton-thod wro-aggelopoulo-12084000000.  9. ‘George Arvanitis: We are Sculpturing Light’, Cinephilia, 9 November 2019. Retrieved 21 January 2020 from h p://www.cinephilia.gr/index.php/ prosopa/hellas/6753-giorgos-arvanitis-na-smileyoume-to-fos-apospasma ta-apo-ena-masterclass. 10. Anon. ‘Interview with George Arvanitis’, Cinematek. Retrieved 10 September 2020 from h ps://cinematek.gr/synenteyxi/giorgos-arbanitis. 11. Christodoulos Halaris. 2019. ‘The Basis of Byzantine Music is the Same as That of Computers’ [originally in the journal Avalon ton Technon, 1996]. Retrieved 10 September 2020 from https://avalonofthearts.gr/η-φύση-τηςβυζαντινής-μουσικής-είναι/. 12. ‘Eleni Karaindrou’s Film Scores to the Films of Theo Angelopoulos’, The Music Aficionado, 26 June 2018. Retrieved 23 January 2020 from h ps://

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musicaficionado.blog/2018/06/26/eleni-karaindrous-film-scores-to-the-mov ies-of-theo-angelopoulos/. Ibid. Fani Zozia. ‘Interview with Theo Angelopoulos’. Kenji. ‘Theo Angelopoulos’ 10 favourite Films’, Mubi. Retrieved 23 January 2020 from h ps://mubi.com/lists/theo-angelopoulos-10-favourite-films. Fani Zozia, ‘Interview with Theo Angelopoulos’. Panos Stathogiannis. 2008. Theo Angelopoulos: I Have No Other Form of Redemption’, Peristylon, vol. 6, December. Retrieved 12 June 2020 from h ps:// aitionblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/.

Chapter 2

The Life of Films



Political Temporality and its Cinematic Dimension A er his first aborted effort on the pop group The Forminx, Angelopoulos produced a short film, which has been rather overlooked. The Broadcast/I Ekpompi (1968) is a 23-minute-long work that can be seen as the testing ground for his pictorial representation of space, movement of camera, use of technology and ultimately for his approach to image within image in contemporary urban spaces. Produced by Angelopoulos, with Giorgos Arvanitis as director of photography, it is about a group of journalists who foreshadow today’s reality shows by asking passers-by to define the ‘ideal man’. Using the specifications of celebrity media, they construct an abstract profile that seems to resemble a lonely, middle-class man who is too shy and depressed to acquire friends. The ideal man, superbly performed by Theodoros Katsadramis, wins a date with a popular movie star, Mirka Kalantzopoulou, but when he arrives at the venue for the meeting, he discovers that it is only a publicity stunt and the star will not be there. Vassilis Rafailidis calls the film an exposé of ‘. . . the most horrible give-and-take, the most obscene and dishonest . . . selling of dreams . . .’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 7) Shot in a fluid and hazy black and white, the film is a film about itself. It is also an example of Angelopoulos’ extremely interesting rhythmic montage, in terms of Eisenstein’s theories, weaving together rock music, freeze frames, voice-overs and off-screen action. (The use of credits in the beginning and end of the film is also ingenious.) ‘The Broadcast,’ writes Kolovos, ‘reveals a director who already knows how to manage the material he collected from reality and make it into cinema’ (Kolovos 1990: 33). Indeed, the camera moves fast, through jump-cuts, through the streets of

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the city and roams aimlessly over the faces of everyday people who speak different languages and are in a hurry to move out of the frame. Angelopoulos employs the visual strategy of camera-stylo, capturing the fleeting images and sounds of people who disappear without a trace and at the same time recording a spectacle of unreality and simulated actions. The deceitful nature of the images, clichés and slogans of the media enhance the illusion that something real is about to happen, yet nothing does, since the camera is only playing with the expectations of viewers. This film is the first effort to confront the mingling of reality and unreality by the mass media and the way it influences the construction of an illusory self by surrounding the real individual with a complex web of misinformation and dissimulation, rendering it without historical agency and self-determination. Television had been introduced to Greece only the previous year (together with the 1967 Dictatorship), yet the film prophetically raised the question of organised deception through its occluding codes of plausible (mis)representation – a theme that he would return to in most of his later films. The camera stalks the ‘anonymous’ ideal man, leaving him no free space in the spectral reality of the city. This is one of the few instances that Angelopoulos uses satire, humour and parody to critique the emerging urban realities and their visual technologies. Yet the urban anthropology of his first film – Kolovos calls it ‘an anthropological documentary’ (Kolovos 1990: 33) – raised unique questions about the subjectivity of its own characters. The anonymous man is the man without qualities, dimensions and history, moving like the inanimate camera-eye from street to street and room to room without purpose or fulfilment. Ultimately, the only true character in the film is the cityscape, the skyline of buildings and the forms of the urban environment. Angelopoulos will return to this cityscape a er a deep and ambivalent detour into the chthonian roots of his society. From the central Syntagma Square of Athens, the locus of immense political drama and social confrontation, Angelopoulos would venture into the remote mountains of central and northern Greece and, in a genuine modernist fashion, encounter ancient myth as ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ (Eliot 1975: 177). This myth-making projection onto the present and the unearthing of its perpetual presence takes place in his first feature film, which gained immediate recognition. ‘My movies,’ he stated in a 1978 interview, ‘are testimonies on their era, the specific era they were made, encompassing elements which shed light to everything significant, interesting or creative that the place offers as tradition, past or even present’ (Angelopoulos 1978: 19).

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Angelopoulos’ first feature film Reconstruction (1970) was produced and funded by his friend George Samiotis, almost as a favour. At around 110 minutes long, it is probably the most crucial film in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. Despite its complex and somehow unconverging narrative lines (an obvious homage to Kurosawa’s Rashomon and to Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad), we can detect in its structure all the important characteristics of his style that evolved in his later films. However, the intensity of the visual condensation that we find in the film is aesthetically and narratively problematic. In an interview, Angelopoulos stated that his ‘originary landscape’ was formed visually in his mind a er he visited the abandoned villages of mountainous Greece. Mistreated by the police during the Dictatorship, he was forced to stay in his native country, although he could have escaped to Paris, so he started making films ‘not only to understand myself but also where I was. And where else could I go? With the Reconstruction I went to the deep Greece not to Athens in order to discover my country – this is how this story [of making films] began’.1 The idea of deep Greece will return in later films. The landscape of ragged mountainous terrain, huge boulders and sca ered stones (reminiscent of the mytho-historical landscapes in George Seferis’ poetry) became the foundational iconographic pa ern of all his early films a er Reconstruction. It sets the frame and the tone for the field of visuality constructed in his work until 1980, and the visual references that informed the evocative power of his imagery until his last film. The paradox is that Angelopoulos uses the camera in a consciously artificial manner in order to foreground the concrete reality of what he depicts. The camera is the unwilling bystander to a perennial tragedy, which remains unspoken and undramatised. Yet although the drama is present and specific, it never becomes melodramatic as in the Italian neorealist movies. It retains an unmitigated rawness and immediacy – somehow its horrifying cruelty. Reconstruction is a film about the ambiguity of human choices and the instability of human narratives. Critics failed to detect the existential question of choice in the film, while feminist critics missed the victimised state of the woman, her inability to confront her social imprisonment and that she is the sacrificial offering to the invisible structures of history. She is both guilty and innocent. She is suffering, consciously and subconsciously, because she cannot articulate her own voice. Critics also failed to see the imprisonment of men in a web of invisible expectations they have no other option but to follow. Indeed, men and women have no character or introspective depth in the film: they are merely types with a performative function who have internalised structures of domination and self-alienation. They are semiotic actants in an unfolding narrative

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that offers an antagonistic opposition to the expectations of the spectator and therefore no closure or catharsis. In his effort to avoid the sentimentality of mainstream cinema for a similar story, as seen in Tay Garne ’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) or even Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), Angelopoulos tried to produce types without individuality, inner feelings or indeed an intellectual and emotional life. All characters were cogs in an invisible social machine, to be used as catalysts for moving the narrative forward and therefore framing a social problem beyond their individuality. For this purpose, he fused different acting styles and used unselfconscious amateurs who were le to find their own way into their roles to externalise the actual frustration and horror that they themselves felt within the story. Reconstruction was filmed on location in an almost abandoned village of Epirus because most of the men were working as migrants in Germany. The script by Angelopoulos himself, in collaboration with Stratis Karras and Thanassis Valtinos, is an ingenious fusion of real events, symbolic references and mythic underpinnings. The return of the immigrant is the archetypal subtext, although in this case not as a triumphant Ulysses but as Agamemnon. Like Agamemnon, he is killed by his wife and her lover, who bury him in the foundations of his own house. Although this is a direct reference to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, such an incident had actually occurred the previous year in a Greek village, giving thus a historically pragmatic background to the film as a gesture of reference to the practices of Italian neorealism. Consequently, the murder in the film was both real and symbolic and, as a cinematic event and visual experience, was a confluence of both. The audience knew the story from the newspapers and were taught the myth at school. Yet although the audience knew the outcome of the myth, in the movie they were le in abeyance, in an oscillating irresolution between possibilities. This technique of ambiguation is present in most of Angelopoulos’ films. The symbolism of myths problematises the actual lived experience by referring to something beyond itself, without the final anagnorisis in the Aristotelian model. Indeed, to circumvent the bourgeois fascination with individualism, Angelopoulos foregrounds the collective significance of such acts by anchoring them to a mythical pa ern. Their coexistence in the cinematic image is probably one of the most important characteristics of all his films. Furthermore in Reconstruction, he introduces a film within a film as a re-enactment for the benefit of the investigating magistrate, and another film made by Athenian journalists to make sense of what has occurred. The reconstruction as filmic event focuses on the awkward performance by the non-professional actress Toula Stathopoulou, who

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impersonates with admirable subtlety the emotional transitions from an affectionate lover to a trapped animal, and ultimately to a sacrificial victim. The three journalists were real journalists impersonating their own selves: this game of mirroring and counter-mirroring is one of the most daring narrative structures introduced by his first film and can be considered as his response to the subtle montage strategies of the last scene in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962). Even Angelopoulos himself appears in the film as the mostly silent Athenian journalist who wants to record everything, while the scenes in the public spaces of the village constitute a telling homage to Michael Cacoyannis’ final scenes about human bodies and rituals through the streets of Athens in Stella (1956), as captured by the fluid camera movement of Kostas Theodoridis. At the same time, the camera tries to ‘fla en’ the landscape and depict human forms as emerging from the chthonian soil and mud. The unity between the human and the inhuman, the organic and inorganic, takes here a clear and distinct form. The film ends as it started: with a frame of stones, impregnable, pre-human and silent. The final scene in which the women of the village a ack the murderous wife as she is taken away by the police is a powerful cinematic reference not only to ancient Greek tragedy but to Cacoyannis’ sculptural choruses of The Girl in Black/To Koritsi me ta Mavra (1957), and the scene in Zorba where the local women plunder the house of the dying foreign woman, Madame Hortense. Arvanitis’ camera is in direct dialogue with the sculptural qualities of Walter Lassally’s cinematic eye and shows the continuity of the best aspects of the dominant Greek cinematic style. The folk song that ends the film, enhancing the emotional impact of a 360-degree camera pan, adds the impersonal and archetypal dimension to the story: this is not simply a doomed love affair but a primordial and unavoidable structure of being echoed through centuries of elemental silence. His next film, Days of ’36 (1972), was produced by George Papalios, a wealthy independent producer who later abandoned film production altogether out of frustration – and this caused legal problems in the distribution of the film. Wri en by Angelopoulos himself, in collaboration with Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos and Stratis Karras, the script reads like a poem by C.P. Cavafy and inaugurated the practice of using popular actors from the old commercial cinema within the different context of a dislocated and inconclusive political thriller. It was also the first movie Angelopoulos made in colour; Arvanitis struggled hard to dull the bright Mediterranean hues by creating chromatic continuities or subtle variations of the strong colours, blue, red and green. Ochre is the foundational shade of this film, embalming all living creatures with its death-like uniformity. There is a certain hermetic formalism, a closed visual form devoid

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of openings or horizons. Angelopoulos’ emblematic long take is coupled with long silences and dead time, which in reality is full of pregnant unfilmed action, hinting at real or verbal events that take place outside the visual realm of the spectator. Angelopoulos turns the camera away from everything that could generate emotion and empathy, keeping the spectators away from all forms of identification with what happens on screen. The camera expels from the realm of the visible that which could reveal and therefore incriminate. In the Freudian sense, it displaces, indicating ‘a replacement of something concrete by an illusion’, making it a ‘displacement of accent’ (Freud 2004: 208). The displacement is itself a statement of presence; spectators know that what is seen is a visual synecdoche, not a pars pro toto but completely the opposite: a visual totum pro parte, the depiction of powerful and invisible structures that determine and govern the life of individuals, a shadow theatre with unknown puppeteers, expressed through depersonalised clichés, such as the use of white colours in the clothes of the bourgeoisie, the Valentino-like clothes of the gangsters or the dull sentimentalism of songs on the record player. In an interview of the period, he commented on the elliptical structure of the film: ‘It’s one way to go beyond naturalism, as Dreyer used to say. The ellipse is a tremendous option for the spectator to become the filmmaker’s partner in the creative process. It also offers a kind of “Brechtian alienation” that depends not only on the position of the camera, but also on the structure of the film’ (Fainaru 2001: 12). Indeed, the film is an abstract and parabolic re-enactment of a political murder that occurred just before the Dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas on 4 August 1936. A drug-trafficker is accused of assassinating a trade union leader, and a conservative politician with whom he has a homosexual affair is visiting him in prison. The politician is taken hostage, and the government tries to find a way of freeing him. The impasse is intense as the conservative party withdraws its support from the government, which decides to kill the presumed assassin. The end remains ambiguous, and it indicates the gradual disintegration (or indeed suicide) of the democratic regime of the period. The film closes with a scene of multiple executions, following a trail of assassinations from the beginning, which makes violent death the unifying thematic thread as to how power works in contemporary political systems, also reminding us of Ingmar Bergman’s late film The Serpent’s Egg (1977). About 110 minutes long, the film deals with the opaqueness of power and the epistemologies of subjection, representing imprisonment and subjection from within, as events of interiorised oppression and not as a violent force imposed from the outside. The supposed assassin is caught up in a series of machinations in which he is himself unconsciously involved

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through his political activities as a unionist. Clandestine political interactions encircle him, manipulating him and ultimately exterminating him as the collateral damage leading to the beginning of a new totalitarianism. Voluntary submission is the prerequisite for political oppression. Angelopoulos depicts totalitarianism as exactly what it is: the total submission of the complete human existence to external authority. The static camera, the nullifying colouring on all surfaces and the disjointed dialogue all point to the timeless unreality of a life under tyranny. His characters belong to history but have no historicity, agency or rational conscience. However, they are not real characters with an internal life and active thoughts: they are actants in the narratological structure of the film, performing the particular situation and demands as specific ‘practice’. In a way, Angelopoulos explores the same narrative opaqueness that we find in Francesco Rosi’s Il Caso Ma ei (1972) and the a empt to question the legitimacy of power and its mystifying institutions through the total depersonalisation of narrative types or, probably closer to his structuralist ideas of the time, the absolute demystification of human individuality. It is also the most unhistorical of his films on history: ‘The narrative events of the film are produced by themselves, from the filmic text itself,’ wrote Nikos Kolovos. ‘They do not represent history. They exist purely at the level of historical material’ (Kolovos 1990: 50). Many themes of conscious or unconscious submission appear in the film. Subtexts of homosexuality emerge as part of the othering and victimising process: the unionist’s affair with the abducted politician is used ambiguously. Is it subversion or perversion? Is their affair a sign of the master-slave dialectic or simply an act of mutual sadomasochistic jouissance? Is their laughter in the closed room where they seem to have sex a form of indifference or an exhibition of sarcasm? The ambiguity in the film is strong but points to the idea that sex, despite its intimacy or excitement, represents and epitomises power, as a tool for submission and domination. Sexuality, in its diverse forms, is the most ambiguous and challenging aspect in all Angelopoulos’ films and expresses his profound suspiciousness towards the ability of genuine and authentic human contact, something that would become a central motif of his later work. In Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), sex and sexuality are used to indicate power structures and stratagems for social domination. In Angelopoulos, as in Bresson and Tarkovsky, sex is almost an act of self-othering: demonic possession in Tarkovsky and Bresson, and ‘false consciousness’ in Angelopoulos. For this reason, with the exception of his last two films, sex remained an act of alienation and self-oblivion while still retaining some of its violent characteristics. Furthermore, sexual encounters are associated with impotence, violence, rape and incest. Affectionate love

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and lovemaking are implied in his last film, even though in a controversial ménage à trois, but it appears infrequently and as an exception. Some would claim that puritanism and prudishness are strong characteristics of Angelopoulos’ early movies, which could also be interpreted as his a empt to deal with the human body as a structural agent and an unconscious functional process – at least in this early period of his filmmaking. The actors in the film, most of them Angelopoulos’ friends and associates, like Vangelis Kazan, Petros Markaris, Kostas Sfikas, Thanassis Valtinos, Kaiti Ibrohori and Yannis Smaragdis, but also emblematic figures of the old cinema like Christophoros Nezer, perform their roles with an astonishing detachment and enigmatic coldness: they are and are not actors at the same time. The amateur Toula Stathopoulou from his first film also appears here as a link to the ongoing narrative subplot of oppression. However, the film is dominated by men whose masculinity is both insecure and violent. For this reason, Days of ’36 is probably the most impenetrable of his films, deliberately keeping viewers at a distance; its cold and dissociative colours accentuate the realities of the period, implicitly criticising the vibrancy of the exuberant colours of mainstream commercial movies – some of them compiled by Arvanitis himself. Other devices are also used to circumscribe the dominant mood of fear and anxiety, the premonition that something is going to happen: empty frames, muted movements, de-dramatisation of action, shades of funereal ochre and accidental music all weave slowly a network of implied texts ready to explode into the visible narrative – but they never do. The film’s central theme is precisely the formless anxiety vis-à-vis a diffused approaching danger. It is about what will happen beyond the confines of the movie, indeed a er the viewer leaves the cinema. The connection between cinematic images and the extra-cinematic experiences forms the continuum between watching the film while being watched by the police in an ingenious convergence of going to the movies and being in society that produced it. In an adversarial manner, Angelopoulos, by avoiding colliding montage and fast jumpcuts, criticises the political dramatic cinema of the day, namely Godard’s pretentious Tout Va Bien (1972) and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s dizzying Touki Bouki (1973), the la er of which received the International Critics’ Award at Cannes and his film stands closer to Werner Herzog’s first film Signs of Life/ Lebenszeichen (1968) with its parallel ‘Greek’ story and escalating progress of paranoia and Ka aesque incomprehensibility. Days of ’36 paved the way for the adventurous experiments with camera and plot that we find in his next two films, which constitute the socalled ‘Trilogy of History’. If the black and white colours of his first film foregrounded a primeval drama re-enacted in history, here the sugges-

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tive power of muffled chromatic scales intensifies the silenced language of shared events. The film does not claim to know what is happening, because the scale of history is above and beyond the grasp of a single individual. Images evoke a pervasive something else that remains unnamed and unfilmed. In political terms, it is the unpredictable break in democratic activity, in sociability, and the disconnection emanating from the ethical ambiguations of oppression imposed upon humans. In cinematic terms, it stands for an unembellished and undramatised editing (or lack thereof) that does not try to explain itself through any rhetorical diegesis of colour, plot or modernist rupture. Replete with such audacious uncertainties, this work paved the way for the epic conflict and cinematic ambition of his next film. Lasting 230 minutes and in only seventy takes, The Travelling Players begins at the point where the previous film le off, with the Metaxas Dictatorship of 1939, and moves to 1952 when the cycle of tragic reversals in Greece presumably came to a close with the elections that were supposed to restore political normality, and with the entry of Greece to NATO. The Dictatorship, the Italian Invasion, the German Occupation, the Resistance, the Liberation, the Civil War, the defeat of the Le , the exile and the partial restoration of democracy are seen through the almost picaresque adventures of a group of travelling actors through the inhospitable countryside and mountainous regions of inland Greece. They are roaming the devastated land performing a folk play, Golfo the Shepherdess by Spyridon Peresiadis, which portrays an idealised bucolic reality and whose language evokes the lost world of a community without history while its viewers are steeped in history. They perform the pre-modern naïve play while monumental events take place all around them that affect the lives of so many people. This forms the disturbing background of the central narrative in what is the most ambitious and complex of all of Angelopoulos’ films and his closest, and quite likely most successful, a empt at creating Brechtian epic theatre for cinema. Angelopoulos structures the various unfocalised storylines on the mythical story of the Atreides family as a tale of war, return and revenge, fusing Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia and Cacoyannis’ Euripidean Electra (1962) in the modernist fashion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Such an enterprising mixture of theatricality, cinematic narrative and grand compositional imagery led many critics to include The Travelling Players in the list of the 100 most important films in the history of cinema, although it is unfortunate that it is the historical and political elements that have dominated especially the critics’ interest. Yet beyond the melodrama of Greek politics, the film addresses much more important questions at a cinematic level not seen before in Greek filmic language, and which con-

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tributed to the problematisation of many visual conventions filmmakers employed to reconstruct history and re-enact the past. The most important aspect of this anti-epic film is its representation of history as the unmindful, collective actions of ordinary people, from below, as it were. It is not a film about heroes or heroic deeds; there are no characters, as such, with emotions or thoughts. It is about the unconscious predicament of people whose lives have been ‘over-determined’ in a Marxian sense by structures and ‘interpellated’ by forces beyond their control and understanding. History as an impersonal mechanism defines what they will do and who they will be. There is no escape; they are bound by circumstances they can neither counter nor avoid. In the end, they seem to interiorise their own subjection, surrendering themselves to despair, submission or utopian escapism. They are taken hostage by their own voluntary servitude yet remain devoid of an internal life or psychological depth; they are automata caught in the grip of obscure and overwhelming forces that decide their identity and sel ood. In order to depict the disjunction between history as collective action and the voluntary deeds of its actors, Angelopoulos constructs a complex view of history as performance, through loosely connected episodes, long takes, dead time and a circular sense of time, of heterochronic simultaneity in locale. Episodes take place parallel to each other and in a way are connected despite their different moment in time. Furthermore, since the forces at play are invisible and unconscious, history can only be scripted and controlled: it becomes a ‘theatre’ of planned and prefabricated activities, indeed a factory for the mechanical reproduction of events, actions and subjectivities. The film’s central visual motif and diegetic centre is the theatrical stage, which Angelopoulos presents as a stage within a stage and within another stage. The characters are actors in the drama of history while acting out their personal survival drama within the historical drama of their art. The film constitutes the visualisation of the Marxian idea of false consciousness and the predicament of contemporary ‘ordinary’ people (who, by the way, never become extra-ordinary) in their struggle for survival. Philosophically, the film arises from the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. It remains a faithful depiction of its basic principles: to detect or foreground objective structures and impersonal institutions underpinning all historical and individual activity, diminishing or even totally abolishing human agency. Cinematically, the important element in this film is Angelopoulos’ transcendence of the rules and regularities of cinematic genres, especially those governing linearity and temporality. Long takes, dead time, selfconscious acting and systematic de-dramatisation are central strategies

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in the portrayal of the most tragic and disastrous period in Greek history. Within the context of the seventies, this is legitimate and expected. Bertollucci, Rosi, Miklós Jancsó, Sergio Leone, the Taviani Brothers and Coppola had released their own historical epics incorporating stylistic elements from various genres and on many occasions by breaking the rules. Angelopoulos went even further; he did not simply synthesise or fuse the rules, he eclipsed them by gra ing them onto the temporality of theatre, especially that of Bertolt Brecht. Loukianos Kilaidonis’ diegetic music has an integral role in the narrative: it brings the story to its most tense peak moment and moves it to its next scene. The music comes out organically from the images, and the images cannot be understood without it. Throughout the film, the whole narrative is structured around songs; their lyrics and tunes (all genuine songs of the period) tell us what actually happened. Angelopoulos called it a ‘musical drama’ as illustrated by the famous tavern scene where royalists and anti-royalists sing their own songs, a direct reference to Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953). The self-conscious acting and the ubiquitous presence of the auteur distinguishes this epic from the other great films of that year. At the critical points when there is a danger of identifying with their characters, the actors turn to the camera and deliver long diatribes about events outside those depicted by the story. This element is designed to create distance between the spectators and the screen. Angelopoulos deliberately uses Brechtian devices to sever the illusory bond with reality by framing completely anti-realistic and unrealistic images, demolishing André Bazin’s theory about the natural continuity between the screen and its contextual realities. Eventually, however, the drama of history overtakes the dramaturgy of the director. Like in Brecht’s Galileo (1938), the Aristotelian theatre of empathy and catharsis emerges unexpectedly in the film. The camera tries to keep these two disparate styles of representation, and indeed worldviews, under control by using singular nuances and subdued shades of colour and contour, so that each frame, even when dominated by the red of a Nazi flag, is predominantly flat and one-dimensional. Visual style expresses the conflict of interpretations that takes place at the structural level of the film. But the cognitive dissonance between them is too strong, and Aristotle infuses the phenomenology of structures with rare emotional power and explosive instability, thus gradually transforming the film from an epic narrative into a lyrical elegy: a farewell to an era and its memories. Despite its strong anti-illusionism enhanced by dulled chromatic contrasts, this is a film in dialogue with Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), or Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), and in its slow anti-montage structure, it constitutes a conscious visual antilogue to Eisenstein’s Ba leship Potem-

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kin (1925). It also converses with the grand epics made before the arrival of technicolour, avoiding slice-of-life images by foregrounding their artificiality and – something that will be found again in his future films – radical self-reflexivity. Angelopoulos claimed he had to face the serious question of how to depict political history in a political way; not as theatre or by employing the devices of thrillers like Godfather II (1974), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), or even the Taviani Brothers’ Allonsanfàn (1974) but in a way that would present politics in absentia, as the forced inability of contemporary people to be in control of their lives, through the loss of politics and the failure of their historical projects. As Ele heria Thanouli observed: When we watch Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1976), Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Theo Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players (1975), or more recent films by Ken Loach, such as The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), we witness the resurrection of the past through a set of narrative conventions that carry with them their own underlying explanations and hypotheses about the meaning of history and the workings of this world. (Thanouli 2018: 121)

The combination of political history with the continual transfer of power, and charismatic individuals, is for Angelopoulos a form of theatre, his seminal narrative convention for the representation of the past – a dramatised displacement of real politics. The Travelling Players focuses on such displacements by fusing reality and illusion. Maintaining their roles, the actors leave the stage in costume and join the audience. This confusion of the real and the imaginary is punctuated by theatrical intervals where the monologues directed to the camera point out the stories that cannot be dramatised; the narratives that cannot have closure. However, the long takes with their slow, hypnotic movement foreground the continuity with everything off-stage as posited by André Bazin. In this respect, Angelopoulos retains a Bazinian understanding of shot and frame, making the camera the topos of subjective viewing for the director and the viewers. The camera looks at both, a empting to synchronise their temporality. This discovery of the camera as the locus of a new understanding of reality, as both the eyes of the viewers and the eyes of the director, will be the ultimate insight gained from his experiments in the visual field right up until his last film. The Travelling Players of course cannot have one singular reading. Dan Georgakas observed that ‘each of the 80 takes moves us through several levels of understanding. Irony and parody contend with naturalism and tragedy. We are ancients and we are moderns. We are the children of 19th-century fantasies. The days of our lives and the days of legend blend’ (Georgakas 1997: 37). Angelopoulos said that when they were filming it, they had no script, just ‘1936–1952’ wri en on a piece of paper. The impro-

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visation is felt throughout the film, adding another layer of meaning to its signification structures and opening it to fresh interpretations. In a way, it pre-empts and even paves the way for the Dogme 95 directors, although the storyline itself has its own formal sequel. When David Bordwell, a faithful scholar of Angelopoulos’ work, juxtaposed Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite (2004) with The Travelling Players in an article on Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel,2 he demonstrated the radical trans-signification of Angelopoulos’ movie through the relocation of its signifying semantics, visual strategies and framing structures. The years 1974 and 1975 saw were the years of great films like Antonioni’s The Passenger, Coppola’s The Conversation, Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and most of all the film that was going to have a deep impact on Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. However, despite the obvious differences, Angelopoulos’ film stands quite close to Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975), in that what it shows is clearly intentional but placed in front of the camera as raw and unprocessed material. The same year heralded the return of the Hollywood studio blockbuster, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and proclaimed the end of experimentation and deconstructive innovation in American cinema. At the same time, Greek cinema was experiencing the effects of television as well as the popularity of the so porn film industry set mainly on colourful Greek islands, like the notorious underground cult film Island of Death/Ta Paidia tou Diavolou (1975) by Nico Mastorakis. During the last years of the junta, a number of jingoistic films exploring Greek history were produced, like Pavlos Melas (1973) by Filippos Filaktos. Angelopoulos’ film obliterated such heroic narratives, transforming the way that history was represented and interpreted. Pantelis Voulgaris’ Happy Day (1976) owes a lot to Angelopoulos’ revisionism despite the fact that Angelopoulos leaves his narrative open-ended and struggles to avoid the empathic identification or the over-sentimentalisation that we find in most of Voulgaris’ historical movies. One of the characters in The Travelling Players mourns the death of revolution by reciting verses of the anarchist poet Mihalis Katsaros, thus ambiguating the message of the film, questioning if the adventure of the Greek Civil War was a justified rebellion against oppression or a nihilistic utopian vision of self-destruction. Furthermore, Angelopoulos’ film arose from the ongoing conflict between visual representations and transformations that was taking place in Greek cinematic culture between 1965 and 1980. During this time, two films, Euridice BA 2037 (1975), by Nicos Nicolaides, and especially Aldebaran (1975), by Andreas Thomopoulos, problematised the storylines

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of mainstream narrative cinema and the representation of urban space. Aldebaran is an underrated avant-garde film, an anarchist fantasy constructing a tradition of alternative cinema and depicting the real and the surreal in their existential proximity and disjunction. An unrecognised masterpiece of the same year, The Chronicle of a Sunday/To Hroniko Mias Kyriakis (1975), by Takis Kanellopoulos, was also on the horizon of Angelopoulos’ filmmaking. Kanellopoulos’ use of low-key colours, disconnected storylines and theatrical soliloquies, as well as mise en scène with long dead time, minimalistic se ings and inferred off-stage action, looks like the ultimate antithesis to The Travelling Players but, at the same time, seems to pave the way to Angelopoulos’ films of the eighties. Panayiota Mini refutes such claims, stating that: ‘The interpretation of Kanellopoulos’ work as a forerunner to the New Greek Cinema and to the work of Angelopoulos underrates the significance of Kanellopoulos’ own films and abstracts them from the immediate artistic and social context’ (Mini 2018: 27). However, these were shared pa erns of visual thinking that became possible only during that period of radical revisionism and reorientation, when the institutions of production had lost their legitimacy due to social unrest and the national defeat in Cyprus in 1974. Within the same contextual implosions that followed the restoration of the Republic, certain ambitious experimental films by Demos Theos, Costas Sfikas and Antouane a Angelidi also indicate that the expressive limitations of the cinematic medium were intensified and expanded, thanks to new ideologies and technologies, especially Sfikas’ Model/Mondelo (1974). The abstract visualisation of the productive model enforced by capitalism, as described in Karl Marx’ The Capital, on the working class was also one of the most ambitious challenges to the narrative cinema of linear or non-linear structure. Theos’ The Process/I Diadikasia (1976) introduced the essay-film as a reinvention of cinema beyond narrative and mimetic representation. Finally, Angelidi’s Idées Fixes/Dies Irae (1977) recalibrated the limits of cinematic representability by consciously inserting gender perspectives in the act of seeing. Within its historical context, Angelopoulos’ masterwork liberated cinematic practices from both the conventions of Hollywood and the traditions of European art-house cinema. One can sense the visual affinity with Bertolucci, the thematic link with Bergman and the stylistic connections to the Taviani Brothers, but in the film, there are so many other unsettled signs that a er almost fi y years The Travelling Players still maintains its visual radicalism and cinematic revisionism. Many scholars outside Greece insist on the link between the film and the history of the period, especially the Greek Civil War, an event very few people remember or

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indeed know about today – even within the country itself – although the movie did become a major stimulus for the catharsis of the unresolved trauma that arose from it. Furthermore, the film took on a new meaning a er 1984, especially when the two military leaders Markos Vafeiadis of the Communist rebels and Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos of the National Army met in front of television cameras and exchanged a sparse and almost Angelopoulian dialogue: Tsakalotos: ‘We were wrong then.’ Vafeiadis: ‘Probably, my General.’3 From that moment of reconciliation, the memory of Civil War was transformed, especially for younger generations, from an open wound into a nostalgic yearning for the excitement, fragility and, ultimately, the futility of youth. It morphed from a Brechtian exercise on demystification into a Proustian treatise on remembering the past and recollecting its traces in the mind. This is obvious in Angelopoulos’ movies from the eighties, especially Voyage to Cythera and The Beekeeper. The perceptual changes we see in the memorialisation of the Civil War in his later films (here we can add The Weeping Meadow) can be used as a way of reconsidering the original movie. When Laura Mulvey revisited her study on Welles’ Citizen Kane, she pointed out that: ‘. . . once a frame of reference is lost, the “surface text” floats away from its historical context’ (Mulvey 2012: 6). In his essay, mentioned above, Bordwell contrasts Angelopoulos to Tony Sco ’s frantic cinema and states: Like Sco , Angelopoulos pushed to new extremes certain premises of the traditions he chose to work in: Dedramatisation, depersonalisation, the long take, a reliance on staging that is dense or spacious, deep or planar, and the urge to represent history and contemporary life in a more abstract, majestic way. Heir to Antonioni and Jancsó, he carried their visual ideas to new limits and showed what more they could do. That strategy laid bare his own artifice, to the point that the minute fluctuations of style – no less ‘cinematic’ than Sco ’s – fascinate us in their own right.4

Indeed, The Travelling Players, through ‘its minute fluctuations of style’, was the catalyst that brought closure through the cinematic screen to the traumatic memory of death, suspicion, hatred and, especially for Angelopoulos, separation. At the same time, it created the ontological ground of his films, the fundamental reality of the journey in its archetypal form of the Homeric ‘nostos’ – that is, the return. The journey through space, and of space, in a hopeless effort to go back home became the most significant element of his cinematic mythology. This prepared his response to Tarkovsky’s biblical statement as reiterated in the film Sacrifice: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ To this, Angelopoulos replied in Ulysses’ Gaze with his Homeric statement: ‘In the beginning was the Journey’, which framed the central axis of his visual world, the idea of nostos and of crossing borders

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to reach home so poignantly expressed in the famous verse from The Suspended Step of the Stork: ‘How many borders do we have to cross in order to reach home?’ Angelopoulos was deeply disturbed by the unanswerability of this question till his very last film. Nevertheless, missing from the film was something that was to become the constant temptation of the cinematography of Angelopoulos: the role of the individual and its psyche, and in purely psychological terms, the role of the unconscious in collective history and individual experience. One of the main actors, Eva Kotamanidou, revealed that Rafailidis did not really like the film and kept a strange silence on its significance,5 probably because of its historicism and its a empt to extract ‘structural regularities’ out of the chaos of history. However, Rafailidis’ silence indirectly indicates the profound impact that the film had both in Greece and worldwide. As I wrote elsewhere: ‘Angelopoulos’ film was one of the very few Greek films which have had an international impact; it consolidated some of the central principles of the Third Cinema and its postcolonial self-articulation as well as of art cinema around the globe’ (Karalis 2012: 180). Dennis Hanlon pointed out the similarities between Angelopoulos and the Bolivian director Javier Sanjinés (Hanlon 2010: 362), but analogies between his visual temporality and that of the Philippine Lav Diaz or the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or even the British Terence Davies, can be easily detected. His next film The Hunters, his most cryptic, esoteric and hermetic work, is about the explosion of the collective unconscious in political terms. Within the context of the experimental art-house movies of the period, Angelopoulos saw his film as ‘. . . much more materialistic than The Travelling Players . . .’ with its ‘aggressive structure which should jerk the audience out of its complacency’ (Fainaru 2001: 26). The storyline is extremely simple: a group of high-bourgeois hunters, all of them nameless but with clear references to actual historical personalities, find in the snow preserved almost intact and with the blood still fresh the dead body of a partisan from the Civil War. It is New Year’s Eve 1977 and both the body and the occasion instigate a series of personal reactions to the participants. Monologues, dancing, singing, reminiscing and infighting frame the space of hallucinations and fantasies, enflamed by fears, anxiety and guilt. The dead body becomes the catalyst for the gradual denudation of themselves and the demystification of their power. ‘With the ghost of history (the dead body of the partisan) hidden at the backstage of history, the celebration for the culprits of the historic crime will take place but also it will be transformed into a danse macabre, in which the happy bourgeois themselves will be transformed into illustrious ghosts by their own actions . . .’ wrote Rafailidis, who thought of the film’s nightmarish atmosphere as a ‘Shakespearean

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ghost’ in Greek cinema (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 17). Kolovos describes it as the visual depiction of a ‘class nightmare’ (Kolovos 1990: 105) the presentation of fears, anxieties and panics of the ruling class and its inability to deal with its past. Formally, it expresses an oscillation between the epic dimensions of narrative filmmaking and the fluidity of avant-garde poetic cinema, with its multiple narrative lines converging, diverging and vanishing, leaving it bare of clues about its storyline and lacking closure or even an end. The theatricality of its staging is purely Brechtian but in its most Aristotelian understanding; each actor of the drama appears to live in front of the camera what they desire to experience but have never dared to. There is a monumental scene in which the wife of a former army officer, superbly and seductively performed by Eva Kotamanidou, ‘dances and [has] sex with the invisible king . . . in a unique scene which functions as a political event, the sexual masochistic acceptance of a ghost-king, functioning as the redeeming spectacle of the bourgeois class’ (Kolovos 1990: 102). In less than forty sequences of around 15 minutes each (the film exists in two versions, one of 168 and another of 140 minutes), Angelopoulos staged the most surreal deformance of the human subconscious, exposing its terrified bad faith, which was masked under grand narratives and rhetorical tropes. He appropriated the performative images and narratives of the ruling elite and deformed their visual identities and psychical identifications to a degree that we have not seen, not even in the frenzied radicalism of Buñuel or the ecstatic psychomagic of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Different sounds, costumes and language games from different periods coexist in the same shot and sometimes in the same frame as the present and the past interpenetrate each other, numbing moral conscience and imposing self-alienation. The actors he used from the old commercial cinema, like Mairi Hronopoulou, Be y Valassi and Aliki Georgouli amongst others, enhanced the surreal and hyperreal atmosphere of the movie, creating a visual space through which the timelessness of the unconscious takes over and exposes the delusional genealogy of the present. The dead body of the communist rebel becomes the catalyst for the demythologisation of the political power and authority in 1977, as linear time becomes almost obsolete and reveals the structural analogies between past and present. By suggesting that it ‘should be seen together with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry’ (Fainaru 2001: 27), Angelopoulos provided the clue for situating the film’s scope and aesthetics. This film also visualises his response to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), criticising both bourgeois decadence and Buñuel’s own approach to the bourgeoisie’s charm as a farceur and not as a political critic. Roger Ebert noted of the Discreet Charm:

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The movie is broken into self-contained sequences, showing the bland surface of polite society and the lusts that lurk beneath. A couple expects guests for dinner. In the bedroom, they are overcome by lust. . . . Dreams fold within dreams, not because the characters are confused, but because Buñuel is amusing himself by using such obvious tricks.6

A similar structure of a nightmare within a dream while experiencing a hallucination underpins Angelopoulos’ film. The Hunters is about the delusions and fantasies of the ruling class at the very moment it is confronted by the ugliness of its actions; something similar was a empted in Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri Eccellenti (1976) and from another perspective in Robert Bresson’s Le Diable, Probablement (1977). The central motif is both a stage and a corridor. Power exists in a hotel, a noplace, where people come and go, changing rooms and ideas, while being devoid of politics and political conscience. In this inverted film noir, this thriller of unconscious nightmares, Angelopoulos denounces the self-mythologisation of the ruling class and exposes its parasitic existence and destructive domination over collective memory. Angelopoulos overcame many difficulties to make this film. The Greek government actively sabotaged his efforts for funding and denounced its message even though it was the official Greek entry at the Cannes Festival, thus forcing him to find new sources of money and form new pa erns of collaboration. The Hunters did not receive the recognition of his previous movie, but as the first Greek film to deal with the timelessness of the unconscious, it indicated a profound change in his existential concerns. He began exploring something that the structuralist scaffolding of his previous films had excluded from their visual field; the introspective conscience of his characters and, through them, the introspective conscience of his viewers at a particular moment in the history of Greek society. Going beyond the dominant perception of history as an idealised and didactic fable, Alexander the Great/O Megalexandros (1980) is probably the only true historical epic produced in Greece. Starring the Italian actor Omero Antonu i, it was co-produced by the Greek Film Centre, ZDF and RAI and is 210 minutes long. The script is based on brief and epigrammatic dialogue interspersed with pseudo-demotic nineteenth-century texts and the verses of George Seferis. To show the rich colours of seasonal changes, natural landscapes were reshaped and villages repainted. Wri en by Angelopoulos in collaboration with the writer Petros Markaris, who later wrote bestselling detective stories, it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival as well as many awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, and until Ulysses’ Gaze, it remained the most ambitious and demanding film ever made in the country, and one of the most emblematic films of Balkan cinema. Dan Georgakas understood the film as a powerful

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political statement and observed: ‘Alexander the Great holds an important place amid a small group of exceptional political films, and with the passage of time, Alexander the Great may be recognised as a masterpiece of its kind’ (Georgakas 2000: 181). Strong basic colours like the brown of the tilled earth, the deep blue of endless skies and the intimate and sensual olive tones of human skin dominate the film; indeed, the human body is its true protagonist. If in The Hunters the body is a utilitarian and reified object, in Megalexandros it regains its sculptural gravity and sensory qualities, albeit depicted in the contortions of orgasm, epilepsy and foetal angst. The costumes – based on traditional motifs, the folk art of Theophilos and on the chromatic euphoria of the Byzantine iconography – are deeply symbolic. Kurosawa, as mentioned by Angelopoulos, loved the references of the colour black to the clothes of the Oprichniki in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part II. This film is the exact antithesis of The Travelling Players, as it seeks to reconfigure the Greek visual tradition through the prism of the Renaissance while foregrounding its Balkan premodern agrarianism. Its pictoriality is aligned to the new perception of representation as practised by both the greatest twentieth-century Greek painter Konstantinos Parthenis and the artist Yannis Tsarouchis, whom Angelopoulos liked and o en talked about. The effect of these two traditions converging with certain oblique references to Classical Greek art transforms the images into a visual palimpsest of artistic layers. Here we find: the idealised nakedness of the Classical Period, the agony and ecstasy of Hellenistic emotionalism, the formal abstraction of Byzantine iconography, the distortion of space through the colours of El Greco, the naïve folk traditions of the Balkans, the deepening of space through the chromatic euphoria of painters like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the warm sensuality of Tsarouchis’ choreographed naked bodies, and the fusion of Byzantine figuration and modern expressionism as found in the paintings of Nikolaos Gyzis and Konstantinos Parthenis together with the naïve pictoriality of Theophilos, whom Seferis held in very high esteem. We also find Christodoulos Halaris’ music based on folk songs of ritualised social bonding influenced by the Byzantine liturgy and played on traditional instruments, which organically enhances the intensity of all the disparate and somehow colliding elements of the film. Angelopoulos described the music as follows: Since the structure of the film is that of Byzantine liturgical music, I chose very old folk music played on antique instruments and used them in the liturgical tradition, alternating between solos and ensemble pieces. As a ma er of fact, in this film I used two types of music – the Byzantine and that of the Italian anarchists who had their own songs. In a way, it is the juxtapo-

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sition of the Orient and the Occident. With Greece, of course in the middle. (Fainaru 2001: 138).

Indeed, it is a visual symphonic translation of tragedy, such as for example, Euripides’ The Bacchae. The ritualism and the primeval frisson that we experience here is totally different to the closed, cold and distant images of his previous films. Here there is a profound change in his cinécriture: Brechtian theatricality has been totally abandoned for a new visual hyperrealism, particularly in the last scene, which concludes an epoch both in Greek cinema and in his work. In a brief note, Kurosawa noted: He watches things calmly through the lens. It is the weight of his calm and the sharpness of the unmoving regard of Angelopoulos’ camerawork that makes Alexander the Great so powerful that it’s impossible for the viewer to escape from the screen. This kind of filming, so personal and unique in its particularity, tends to look back to the origins of the cinema. This is what creates the impression of freshness and validity. As for myself, watching this film I deeply felt the pleasure of cinema in the most absolute meaning of the term’.7

Whereas the earlier film dealt with history as a synchronic web of conflicts, here history is presented through the diachronic symbols of legends and fables. There is something uniquely ‘autochthonous’ in the film: it goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, which begins with a celebration. ‘Long Live the Twentieth Century,’ a voice shouts at the beginning. But the new century comes as the avenging angel, a charismatic messiah who can be both the humble priest of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest or the deranged demonic anti-messiah we find in Scorsese’s The Taxi-Driver. Alexander is a bandit, ‘a primitive rebel, inciting archaic forms of social agitation’ according to Eric Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm 1972: 1), who, modelling himself on the Medieval romance of Alexander the Great, calls himself Megalexandros. He escapes from prison and takes a group of English tourists hostage – a reference to the Dilesi Murders, a well-known nineteenth-century event, which Angelopoulos repositioned for the purposes of the movie. The bandit hides in a village where the anarchist-socialist teacher, the same character and actor from The Travelling Players, tries to present him as a social liberator emancipating the villagers from the exploitation of the landlords. The truth is revealed by a group of Italian anarchists who arrive in search of a safe place. Absolute power corrupts the utopian harmony between the community and the individual, and Megalexandros’ authority descends into tyranny. Eventually, the regular army invades the village to rescue the hostages. As the anarchists leave the utopian village, they destroy all the clocks and any quantitative measurement of time, privileg-

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ing the timelessness of a paradisiac utopia. A wounded Megalexandros is devoured by the villagers in an act of religious theophagia. All that is le is a statue, broken and spla ered with blood, a reference to the verses of Seferis that Megalexandros recites when he is alone in his bedroom; ‘I woke with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down’ (Seferis 1981: 7). The film’s last scene is the key to understanding it and to anticipating the films to follow. Alexander, the only child in the village (an illegitimate son of Megalexandros and his foster mother?) escapes and suddenly finds himself in a modern megalopolis. ‘This is how Alexander enters the cities,’ the narrator’s voice says both triumphantly and ominously at the very end of the film. Alexander leaves the beginning of the twentieth century and is transported by donkey to the modern city full of neon lights, cars and television antennas, moving from the communitarian pre-modernity to the postmodern anonymity of a consumer capitalist society. In the meantime, a gestation has already taken place. Whereas in all his previous films the subject is an unconscious structure, indeed a functional form of historical forces beyond and above the individual, in the symbolic realm of the legendary village a transformation has happened, and desire suddenly rekindles individuality. Megalexandros is the Oedipal hero, marrying his foster mother and having sex with his stepsister, who wears the gown of the bride who was killed on the day of her wedding. The Freudian background and its symbolic references are too obvious to be considered peripheral. These new subtexts are sharply inscribed in the narrative linearity of this film, which abolishes the depiction of temporality of circular simultaneity as seen in the previous two films. Time does not exist in the land of legends, so Angelopoulos introduces Sigmund Freud’s ‘timelessness of the subconscious’ (Freud 1957 [1915]: 191) in order to address a theme that from that point onwards becomes the most important project of his cinécriture, the discovery of the human psyche.

Existential Dilemmas Even before the first titles, Angelopoulos’ grand Balkan epic Ulysses’ Gaze begins with a reference to Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades, which could be the true title of the film: ‘And if the soul is to know itself it must look into a soul’ (in Seferis 1981: 9). Indeed, the question of human agency, therefore of human psyche, becomes paramount in the new period in his cinematic development. If, until 1980, his stories were about objective structures addressing power relations and institutional control, with individuals

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playing a minor or negative role in determining their own destiny, the new political anthropology that he articulated post 1980 became centred on the question of human interiority. We do not know why this happened, and there is no reason to hypothesise, yet there is an obvious break with the past, as if Angelopoulos was going through his own transformation, first as an individual and then as an artist. During these years, a Heideggerian turn, a kehre, took place and history was taken over by historicity as lived time and felt experience in the mind of its actors. A new, richer and more real phenomenology of human presence makes its appearance in his films. Angelopoulos revealed that when he was filming Megalexandros, ‘I was having problems with myself,’ and ‘I was going through a personal crisis’ (Fainaru 2001: 36). The subject of history becomes a subject reflecting on its subjectivity; therefore, it extracts itself from the restrictions of history and becomes an emancipated critic of its own conditioning. From this point onwards, the camera is not any more the charismatic auteur who knows and foreknows but the eyes of the characters as they see themselves on film. The camera becomes their mind watching the action outwards. Angelopoulos’ kehre marked an important point in the history of Greek cinema but also reached further, consolidating certain experiments in introspective cinema in the works of Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Tro a, Alexander Kluge and generally the New German Cinema. Indeed, it went even further than the late Antonioni and Tarkovsky. His next film, Voyage to Cythera, resolved the personal crisis with a totally new cinematic language: ‘This [film] was a sort of deliverance, of liberation,’ he stated (Fainaru 2001: 36). The new iconography and its temporality cannot be understood without reference to two short films made by Angelopoulos between 1980 and 1984. In this period, he worked briefly for television and produced Village One, Inhabitant One/Horio Ena, Katoikos Enas (1981, 20´) and Athens or Three Visits to the Acropolis/Athina I Treis Episkepseis stin Akropoli (1983, 43´). While both films were made for Greek television, the second was a collaboration with Trans World Films and the Italian programme, Cultural Capitals of Europe. The first film is about an abandoned village close to Thessaloniki, called New Sebasteia, where only one inhabitant remains (today it is totally abandoned). The camera revolves around this villager, exploring both his loneliness and at the same time his rich imagination. The deserted houses and the departure of the last mayor leading a donkey laden with his clothes and a huge television set remain some of its most memorable scenes, and he will later incorporate this into Voyage to Cythera. Without a wri en script, the film references Reconstruction, with its minimalistic verité approach, using only the sounds of the radio and a demotic

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song sung by the man himself (linking them is the actual sound of silence). Certain scenes resurface in later films, but the way the camera lingers on empty spaces and the documentary style exploring the absence of the very people who had built this village is eloquent. This is a lived space vacant of life. This is a ghost story about a ghost town; the film derealises the actuality of the place, transforming it into a non-place while the voiceover reflects on the existential vacuum that memory tries to abolish. The second film is a tribute to his native city of Athens and is one of the best films ever made about the city as an imaginative and symbolic landscape. It is also an exploration of Athens as a historic urban space with its own spatial and architectural realities appearing as layers upon layers of successive experiences, and the Acropolis as the consummation of its symbolic form. The title paraphrases the name of the only novel George Seferis ever wrote, Six Nights on the Acropolis (1974, wri en in 1926). Unlike other stories about the Acropolis, this is an intriguing exploration of the realities around the hill, with a gradual ascent to the temple itself, which ultimately remains unfilmed. The voice of Angelopoulos is heard reading poems and commenting on his life in the city. He is captivated by the fact that when the house, and more specifically the very room, where he was born was demolished they discovered another room of the classical fi h-century room containing a children’s toy in its foundations. This coincidence became a coded image for him about the continuity of presence at the very spot of his childhood – a contraction of time that the camera alone can visualise and frame. The film frames the modernist iconography of Seferis’ book and especially that of the simultaneous coexistence of past and present: ‘Then, I felt a bolt of lighting, like an enormous snake, cut through time with one blow. I saw the ashes of her linen garment piled up at the spot where her ankles had been. I beheld a human being rising from the bosom of the marble’ (Seferis 2007: 194). Angelopoulos uses the music of Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hatzidakis, two composers who defined the sonic scapes of the city, as well as poems and prose by Seferis, Costas Tachtsis, Tasos Leivaditis, Henry Miller and others. Yannis Tsarouchis’ gay imagery suffuses the film with latent eroticism through the vernacular pictorialism of his work. The image of a half-naked young soldier, wearing the wings of Eros and riding a bike, is an ambiguous homage to Tsarouchis’ modernism and certainly the underground libidinal tensions and architectural eroticism of the city. Arvanitis’ camera roams the streets pointing out the traces of the past but looking towards the horizon and seeing them through the eyes of the present. Angelopoulos is not interested in the city as a collection of ruins or a symbol of a bygone culture, avoiding thus both romanticism and neo-classicism. He foregrounds the creative symbiosis of past and present

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in the anthropological continuum of the urban space, as memories of successive traumas, through objects lost and found. The destroyed buildings, the bullet holes on the walls, the demolished houses all indicate absence, lost wholeness, the fragmented nature of modern life and the existential lacunae in remembering. However, a film about Athens without the Acropolis, which is what Angelopoulos was doing, would have been ‘useless’. Some shots of the Acropolis, and the story of an Australian expatriate who had a heart attack a er seeing the Parthenon, are enough to indicate how Angelopoulos perceived the archaeology of the city; not with the reverential prayers of Ernest Renan or Sigmund Freud’s disturbance of memory but as a place of lived experience, as a layered continuity of dreamscapes and the way they constitute personal memory, almost in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges. This filmic essay is his visual diary about travelling through his native city and what his eyes capture next to the visibility of the obvious. In many subtle ways, one can see his inter-filmic references to other Greek films of the commercial cinema. What is filmable is the actuality of living, while the Acropolis, the Classical past, and the glory that was Greece are unfilmable illusions. The chaos of the modern city personalises the gaze of the director; if in Freud’s recollection the sight of the Acropolis caused a sense of derealisation due to the classicist fantasies surrounding the building, in Angelopoulos’ visual essay the embodied self of the director transforms the past into an immediate presence, a palimpsestic proximity of lived experiences. As Roderick Beaton wrote about Seferis’ novel: ‘. . . the ancient marble of the Acropolis, under the light of the moon, has a hallucinogenic effect; a tree in a garden on a hot summer night outside Athens is at once tactile and numinous . . .’ (Beaton in Seferis 2007: xiii). The transformation of real space into hyperreal interiority can be found as the foundational mood and atmosphere of the films to follow and can be seen as the animating energy in their aesthetics. This visual essay on his personal memory is the best introduction to the next stage of his development. Voyage to Cythera is the first exploration of the underworld of the human psyche a er Alexander leaves the realm of fables and enters the cities. The remarkable continuity between the films is significant. Furthermore, the condensation of his expansive temporality to a mere 43 minutes in the documentary on Athens gave Angelopoulos the opportunity to work with a new sense of visual time. Voyage to Cythera is probably the most concerted and concentrated a empt to reimagine his own style by recalibrating its strategies. Brechtian distancing was abandoned, dead time was diminished, dialogue became prominent and finally the camera started moving more frequently with the urgency of a dramatic quest. Muffled colours and periscopic frames still dominated

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visual space but now the human form became the centre of visuality and the implied axis in every shot and frame. Although still avoiding close-ups, the camera hovers around the head of the central character, indicating a change of perspective; the eye of the auteur is now the eye of the character. In his previous films, the auteur was above and outside the filmed scene; now the auteur is diffused within each frame, which is psychologised, interiorised and charged with emotional strength. ‘In the kind of cinema I make,’ he revealed, ‘which is always a linguistic research you arrive at a point where language becomes content’ (Fainaru 2001: 34). This film inaugurates a new research in cinema as language to form the mature style of his work. At around 137 minutes long, this movie, Voyage to Cythera, is about a director whose identity remains a mystery even to him. He is in search of a new fictional scenario for his next film when he meets an old man who has returned from exile a er thirty-two years. His relationship with him is not revealed; is he his lost father or another character of his imagined film? Angelopoulos stated that: ‘The audience must realise, from the very first moment, through the use of the same name, [that] the film deals with double identities throughout. All the characters here have a double, that of the film itself and that of the film within the film’ (Fainaru 2001: 39). The identity, history and origin of the returning man remain a mystery. The other characters are also ambiguous; the central female character, magnificently performed by Mairi Hronopoulou, is maybe his sister and his lover, in a strange role that blurs the borders between illusion and hallucination. The underlying libidinal economy of the film is also unse ling, as the relationship between brother and sister is explicitly sexualised, although the theatricality of their performance indicates a play within a play in the form of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. This is repeated with the homoerotic obsession of the elderly right-wing Civil War warrior, magnificently performed by the king of slapstick comedy Dionysis Papayiannopoulos. The repatriated communist exile (suggestively played by the biblical figure of Manos Katrakis) returns to his village to reconcile himself with his political enemies from the Civil War only to discover that the new reality of commercialisation and commodification of the symbols of the past has rendered them all parochial and obsolete. His wife, a very strange Penelope, seems divided between what she must do and what she wants to do. She chooses to go with him because she knows there is nowhere else to go. In the most crucial moments of the film, the old man finds the strength to u er only two words: ego eimai, I am, it is me. The question of memory as identity and language looms large in this Heideggerian film about ‘language as the house of being’. But what happens when you lose your

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language? You simply repeat the first words in any language: I am. Angelopoulos is in a dialogue not with the ‘I am’ discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of John but in a more romantic response to the vitality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s primary imagination ‘. . . the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (Coleridge 1907 [1817]: 202). The articulation of the I Am (ego eimai) transforms him from a shadow to a real human being: with this definitive statement ‘the director has finally found his character,’ declares Angelopoulos (Fainaru 2001: 45). Essentially the director, Alexander, directs himself to become a director of the film that he wants to produce within the film he wants to make, although he does not understand that he himself is the film. Indeed, it begins with two enigmatic scenes as the first credits appear over the images of galaxies revolving first one way and then moving towards the other (like the scene in the beginning of Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (2000) with the movement of water), while the sounds of a disrupted cosmic melody invest their movement with a strange and totally imaginary and numinous background. Suddenly, the film continues with a relocation in history through Angelopoulos’ own recollection from the German occupation of Athens, when as a child he pranked German soldiers without realising the danger. Within the same frame, another child appears, probably the child of the director, who is looking at the city of today. The new synchronicity frame that Angelopoulos perfected in his subsequent films appears here not as a device to deal with history but as an ordering pa ern for the present. The film marks a radical turn in Angelopoulos’ cinema towards the autobiographical, which will remain the central characteristic of his work. The characters in the film appear as the characters that the director is seeking for the film, while many of the actors who apply to be extras are from his previous films repeating their original lines. The cinematic director is Angelopoulos, who imagines himself as the director he wants to be. The director reads scenes from the script, standing under a poster of The Travelling Players by Theodore Angelopoulos, while a white screen that the director a empts to populate with characters is placed in front of the camera – an eloquent reference to the dark monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Angelopoulos’ voice is also heard randomly in the film saying on behalf of the director: ‘One, two . . . Oh God I can’t keep my rhythm. One, two, three. Night.’ Tunes and songs from The Travelling Players are heard in a contra-punctual sense against the modern context and background. The drama ends pointedly in a village called Messonision (the middle, or the in-between, island), and the two characters remain in the middle of nowhere. Throughout the movie, there is an implied dialogue with Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal, as Eleni Karaindrou’s

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score tries to structure the sonic chaos of the film around a theme and variations from Antonio Vivaldi’s music. The presence of Giulio Brogi, who had starred in San Michele Aveva un Gallo (1972), and Il Prato (1979), is a touching gesture towards the cinema of the Taviani Brothers (as well as towards Antonioni’s Red Desert). Manos Katrakis as Spyros, the name of Angelopoulos’ father, also evokes the memories of political exile and persecution and adds personal experiential references to its significations. Mairi Hronopoulou, the diva of the Greek commercial cinema, adds another layer of references, expressing the dominant visual cinematic culture of necrophanic politics of subjectivity. In an intense scene, she soliloquises in front of the camera a er having sex with a sailor: ‘Many times, I realise with horror and relief that I don’t believe in anything anymore. Then I return to my body: it is the only proof that I am alive.’ The idea of a missing connection with the past and the land, and with the present and its complexities, permeates the film. The reality of absence is explored here by Angelopoulos through the emotional power of brown replacing the dominance of ochre. Yellow also appears as the portent of hidden messages and later of hidden messengers; blue adds its shades to the growing sense of loss and death. ‘Why do we have to gasp chasing a shadow?’ The shadow expresses the missing connection with a lost past. It is about children who grew up without their father: a father who remained a myth and was never an authority figure for positive psychological investment, nor was he ever a ruler against whom to wage rebellion. Whom do you resist when the throne is empty and its legal occupant returns as a broken and pitiful man? Rafailidis observed that ‘Spyros is a King Lear who lost his kingdom in the Civil War, a Don Quixote who believed that his lance was an effective weapon in the ba le with the windmill of History, and an Odysseus who returns home a er 30 years to find a daydreaming Penelope and a confused Telemachus. . . . Ithaca no longer exists . . .’ (Rafailidis in Horton 1997: 48). Ithaca is replaced by an image of Ithaca, a bad copy of the past that acts as a sign for remembrance and parody. The last scenes of the film frame a ruthless satire of le -wing political activity, as workers on strike mix with actors, mimes and singers. In the society of spectacle, every image is a spectre, a ghost of un-being, a deception. The theatre becomes the topos where emotions, both real and feigned, are ambiguous and framed ambivalently by the camera as it recedes from the faces that express them. Despite that, the fact that it is structured around the nostos of the refugee, the Homeric undercurrent of all his films, something else emerges from the story structure, the pictorial qualities of the images and ultimately in the constitutive qualities of the characters of Voyage to Cythera.

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From now on, Angelopoulos constructs complete characters with a past (memory), present (agency) and future (faith). The construction of visual forms for embodied conscience and self-aware historicity emerges as the new project in his cinematic language. The visual field is now about the deep structure of emotions and not about institutions of history. A melody that is vaguely audible permeates each scene and foregrounds something symbolic – something present but hidden, articulated but never heard, like the first words that they exchange alone, which drive the exile to seek refuge in the hotel of his youth. This is a prescient statement about the predicament of displaced people; the eternal refugees who like Spyros converse only with the invisible presence of Death. The scene in which Spyros talks with Death is extremely indicative of Angelopoulos’ new poetics, as the camera itself circles around him ready to devour his existence. They all search desperately for connection, for the liberating gaze of the other that will give them identity and a sense of belonging. (The gaze will later become one of the most crucial elements in Angelopoulos’ visual poetics.) The film reaches its peak when music from an unidentified source plays a strange tune that forces characters to look straight at the camera. ‘I want to go to him,’ says his wife as a form of farewell, and everyone applauds. The incomplete tune is heard again as the lights go out and Spyros and his wife are abandoned in the middle of the sea. The originary or indeed the archetypal couple is lost in the blue stillness of the endless sea. This is how the epigones dispose of the heroic generation that gave them birth: by sacrificing them to the ephemeral gods of modernisation. It was obvious that with this film Angelopoulos was exploring new ground within his own cinematic territory. The ingenious script, in collaboration with Tarkovsky’s screenwriter Tonino Guerra on an idea by Pierre Baudry, received the first prize for screenwriting at the 1984 Cannes Festival, and the film was awarded the FIPRESCI prize as well. As a genuine departure from his usual political statements, it caused consternation among critics. Nikos Kolovos aptly summarised the new ground that Angelopoulos was exploring and the cinematographic problems it raised: ‘Trying, correctly, to unhook himself from the tyranny of History as Ideology, he searches rightly so, for a new system of writing and narration. In such change of direction, we can a ribute the omissions, the repetitions and the gaps, that even a well-meaning but demanding viewer could detect in the film’ (Kolovos 1990: 156–57). Wavering somewhere between frustration and despair, such ‘change of direction’ embodied an existential mood that was to be further explored in his next film The Beekeeper (1986). At 122 minutes, this is a long film that remains unsure of its own message. Although it has some great moments overall, it lacks the visual intensity of his previous film. The

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monochromatic variations in grey of Arvanitis’ camera, enhanced by the minimalistic repetitive wind sounds of Eleni Karaindrou’s music, hauntingly performed by the Polish-Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, have become emblematic of the malaise that was taking over Europe during the period of neoliberal affluence under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the gradual demise of the Soviet Union a er the Chernobyl accident. The se ings alternate between the ecstatic naturalism of grand mountainous landscapes and the gas stations, industrial deadlands and cheap hotels of the Greek provinces, punctuated by constant references to the epic and heroic events that took place at the same spots in The Travelling Players. Angelopoulos captured the feeling of imminent implosion, and The Beekeeper is precisely about ‘. . . the conflict between memory and nonmemory’ (Fainaru 2001: 53). Despite the presence of Marcello Mastroianni and the singer-actor Serge Reggiani, this film is probably his least successful. I called it elsewhere a ‘transitional’ film (Karalis 2012: 178) because it acted as the bridge between his previous superb experiment with self-questioning and Landscape in the Mist, his masterpiece of the decade. Mastroianni’s performance is based on stillness, imperceptible gestures and half-said words. His physical presence, austere, withdrawn and disorientated, emphasised by shabby clothes and restrained movements, ma ers more than the dialogue. His sensual and vibrant face that dominated Fellini’s films is transformed by Angelopoulos into a funeral mask expressing broken masculinity, even almost physical and psychological castration. In a sense, the film is a strange dialogue with Robert Bresson’s The Diary of a Country Priest (1951), as it records his personal flirtation with death. It is punctuated by the reading of his diary, pensively made by Angelopoulos himself, essentially exploring his own anxiety against the ‘eternal now’ used by the young to define themselves. Unafraid to persistently film his actors’ backs, Angelopoulos places the camera behind them, avoiding the reality of their existence mirrored in their faces. The integration of the personal-autobiographical in the collective-historical is achieved by such fusion devices as Karaindrou’s music, the sounds of river flow, rain, human breath, sexual gasping and the squeaking of the bed. All these sounds are connected to the monotonous rhythms of rain, the wind blowing and the changing pa erns of natural sounds. ‘I always wanted to make a film about the weather,’ confided Angelopoulos. Rumour has it that he even actually moved changed the existing railway lines, bringing them in front of the cinema to incorporate the sound of passing trains in the sensory palate of the filmic experience. Marcello Mastroianni plays Spyros, a teacher and beekeeper who, a er the awkward wedding of his daughter, abandons his family to follow ‘the

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trails of flowers’, the route of bees, from the north to the south. Strange suspicions hinting at an incestuous affair with his own daughter hover around him in his tense encounters with his wife, who abandons him and sells their house. His daughter is both a racted to him and is fearful of him. His son simply detests him. Repeated throughout the film is an absurd children’s di y ‘I climbed a pepper tree . . .’ –already heard in the previous film. From the very beginning everything goes wrong. The wedding is aborted, leaving the wedding banquet untouched and the ritual of bonding violently and abruptly suspended. On his journey, he meets a young girl, seductively performed by Nadia Mourouzi, who embodying the burning presence of reality against his own escapism challenges his last hope of staying alive. Their encounter is futile and threatens to destroy Spyros. A er a failed a empt to have sex in an old movie theatre, the girl disappears, leaving him alone on the empty stage, which without spectators is equally futile. A er a meeting with old friends (who are also in the grip of the same dead-end, illness and depression), one of whom says, ‘I wasted my life courting history’, Spyros surrenders himself to death by the sting of his beloved bees. His dying hand plays the tune of the song of his youth when he fought for the Le . The script, wri en in collaboration again with Tonino Guerra and the Greek prose writer Dimitris Nollas, has too many ‘colliding signifiers’ and poses more questions than the visual narrative is able to resolve. Two great actors of the old commercial cinema give evocative significance to the film: Jenny Roussea as his wife and Dinos Iliopoulos, the unique character in Nikos Koundouros’ The Ogre of Athens/O Drakos (1956), as the projectionist in the abandoned cinema. Another interesting presence is the sardonic Dimitris Poulikakos, the anarchist provocateur of the Athenian underground scene of the early seventies. The film is an elegy to that generation of utopians who believed that a er the Restoration of the Republic in 1974 a new society could be built. It is a eulogy to all generations of true believers who have been le behind by history. Its mood is one of nostalgia, melancholy and surrender, developing the underlying theme of loss and absence that will dominate his later movies. Still displaying the poster of Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, the empty cinema is frozen in time: only the camera remains to film and record what is no longer there, the absent gaze of the audience. The role of the nameless girl, who is the same age as Spyros’ daughter, is extremely significant. Rafailidis stresses that she is the most ‘tragic person in the filmic story and not Spyros’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 44) as she fails to fertilise the barren existence of a man living constantly in the past. This odd couple is an eloquent response to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), mixed with references to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of

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the Beehive (1973). It is silenced political history and emotional disintegration converging with the sterility of the present moment. It exposes the incompatibility of a young woman who is at home only in the present with an old man who feels homeless everywhere. In its political context, it provides the opportunity to reassess the historical trajectory of socialism, framing the gradual disillusion with the socialist experiment in Greece and the slow implosion of socialism as a project of renewal, which started becoming visible in Europe a er Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. Angelopoulos situated his film in a telling manner: I must stress that I have entered a post-Marxist period. I am interested in the existentialist problematic, the individuals who live intense existential situations in relation to themselves and others. This is a trilogy that could be called the Trilogy of Solitude. Its films are about human solitude. The first was Voyage to Cythera, which I would call the Silence of History. The second will be [The Beekeeper] the silence of love. And the third will be the silence of God; not of the religious God, of course but as the point of ultimate reference, of liminal quest.’ (in Soldatos 2004 [1985]: 383)

In planning these films, Angelopoulos understood that he had to address the question of God in modern societies despite his denunciation of ‘the religious God’ of the institutional and ecclesiastical tradition. The film is indeed full of religious references and to a certain degree responds to the rise of the ambivalent movement of neo-orthodoxy in Greece during that period, which was filling the metaphysical vacuum le by the profound disenchantment with Marxist ideology. In any case, the film is deeply immersed in existentialist dilemmas and is somehow trapped in its own complexity. It does not explore the existentialist question of freedom as found in Jean-Paul Sartre but the reality of being towards death as articulated in Albert Camus’ challenging statement: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’ (Camus 2000: 5). Suicide is about loss and absence, something that is stressed in the film when the director reads from his diary: ‘If someone asked me who are you what do you want here, I would answer: Nothing, I was just passing by. I used to live here many years ago.’ Yet, he is still alive and here but not really here; this ambiguity weighs heavily on the structure of the film and slows it down with unbreathable dead time. Throughout the film, Spyros tries to piece together the lost fragments of happiness he experienced as a child. The image of childhood as the ultimate home of existence is in a way akin to William Wordsworth’s verse: ‘The Child is Father of the Man’ (Wordsworth 2000: 246) and had already appeared in Voyage to Cythera, where, as in most of his films, children are generally invisible.

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With his next film, Landscape in the Mist, he wanted to change completely his perspective of reality. If history is a perpetual loss of innocence, then this film is about those innocent participants in history who rarely have the opportunity to see their inner world in cinema: children. Here the lost childhood of Spyros becomes the ultimate myth of restoration and redemption, which cannot be provided by history. It is also the closest that the ‘materialist’ Angelopoulos ever got to the ontological ground of being as the transcendent Other, beyond the verbal confines or the imaginative inventions of the human mind. Landscape in the Mist is precisely about the invisible, uncategorisable and wordless otherness that only children can believe in or experience directly. It is a film almost literally made through the eyes of children, who see everything and everyone from below: the camera, in low-angle, almost eye-level shots reminiscent of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, looks mostly upwards, framing the gigantic world of adults as the space of confusion, horror and trauma (with the telling exception of a single crane, high-angle shot). Arvanitis’ camera moves closer and closer to the children’s faces, retrieving moments of existential suddenness through the revelation of overwhelming beauty or devastating ugliness. It is based on a story by Angelopoulos, who co-wrote the script with Tonino Guerra and Thanassis Valtinos. At 127 minutes long, it is one of his most condensed films, and perhaps his most Aristotelian work. What distinguishes this film is the admirable narrative economy of its story, with its linear time and sequential development, embodied in the three classical unities of place, time and action, without lapses or discontinuities. It is about the journey of two children, a girl and a boy, who go looking for their migrant father in Germany. They leave home and travel on many trains until they reach the borders of an unknown country. Traumatic and revealing encounters with death, deception, rape and falseness are their rites of passage to adulthood and ultimately to history and mortality. It is possible that their father does not exist and that the children are lost in the labyrinth of lies told by adults. The story is a mixture of a fairy-tale narration, based on ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by the Brothers Grimm, and Samuel Becke ’s Waiting for Godot, interspersed by le ers to their father read aloud by both children. Its cinematic ancestry goes back to The Night of the Hunter (1955) by Charles Laughton, and René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), coupled with vague references to Ingmar Bergman’s Silence (1963) and more pronounced ones to Fanny and Alexander (1982). The final freeze-frame indicates an indirect affinity with François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), while the signs and miracles reference the magical realism of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Spielberg’s ET (1982).

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The wet, impoverished and drab landscapes of the Greek provinces permeate its iconology, psychologised by the discreet music of Eleni Karaindrou, who made ample use of natural sounds, like falling rain, bird cries and, most importantly, the metallic cacophony of trains and motorbikes. The psychedelic music of the ‘garage’ group The Last Drive gives a completely different background to the aural semiotics of the film, enhanced by the unexpected reading of verses from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels?’ (Rilke 2011 [1922]: 131). The film is not mimetic realism in any way; it takes place in the realm of the unconscious as it is consciously anti-realistic and anti-linear within a totally linear narrative. In a strange and uneven review, Rafailidis, the most virulent antireligious cultural theorist in Greece, wrote that the film is ‘. . . a biblicalpoetic parable (something that becomes obvious through all its converging codes) about the myth of Creation, or be er about the re-creation of the world through cinema, the only effective “miracle-maker” today’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 82). In its religious dimension the film juxtaposes the worlds of children and adults, of dream and reality, of belief and wonder. Yet if, as Rudolf O o has indicated, behind the word ‘god’ we mean the quest for the numinous as the mysterium tremendum (O o 1950 [1917]: 6), the film is full of signs and wonders of that ‘wholly other’ experienced in silence. As O o again wrote of the numinous: ‘It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of – whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures’ (O o 1950 [1917]: 13). From the beginning, the children are exposed to the wholly other realities of life: madness, exploitation, corruption. Yet they never forget their father: their thoughts are always orientated towards him. The children meet Orestes, a beautiful young man who takes them on his bus and his motorbike through various places and landscapes, introducing them to strange people. A er their meeting up in the mountains, he takes them down to a town, easily recognisable to Angelopoulos’ audience because it is the backdrop for both The Travelling Players and The Beekeeper; a place of heroic deeds or unspeakable atrocities. Here they meet the actors from The Travelling Players, who repeat their lines from their roles to themselves. When they reach Thessaloniki, the players auction their costumes from their failed performances, since no theatre will hire them because no one is interested in their play. When the children are taken to the police station, they meet Toula Stathopoulou, the amateur actress from Angelopoulos’ first film, Reconstruction, also repeating her lines from that film. Angelopoulos parodies his own characters in a rare perfor-

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mance of humour, like the scene with the rooster at the railway station, a reference to a similar scene in The Travelling Players. But who is Orestes, the man from the mountains, as the etymology of his name indicates, who drives them through alien places and hostile landscapes? He is not the liberator or the redeemer of the classical tragedy Oresteia: he is the opposite, the distractor, the deviator, the seducer. He takes them to huge highways and subterranean caves, showing them a society in decline. Against the background of a new commercial centre, he even shows them a broken negative of a film depicting something unseen: but what? This is never made clear. Angelopoulos has masterfully incorporated the ambiguities of his role in the script. But this is not the world of the children. These deviations expose them to strange signs and wonders: a snowstorm, a dying white horse, the enormous broken hand of a fallen deity. Two bicycle riders in yellow appear to indicate that every one of these signs is an epiphany and that something else is also present. (The yellow bicycle ride will reappear in three of his subsequent films.) Orestes is Mephistopheles: ‘part of that force which would / do evil evermore, and yet creates the good’ (Goethe 1963 [1825]: 159). His presence embodies the spirit of negation, sloth and a life devoid of purpose; he is living for the moment – that is to say moments of selfoblivion and self-alienation, ostensibly selling motorbikes but in reality selling sex in an underground disco. In a scene full of homosexual imagery, the disco becomes the representation of hell; the place where human faces do not radiate their natural light. Arvanitis’ camera thrives on the darkness that dominates the human face in this scene, as the source of light is withdrawn and comes exclusively from electrical projectors from the ceiling. It is as if humans have lost their own light and move like shadows in and out of the secret life of dark corners. When the girl decides to continue the journey despite the traumas and the dangers, the boy goes with her. The only crane high shot in the film shows Orestes from above as he waves farewell, first to the children and then to the camera and ultimately the eye behind it. In the film, sex constitutes the horrible revelation of what it means to grow up in a brutal and barbaric world. But it is not presented in the sensational voyeuristic way we usually find in mainstream movies. The rape of the girl by a truck-driver is the most terrible scene that we witness – yet it is not filmed. Nitzan Ben-Shaul thinks of this scene as one of the most symbolic ‘one-shot sequences’ in modern cinema: ‘the event is powerfully conveyed by the slow movement of the camera towards the truck. It literally emblematises Bazin’s idea of the mystery of depth in space. Moreover, the narrative process of revelation is embedded in this one, slow, continu-

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ous camera movement, despite the fact that, or rather because, the camera never shows what went on’ (Ben-Shaul 2007: 12–13). Indeed, the unique way that Angelopoulos has intertwined what is shown and what remains invisible possibly makes Landscape in the Mist his best and most enduring film. Its final scene is one of the most emblematic in world cinema. As the children try to cross the border, we hear the voice of a guard ordering them to stop, followed by the sound of shots, but we are transferred to a single tree emerging colourless from the mist and the two children running towards it. It is an eloquent homage to Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which ends with a tree blossoming under the strong light of the sun (Tarkovsky had recently died). Angelopoulos’ tree, however, remains grey, bere of the vital green of life. Forrest Cardamenis asks ‘Have they arrived only in death? Or is it reality? Perhaps some imaginary dream space between the two? Angelopoulos leaves the question unanswered, revelling in the hope that film can offer redemption for both character and viewer.’8 If The Travelling Players and The Hunters are visual laboratories for stylistic innovations in filmic temporality and visual representation, Landscape in the Mist ingeniously fuses classical forms of narration with experimental codes in representation through the absolute purity of its structure, maintaining throughout its 127 minutes the most accomplished and consummate cinematic sublime that his visual language could articulate, as we will see in the next chapter. It can be seen as both a Germanic fairy tale and an Aesop’s fable and is easily understood without being ponderous. It flows smoothly, as its narrative structure effectively converges with its semiotic referentiality. Its very simplicity generates an excess of meaning and a surplus of significations: you can see it either as a simple story or a metaphor about the present times. Even a cautious critic like Wael Khairy wrote: ‘Landscape in the Mist’ is a work of art that comes from the feelings, dreams, sorrows, and flashes of life that we experience every day. And it is all stitched together by the haunting melancholic score composed by the great Eleni Karaindrou. This contemplative film is layered, complex, challenging and rewarding. I find myself thinking about these children time and time again as I go through my own journey in life. It is filled with immense wisdom and unforge able imagery. The last shot in particular reaches a crescendo of beauty that is so operatic, once seen it will never be forgo en.9

In a collection of the 100 essential films compiled by The National Society of Film Critics, Michael Wilmington praises ‘. . . its own pure sense of the overpowering beauty, terror, and mystery of life’ (Wilmington 2002: 169). As I claimed elsewhere regarding this film: Angelopoulos succeeded in visually articulating a negative theology, an apophatic depiction of the traces of numinosity as found in the realm of his-

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torical change and existential impermanence. The eyes of the children transform the cruelty of history into a tale of restoration and return to the ground of being. Its filmic space, both oneiric and material, framed an imaginative revelation of the inner conscience of the individual trying to come to terms with the fallen nature of humanity as a historical event.10

The film received a number of prestigious awards, including the Silver Lion in Venice, the Hugo Award from the Chicago Film Festival and the Felix Award for best film, and it has remained to this day one of the most significant and most screened Angelopoulos films. It remains a point of reference as a movie that can stand next to the best works of cinematic tradition from early German expressionism to contemporary postmodern films. The end of the film touches upon a theme that had not been dominant in the past but was to become part of his visual geography in the last two decades of his life: borders and border-crossing. The theme of borders is the central point of reference of his next film, The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). At 138 minutes long, this rather flawed movie features exceptional imagery but is burdened with too much philosophical baggage and falls short of its own premise. Co-wri en by Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra and Petros Μarkaris, it had two directors of photography, Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos. Both the synergy between the two cinematographers and their differences in stylisation, camera movement and use of open space are eloquent and somehow ambivalent. Until then, Sinanos had worked on short films and documentaries. His frame and imagery featured intimate realism and sharp contrasts of primary colours, which collided with the flowing, grainy and expansive chromatic pa erns that we find with Arvanitis. In his work on Hristos Vakalopoulos’ Olga Roberts (1989), Vasiliki Eliopoulou’s The Crossing/To Perasma (1989) and in his later international productions, especially in Öscan Alper’s Memories of the Wind (2015), strong primary colours dominate the cinematic frame, whereas the human face loses the self-sufficient luminosity that we find in Arvanitis’ images. The intimate colours in confined spaces seem to bear the mark of Sinanos, while the grand frescos of natural landscapes seem to refer to Arvanitis. Furthermore, Eleni Karaindrou’s music is discreet to the point of superfluity; the sounds of rain, river and the falling snow would have been preferable. Angelopoulos distracts his spectators from the storyline by sentimentalising its atmosphere. The disjunction between image and soundscapes is another subtext in the movie, indicating the implicit disconnect between the individual and its surroundings. The scene under the heavy snow and the absolute silence, in which you think that Angelopoulos wants to capture the sound of snow falling and the imperceptible

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movement of crystalised water, denotes the most interesting encounter between Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yet the film was based on two newspaper articles that Angelopoulos ingeniously transformed into powerful and almost devastating images. As Aimilia Karali explains: One [article] was from the island of Gavdos (south of Crete) in the early seventies. Someone died and there was no priest for the funeral service. The weather conditions were harsh and no priest could take the boat from Crete. So, they placed the coffin with the dead on the harbor of the small island and the priest from the other side on Crete was conducting the last rites. The second piece of news came from the early nineties. A er the opening of [the] border between Azerbaijan and Iran, people from the border villages were looking for their relatives from whom they were violently separated when the borders were drawn. Because years had passed, people hanged on their chest photographs of their relatives from their childhood hoping they would be recognised through them.11

The scope of such details and the grand scale of the implied and unfilmed realities in the movie enrich its structure with unique and universal relevance. It was an international production starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Gregory Patrick Karr together with an amazing Greek cast utilising, again, actors from the old commercial cinema and the slapstick tradition, entrusting them with profoundly tragic roles. The presence of Mastroianni and Moreau links the film to Antonioni’s La No e (1961), implying a dialogue between these films, which had been made thirty years apart, while the changes of the faces of the actors indicate the changes in visual style, acting and ultimately mood. The story is about a politician who disappears from the parliament. A journalist, who reports on refugees and asylum-seekers at the borders, finds someone who looks like him and convinces the wife of the politician to go and identify him, but their meeting is inconclusive. The film ends with an impressive painterly frame in which technicians construct the new forms of communication over the borders. Nobody learns anything about the man, who marries his daughter in the most monumental scene, and the final scene is as much emblematic as it is cryptic. The whole film is a cryptogram, with verses without reference to the actual work itself and poems by Angelopoulos being le on the answering machine. Angelopoulos said that he was ‘. . . trying to go beyond . . . to reach into the dark recesses lurking behind the surface of the story and the people in it’ (Fainaru 2001: 76). Essentially, the film is about a missing origin and the intriguing feeling of the lost beginning and lost authority. Mastroianni expresses it quite clearly when he says: ‘we crossed another border, how many more borders will we have to cross before we reach home?’ He refers, of course, to the real home, the one place where a person

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feels he really belongs to, heart and soul. For me, this phrase sums up the entire film. This is the kind of existentialism you will not find in my earlier films. (Fainaru 2001: 77)

The film is, however, awkward in its philosophical presuppositions and is self-contradictory to a degree. If someone exercises his freedom to abandon a certain life for another, then home for that person is where he chooses to be. Rafailidis was perplexed by the film, calling it his most ‘Hegelian’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 97) and explaining it as ‘an oscillation, between the obviousness of things and the invisibility of thought’ (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 99), and as ‘an encounter between the imaginary (represented by Mastroianni) and the real (represented by Moreau)’ (ibid.: 100). Angelopoulos also used the same metaphor elsewhere: A transcending of the concept of death, there where dividing lines are lost; because the cardinal contradiction we encounter today is that, while on one hand we are talking about the unified Europe, meaning a transcending of borders, on the other we see that border become increasingly smaller: two contradictory practices which characterise the confusion prevailing today. The movie is based on this notion: the idea of oscillation between a lost yesterday and a tomorrow which is still unknown. (Soldatos 2004: 496)

The film makes oblique references to Jean Renoir’s La Grand Illusion (1937), with the concentration camp at the borders of no man’s land echoing its revolutionary statement that ‘borders are human invention’. In this internment camp, however, we do not find the aristocracy of Europe conversing about order and civility while being ecstatic about Greek poetry but anonymous people without identity and belonging. As André Bazin noted: Grand illusions are doubtless the dreams which help men to live, such as a simple obsession with pyrography or translating Pindar, but more than this, the grand illusions are the illusion of hatred, which arbitrarily divides men who in reality are not separated by anything but the illusion of boundaries, with the wars which result from them: the illusion of races, of social classes. (Bazin 1992: 65).

In Angelopoulos’ film, no illusions, grand or small, exist: all characters are lost, homeless and directionless. They live in a limbo between identity and homelessness – while gradually homelessness becomes their very existential identity. In that sense, Rafailidis’ idea about the Hegelian film vis-à-vis its ethics of recognition can be corroborated. The internment camp becomes Dante’s Inferno, and they are waiting their turn to be condemned. Bazin also pointed out an analogous visual technique in Renoir’s film: ‘By moving the camera to “reframe” the scene instead of cu ing, Renoir is

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able to treat the sequence not as a series of fragments but as a dramatic whole’ (Bazin 1992: 64). It is not certain that Angelopoulos manages to do the same: the links between some scenes are not obvious, and the film remains a series of magisterially framed fragments of narrative, which are self-referential and opaque. Film critic Alexis Dermentzoglou presciently called this film the most important ‘post-Angelopoulos’ film (Soldatos 2003: 498) because of the fragmented narrative, the episodic structure and the disjointed form, privileging style and stylisation over the existential questions that were embedded in the film. The truth is that the film encapsulates a profound disenchantment with politics and all social projects of renewal. It was released in 1991, when communism had just collapsed, the first signs of a looming war were appearing in Yugoslavia, and the rise of aggressive nationalism was dominant all over Europe. Angelopoulos went through a serious crisis in his political orientation when he realised that politics ‘. . . is nothing more than just another profession’ (Fainaru 2001: 79). His politician abandons the parliament and discovers the importance of silence: ‘There are times,’ he says, ‘when silence is imperative for us to listen to the music behind the raindrops.’ Tellingly, Angelopoulos adds: ‘What he really means is that all the pretentious political theories are useless; they dissimulate the real music of life’ (Fainaru 2001: 79). The crisis of authority is also a crisis of meaning, and Angelopoulos’ own political dilemmas become dominant in the film. With his next films, he crossed his personal Rubicon, the borders of his own country, to look beyond the mirror and see the brave new world emerging on the other side. Until 1994, all his films explored the hidden landscapes within the traumatised subjectivity of Greek political and social history. Angelopoulos created the aesthetics of trauma not as a romanticised struggle between right and wrong, or strong and weak, but as a conflict between inner demons and psychological realities. He explored the lack of a unified subjectivity in Greek society by investigating a suppressed interiority. As I mentioned earlier, his least successful films are the most interesting from the point of view of their philosophical and existential questioning. As Irini Stathi concluded in her monograph on him: ‘We have to confront the polysemy of the cinematic writing of an auteur, who doesn’t hesitate to contest the grand schemes of the arts, without overlooking the need to formulate a dialectical stance towards the world’ (Stathi 1999: 177). Angelopoulos wanted to make polysemous films and open them to the questioning of his spectators, although The Suspended Step of the Stork also indicates a dead-end in the questions that he tried to articulate. In answering Andrew Horton’s comment that we never really learn the identity of

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the disappeared politician, Angelopoulos said: ‘It doesn’t ma er. Whether he is or is not the missing politician is not the important question in the film. What is important is that he could be the politician, the missing figure’ (Horton 1997: 110). His next film is about potential, almost unknowable identities in a world that had surrendered itself to barbarism a er having lost its ‘soul’. In the loss of the soul, the primacy of vision is reaffirmed, and in a Platonic way the quest and the necessity for the primary gaze that reconnects humans to their originary reality emerges.

Cultural Aestheticism and its Discontents A er 1991, Angelopoulos was forced to redefine his own political identity following the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, which led to the civil wars, especially in Yugoslavia, and created huge waves of refugees. The ideal of a transnational identity, a universalisable citizenship on the ontological grounds of common humanity, as advocated by socialism, also came crashing down. Soon the rise of nationalism and tribalism threw the heart of Europe into genocidal wars that destroyed societies that had for generations been raised with the ideal of their shared civic values and common political citizenship. During this time, he worked on the most monumental and Homeric film he ever made, the only one to equal The Travelling Players, considered by many as one of the best European films of the decade, despite its many critical flaws due to the over-ambitious scale of its premises. Ulysses’ Gaze stands apart in Greek cinema and probably in European cinema for its scope, imagery and perspective. It is as if the European epic tradition of bildungsroman found in its images the culmination of successive and intense experimentations with form and mythmaking. Released in 1995, it is an international production with three other countries (Italy, France, and Germany) and runs for 176 minutes. Starring Harvey Keitel and filmed in situ throughout the Balkans, especially in the city of Mostar, where the war was still raging, it became a cinematic landmark because of its boldness or, as its detractors would claim, its hubris. Loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, the script was wri en by Angelopoulos in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris and Giorgio Silvagni. The modernist reinscription of classical myths in this film finds an intriguing and imaginative manifestation with the constant parallelism between past and present, bringing to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses. The production was memorialised as an event in itself in a series of evocative shots by the famous Czech photographer Josef Koudelka that

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express the legend around the film and its director. Koudelka said that for him it reflects ‘. . . his own journey of endless, restless discovery through the lens.’12 It received major international awards, including the International Critics Award at the Cannes Festival and the Felix award by the European Film Academy, although it lost the Palme D’ Or to Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995), something that annoyed Angelopoulos profoundly. Margarita Manda, as assistant director, le a detailed and moving diary, both verbal and photographic, of the exciting adventures during the production, starting with the unexpected death, before shooting began, of the Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté, to whose memory the movie is dedicated. Manda also assisted in the revision of the script as it was crystallised, revealing that Angelopoulos used to call her ‘. . . between five and six in the morning to share with me the various changes, re-writings, restructurings of the script as he had seen them in his sleep at night – and together with them recite a verse from his poems or a poem from other poets’ (Manda 2013: 7) that he would use in the film. The film is about a Greek American director, identified only by the Ka aesque initial ‘A.’, who returns to the Balkans to find the first ever film reels made in the Balkans by the Maniaki Brothers in the early twentieth century. (The earliest surviving reels by the Maniaki Brothers date from 1906.) The film is about the exodus to the Balkans, several years a er the collapse of communist regimes in Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania and during the civil wars of 1994 in Yugoslavia. It is a magnificent and terrifying exploration of the disintegration of political structures, which previously only Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) had depicted in such depth and detail. Yet early in the film, we understand that this quest is not simply about the fall of communism or about some original reels. It is indeed ‘a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (Eliot 1975: 177). The chaos that was unleashed especially in Eastern Europe and the Balkans a er 1991 was not simply political: it entailed the collapse of history, the implosion of the last project of universal unification. The vacuum was both existential and metaphysical: the ancient myths in this film offered the structure, indeed the bridge, towards a new dramaturgical transformation of a disintegrated and sha ered reality. The film starts with footage of The Avdella Weavers – the first film made by the first cinematographers of the region, the famous Maniaki Brothers – with a voice-over of the main character wondering if this really was in fact the first film, ‘the first gaze’. The initial scene at the port of Thessaloniki almost comes out of a painting by René Magri e, as there is a photographer who dies in front of the camera while waiting to capture a blue boat

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sailing out. Thanassis Vasileiou points out that ‘Angelopoulos chooses a Magri e-like chromatic pale e, searching in the confusion of blue, for a final gaze before death. On the other hand, frequently, water is presented by Angelopoulos as the ideal landscape of death’ (Vasileiou 2013: 59). Arguably, this is the most pictorially accomplished film by Angelopoulos, based as it is on strong, primal and vibrant colours to the degree that the whole narrative is driven by the alternation of bold chromatic contrasts. Warm and intimate colours permeate all scenes in closed spaces, while cold and distancing ones dominate the external shots. Employing both Jacques-Louis David’s geometric compositions and Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic synaesthesia, Angelopoulos’ dynamic chromatic rhythms enliven and intensify the psychological effects of colours on the viewers, who gradually become ‘co-narrators of the myth’, as Petros Markaris observed (Markaris 2004: 82). As the central character ‘A.’ travels through destruction and death, he meets a number of people who are the gatekeepers of collective memory: a Greek taxi-driver, an old friend from the revolutionary youth, his own past in Romania, and when he arrives in Sarajevo, Ivo Levy, the Jewish restorer of the film archives – the ultimate custodian of European cultural memory. All these meetings are linked to an elusive woman – who appears in four personas akin to the Homeric Muse, or the gadfly that spurs him towards the end of his journey – ambiguously and provocatively performed by Maia Morgenstern. The muse guides him towards, and misguides him away, from his purpose. She is his Circe and Calliope; she wants him both domesticated and wild. Yet, whatever stops the journey is the negation of creative life but also a pointer to an illusion and the need for self-deception. Maybe the whole film is only a fantasy, a dream-work in the mind of an artist seeking creative fulfilment in an era of occluding social catastrophes. Free of his usual American bravado, Harvey Keitel is cautious and reserved, sometimes stilted, even cold, somehow wooden and constrained; but it is the physicality of his presence, especially the expressive qualities of his face, that defines the role. One can clearly feel the awkwardness in his acting and how deeply it differs from his performance in Martin Scorsese’s films, or even Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), a role that inspired Angelopoulos to recruit Keitel for his film. Angelopoulos claimed that Keitel needed to hear a song by Frank Sinatra while reminiscing about his mother in order to make him cry. It is obvious that Keitel felt ambivalent about his role; his training in Method acting conflicted with certain distancing stylisations that Angelopoulos wanted him to perform. The same can be said of Erland Josephson, one of the principal actors in Ingmar Bergman’s and Tarkovsky’s movies, whose acting seems confused and

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cumbersome – although like Keitel, his presence is much more eloquent than his acting. Angelopoulos’ Greek actors like Thanassis Vengos, Yorgos Michalakopoulos, Dora Volanaki and Mania Papadimitriou are more a uned to his directorial gaze and expectations, performing their role with the neoclassical elegance of sha ered memory. (Especially Papadimitriou in the role of his mother in Romania.) Thanassis Vengos, as the star of the comedies of the old commercial Greek cinema, renders his role with tragic ambiguity and sublime despair: is he a psychopomp or a village fool? Does he speak with the natural elements or is he the victim of the many conspiracy theories that thrive in the Balkans? Yet the profound disconnect between Vengos’ cinematic persona as a comic actor and his performance here as the Delphic oracle makes this scene full of majestic, almost sublime dramatic energy. There are some unique scenes in the film, such as the family reunion in Romania: a Shakespearean and Proustian moment of condensed emotional intensity and evocative power, taking place in three different years at the same place – probably the most important scene in the whole film, reminiscent of Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Another emblematic scene is the funeral of the last god of politics, Lenin, and its procession across the real and only god of Europe, the river Danube. The statue of the god that failed is greeted with respect and despair. Its destination is Germany in order to be sold for building material, which is equally ambiguous: is this the end into oblivion or a new life in a new form? The implicit storyline keeps these scenes together in a loose but effective manner, although the incomplete connections are obvious. Karaindrou’s music, with its emotional sonorities, over-sentimentalises filmic temporality, but Angelopoulos bypasses this by consciously accelerating the pace of his narrative flow. The grey of Lenin’s broken statue enhances the mood of an imploding world. The scene of his funeral procession, with people crossing themselves, and the natural sounds of the boat and the river alternating with the oboe, the accordion and the viola is an elegy to the hero’s final journey to the Underworld. The last shots reveal the broken finger of his statue, seemingly a mystifying reference to the hand with the broken finger in Landscape in the Mist. Is this a vivid symbol of a lost unity, or simply a phantom and a hallucination? The film ends with the screening of the developed reels, which we cannot actually see. It seems that here he has finally embodied his belief in the miraculous and thaumaturgic character of cinema, with cinematic images representing the ultimate metaphysical code in the era of fragmented post-politics or indeed nihilistic anti-politics. In presenting the earliest surviving recording of life in the Balkans through the camera of the Maniaki

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Brothers at the beginning of the film, we are given the gaze of the ‘weavers’ as the first pure gaze towards the future, as the past looks back at us today with wonderment and confusion, inviting us to resurrect and relive it. The development of the missing reels means a reconnection with the innocence of the cinematic transformation of reality. The restorer of films in Sarajevo simply says: ‘What am I if not the collector of vanished gazes?’ Under pressure by the traumas of history, so poignantly expressed in the scene when Keitel cries, Angelopoulos seems somehow to flirt with Mallarmé’s idea that ‘all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book’ (Mallarmé 2004: 729); in this case, everything exists to become cinematic image. There is a strong element of aestheticisation, or even of aestheticism, in the film, expressed through the monumental and the gargantuan, which seems to reflect Angelopoulos’ exploration of the cinematic sublime. Occasionally, during its scenes, Angelopoulos manages to capture glimpses of the sublime, but his camera seems hesitant and somehow holds back: by imposing the mythic substructure on the chaos of history, his Marxist past reacts to the antinomies of collective activity. In a sense, his rationalism is in conflict with the unrepresentable subtexts of history: the dream that evolved into a nightmare is something that really puzzles Angelopoulos. And it seems that he does not want to believe that the drama was probably a nightmare since its inception. Ultimately, however, cinematic images redeem reality from its contradictions and become themselves the gaze, the originary topos of existential revelation, as we see at the end of the film. Is this the mythical war in Troy or the real war in contemporary Sarajevo? Undoubtedly, Angelopoulos’ quest in this film reached its limit, and in many ways we can detect his perplexity and bewilderment in front of his own aesthetic and political choices. In the end, the film speaks through its lacunae, its silences and its ruptures. Despite the Homeric storyline, it is a series of fragmented episodes, a series of movements that are in search of their coherence and connecting threads. Roger Ebert seems not to have understood this in his flippant review when he wrote: ‘What’s le a er Ulysses’ Gaze is the impression of a film made by a director so impressed with the gravity and importance of his theme that he wants to weed out any moviegoers seeking interest, grace, humour or involvement.’13 A more perceptive critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, stated: ‘Magisterially filmed, this movie demands at almost every instant to be regarded as a masterpiece, though for me it’s too full of itself and its own virtue.’14 Indeed, the reservations for the overall organic accomplishment of the film are counterbalanced by the gravity of each individual scene; in a way, the film can be seen as a chain of dream-like sequences in an almost associative and deliberately disjointed narrative line.

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Some of the critics were able to discern many contradictory subtexts, but they were unable to detect Angelopoulos’ ‘architectural plan’ for their incorporation in the complete cinematic geography of the film. Rafailidis, in a rambling but highly stimulating essay, correctly pointed out the connection not only with Homer’s Odyssey but also with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and saw the film in an adversarial dialogue with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1978). ‘This is another Odyssey,’ he stated, ‘in which the hero searches for the truth in the jungle, . . . and you must have the ‘hunter’s instinct’ and in this case the instinct of the hunter of images to be able to wander with ease through the Balkan jungle . . . while so dexterously targeting truth through your camera’ (Rafailidis 2003: 126). And as Geoff Andrew observed, the hope of the ‘A’ is ‘that rediscovering the lost Maniaki footage, he’ll be able to restore an “innocence” to his own cinematic gaze’ (Fainaru 2001: 91). In a sense, the disenchantment with politics and history led Angelopoulos to implicitly endorse Nietzsche’s existential pronouncement that ‘for only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified to eternity’ (Nietzsche 1999 [1872]: 38). Rafailidis also notes the Nietzschean subtexts in the film and interestingly adds: ‘At the same time, [a er the death of god by Nietzsche] Spengler declared the death of civilisation. What survives this double murder? Only cinema. A new God and a new civilisation were born with it, at the time when Nietzsche and Spengler announced the double death of God and the logic on which Western civilisation relies’ (Rafailidis 2003: 103–4). In this respect, the grandiose almost eschatological auteur appears dominant in this film, a role that Angelopoulos seems to bestow upon himself. The screening of a film at the start of this film points to his previous movie The Suspended Step of the Stork, about which a journalist claims that it had ‘shaken the world.’ But there are also two strange scenes. The first is when the taxi-driver delivers his tragic-comic eulogy on the Greek nation: ‘Greece dies. We die as people! They completed our circle. . . . Three thousand years in the midst of broken stones and statues . . . And we die . . . But if Greece is to die, let her die fast. But agony lasts long and makes a lot of noise . . .’ The prophetic announcement in this statement indicates the strange role that Angelopoulos takes on; to express the perennialism of the Greek people in their land and pronounce his anxiety about the future. This anxiety permeates the fin de siècle mood of the film, as worlds collapse and the camera simply records ruins and destroyed architectural monuments. For Angelopoulos, the un-homing of people from their ancestral places becomes crucial. The second strange scene is when Christians and Muslims bury their dead in the same cemetery, which is an expression of the

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absurdity of wars, which Angelopoulos visually declares like a biblical prophet. The final speech, a paraphrase of certain famous Homeric verses, by ‘A’ looking directly to the camera comes as a prophetic statement about the future of humanity and the role of cinema in shaping it. The film ends with a blank screen, which becomes the soul into which the spectators must look in order to recognise the ‘adventure’ of their own soul and the film that they themselves must make and visualise. These are the most intriguing elements in the film, together with some equally interesting topics like the circular character of history, the uneasy symbiosis between past and present and the timelessness of the individual unconscious. However, the quest for the cinematic sublime is occasionally transformed into the worship of the over-human as physical gigantism, in a form of spiritual titanism. Politically, the film monumentalises not only the collapse of socialism, the last universal project of revolutionary Enlightenment, but also the first disappointments with the vision of a unified Europe, which supposedly was to bring peace and prosperity for everyone on a continent ravaged by so many wars. But Angelopoulos’ Europe has an American accent through Harvey Keitel and looks more like a phantom of, or a nostalgia for, Europe that existed only in its literature and art. This accounts for Angelopoulos’ script (Angelopoulos 1995), which, as it has been published in its entirety, can be studied for what he le out or intended to include. A careful reading of the script, which is heavily edited in its cinematic adaptation, shows the highly literary character of a dialogue based on poems, referencing mostly discourses going back to Homer, Seferis, Eliot, Rilke, Cavafy and Shakespeare, among others. It is based on poetic, mostly dramatised monologues, with constant symbolic references and implied allusions to poetic texts. In a sense, it records Angelopoulos’ deep dialogue with Seferis’ poetry and the vision of historical experience as anxiety and fear, first for contemporary Hellenism and then for the future of the European civilisation. His concern with the universalism of Hellenic and European cultures is the powerful undercurrent in the film. To the mountainous Balkan landscape, he adds something that he adopted from Seferis, as what we do not see at the end of the film, the unfilmable primary gaze, also expresses Angelopoulos’ own reference to the ‘maternal gaze’ of the Mediterranean. In a discussion with Rafailidis, Angelopoulos revealed his relationship with the Mediterranean south, which will become an important theme and background for his next film. What makes people relocate and suddenly a man from the South migrates to the North, I don’t know. I know however and feel that this area is suspended. I feel that this is a more vulnerable region or maybe I see open

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horizons beyond what the eye can see. I feel that people up here are more closed, as if hiding a secret. I feel certain things which I don’t understand and perhaps I come here for them. (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 161)

Angelopoulos also revealed that in the film ‘A’ is seeking a way out of a crisis that is both his own and that of an entire generation. ‘. . . And to a great extent, his crisis is my own too’ (Fainaru 2001: 94). The personal aspect of the crisis became prominent with his next film Eternity and a Day (1998). It is a densely structured and emotionally powerful film, not simply based on the monumentality of images but on the depth and complexity of human emotions cinematically expressed as a Proustian meditation on human memory. It is a film that achieved the cinematic sublime from its first moment till its final scene. The film deconstructs and reconstructs his own cinematic language, something that would eventually lead to his last two films in which the personal crisis becomes the ontological grounding for his renewed semiotics, as the epic scope and the lyric sensibility are dissociated and somehow lose the energy of their uneasy symbiosis. Eternity and a Day is about the artistic sublimation of mortality, and by extension the psychology of art and the artist, with the implicit presupposition that our greatest artwork is our own death. Together with Landscape in the Mist, it is his most accomplished film, making a decisive contribution to cinema as a new language of the sublime. In a way, it is a fusion of Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice (1985), through a strong existential problematic but without the obscure religiosity of the la er or the sensual exuberance of the former. It is a deeply humanistic film, exploring beyond ideological claims or political theories the personal confrontation with death as the unveiling of pure human interiority. With the strange reference to William Shakespeare’s As You Like It in the title: ‘Forever and a day’ (Act V, scene 1, verse 152), Angelopoulos foregrounds the strong theatricality that permeates Bruno Ganz’s peculiar performance as the dying poet. Released in 1998, this international production runs for 130 minutes. Its magnificently saturated colour pa erns alternate between the nuances of marine blue and the shades of grey, with striking colours like yellow and black punctuating its chromatic homogeneity. It is one of the best films of the decade and a deserving winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Wri en by Angelopoulos in collaboration with Tonino Guerra and Petros Markaris, it expresses his most persistent and systematic existentialist meditation on life, mortality, creativity and memory. Markaris’ book on their collaboration gives an eloquent narrative of the intellectual, aesthetic and autobiographical fermentation that lasted for over a year about a film that ‘although about death is not about the end, in an era that all talk about the end’ (Markaris 1998: 21). Markaris also points out the

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permeating poetic tone and mood in the conception of the film, focused on Ganz’s character (Alexander, a writer), who knowing he will die soon is struggling to complete the unfinished works of the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857). Ganz ‘is the poet of today who goes back to past, two centuries back, in the time of the actual Solomos, two centuries earlier, but as he is today. It reminds us of the flashback in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which was only a personal story in that film but here is the story of a poem.’ Markaris concludes by foregrounding the temporal continuum as experienced in poetic u erances: ‘This was an astonishing idea, since not only the poem Hymn to Liberty never ends, but poetry takes a diachronic significance in the film. It is as if all poets write one and the same poem which is never finished’ (Markaris 1998: 38). The tense collaboration between the two directors of photography, Arvanitis and Sinanos, plays an organic role in creating the dream-like sense of recollecting the past and living the present moment. Karaindrou’s music, using piano and wind instruments and sounding like Chopin’s Nocturnes, is more discreet than in the previous film. It enhances the atmosphere of an imminent end without over-sentimentalising it. Imposing and arresting, Bruno Ganz’s acting (although in Angelopoulos’ mind the role was made for Marcello Mastroianni, who had died the previous year) is supported by Isabelle Renauld as Anna, Alexandra Ladikou as her mother, and Despina Bebedelli as his mother, who all give magisterial performances full of emotional evocations, enhanced by elaborately stylised clothes and gestures. The Albanian child is played with exquisite simplicity by the amateur actor Achilleas Skevis. Appearing like a meteoric and random romantic vision, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, the award-winning Italian actor from Silvio Soldini’s A Soul Divided in Two/ Un’anima divisa in due (1993) and Michele Placido’s An Ordinary Hero/ Un Eroe Borghese (1995), gives an especially eloquent and measured performance as the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos. The spectre of Dionysios Solomos looms large even in his absence throughout the film. Solomos as a physical presence appears in two crucial scenes; the first is set in the past with his return to his native land from Italy because of the Greek revolution of 1821, and the second, in the most eerie scene of the film, is set on a bus in contemporary times, with three yellow bicycle riders following it through the night. Solomos established modern Greek literature but is torn between the Greek and Italian languages, and he never finished his greatest poems. The whole film is about a personal poetic language, as the Heideggerian poetic Ursprache of the originary existence, in order to reconnect with a complete self, lost or forgo en: ‘Why did I live my life in exile?’ the writer, Alexander, confides to his dying mother. ‘Why the only moments I returned were when only I

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was given the grace to speak my language . . . my own language . . . When I could find again lost or drag out of silence forgo en words . . .’ The film is about these questions and the deep existential openings they offer. A chance meeting between the Alexander and a migrant child from Albania brings him either a vision of grace or an illusory way out of his entrapment. The child is to the dying writer what Beatrice was to Dante, taking him to the limits of his existence and through the events that test the recognition of his own soul, showing him the dilemmas of being. The scene at the borders with people hanging onto the fence is probably one of the most astonishing and ominous scenes in modern cinema. Without specifying the place, the image is based on a medieval depiction of the condemned struggle to escape, with the elongated figure of their guardian approaching menacingly as if ready to snatch away the li le child, in an iconographic pa ern reminiscent of Luca Signorelli’s frightening paintings. It also shows one of the most terrifying scenes in Angelopoulos’ search for the cinematic depiction of self-contained, purely imaginative images without reference to or dependence on experiential realities; the border fences, with all the faceless people hanging on them, capture the mysterium tremendum of the ‘other shore’, which stands too close to the everyday, tragic predicament of contemporary people. Solomos is also pertinent here in his most metaphysical poem O Porphyras (The Shark), associating death with Hegelian self-recognition. The metaphysics of ecstatic mystical presence that we see in Solomos’ mature poems become the central element of the film’s own implied existential statement: Before it ceased the brave breath experienced great joy; A light flashed like lightning and the youth knew himself; The worlds opened round him, crowning him with laurels, ... A remnant most wonderful of solitude and splendour, Oh good and handsome stranger, while your youth blossoms, Go and accept by the strand the mighty man’s weeping. (Solomos 1998: 144–45)

The film ends with the child sailing on the endless and fearsome sea, while Alexander is gradually absorbed by it; sea and mother, La mer and La mère, in Lacanian terms. The final long take begins with Alexander entering the house of his birth; the twenty minutes in which we go through his life and witness his death comprise one of the most powerful and evocative embodiments of the sublime in modern cinema. Sounds, lighting and colours dance around the dying body of the writer as if in the first day of his birth: everything is surreal and monumental. But the film is not about disconnected episodes, despite its anti-epic character. It is full of lyricism and fluidity, full of emotions and premoni-

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tions, numinosity and dread at the same time. Random incidents appear suddenly like the strange wedding in the middle of the city, or unconscious primeval rituals like the burning of Selim’s clothes (reminiscent of certain scenes in Angelopoulos’ first film Reconstruction). The poetry of Seferis, Solomos, Ritsos and Paul Celan, among others, suffuses the dialogues. The missing final stanza from Solomos’ poem as told in the bus scene is also indicative: A gentle breeze caressed faces most fine Making man exclaim from his heart’s depth That life is sweetness and [darkness is death]. (Solomos 1998: 101)

The incomplete final verse is the key to Angelopoulos’ meditation on mortality. The story is about a descent into the poet’s unconscious in order to explore the birth of the idea for the film. It is a meditation on what makes a film significant and gives meaning to its visual symbolism. Angelopoulos in a psychologically informed prologue to the publication of the script wrote: The period that precedes the writing of a script is a period of humidity, with strange variables, and presumably unjustified sensitisations. Alternations between absent-mindedness and readiness. It is a period of double life. The noisy part of your self lives the everydayness as always, while the noiseless part weaves secrets, with invisible materials, which when matured they will come to the surface, in an unsuspicious moment, traversing with tremendous easiness all filters of everydayness. (Angelopoulos 1998: 8–9).

In a succinct and sensitive review of the film, Nigel Andrews wrote: ‘An Angelopoulos haiku! For all its abstractions, Eternity and a Day has the beauty and the immediacy of great music. . . . A film about a poet [which] is also a film about everyone’ (Andrews 1999). Dan Schneider stresses the scope of the film to explore the unconscious of the main character and contrasts it to Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. ‘Yet,’ he says, where the former film achieves its aims by balancing out the life of the dying man with that of a young woman, then turns the film on its head by dealing with the legacy of the man a er his death, and the la er film evokes dread by displaying the subconscious memories of its lead character, Eternity and a Day splits the difference.

He concludes his review as follows: Angelopoulos reveals that, while he is the equal of the best filmmakers in the art’s history, such as Fellini or Bergman, he has more seriousness than the former, and a more profound empathy than the la er. Where that ultimately places him on the scale of the cinematic pantheon is to be argued over, but not the fact that he belongs. He and this film are that great.15

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The death of the Alexander also means his resurrection; through his words he is saved from oblivion and saves the words from forgetfulness. He saved the phenomena and through that act he is himself saved, probably also redeemed. The film ends with the sca ered words being heard spasmodically from the mist as we o en see in the fragmented and incomplete Solomos’ manuscripts. The cinematic text is also absorbed too, and the film ends as it begins with a Heracletian meditation on time: ‘time is a child who plays with pebbles on the edge of the sea . . .’ (Heraclitus 1987: 36). This concept of historical time lost but saved through words or images will resurface in his next film and will remain visually and thematically the principal concern of his cinematic philosophy. Lived temporality was at the heart of his visual language as the organising principle and the ultimate telos of his images. Angelopoulos liked repeating Eliot’s verse ‘In my beginning is my end’ in many interviews, as encapsulating his own perception of time. And while talking about this film, he stated: ‘The journey, the borders, the exile. Human destiny. The eternal return. And more. All my obsessions come in and out of my films, as remain silent until they later resurface, the instruments of an orchestra.’16 Eternity and a Day can be seen and heard as a Wagnerian symphonic rite of passage both to the eternity of art and the reality of now. As Eleni Karaindrou, the composer of its music, said: For Eternity and a Day, the sixth of our joint works, Angelopoulos received the Golden Phoenix at Cannes, by making a film, a poetic meditation, on human existence and its limitations, leaving us with the great question, what is tomorrow, how long does it last . . . ? An eternity and a day. He borrowed the answer from Shakespeare but extended it through his own personal reflections.17

Between Scepticism and Nihilism Talking about the three cryptic words that are u ered by the dying poet in Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos explained: ‘The first stands for everything that is love, closeness, intimacy with whoever it may be, your mother or your lover. The second expresses the existential side of the story. And the third expresses time’ (Fainaru 2001: 110). These are the concerns of his final two films, which, although planned to form a trilogy, stand quite independently in visual style, thematic structure and ultimate cinematic temporality. The Weeping Meadow is an international production, set entirely in Greece, with Greek actors and a Greek storyline. Margarita Manda published the original short story that Angelopoulos first wrote before amplifying it with dialogue and action. ‘It is an elegy on

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human destiny,’ Manda quotes Angelopoulos saying. ‘A poetic apologia for the century that le and a visionary relationship with the new century, through a love affair that challenges time’ (Manda 2004: 187). The final script was co-wri en with Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris and Giorgio Silvagni. The director of photography was Andreas Sinanos, and it runs for 172 minutes. Karaindrou’s music is rhetorical and overpowering, excessively enhancing and magnifying emotions, and at times takes over the visual narrative rather than underlining its expressive potential. The film is emotionally overcharged, acquiring almost melodramatic characteristics. Expressing a growing scepticism about the past, it is a historical melodrama, unlike The Travelling Players or Megalexandros, almost challenging all premises that Angelopoulos employed in these films. Angelopoulos built and then destroyed an entire village by sinking it into an artificial lake, in order to show the grand scale of the idea and the magnitude of its scope – although at the end, the film remains somehow episodic as it oscillates between melodrama and epic, somewhere in the space between John Ford’s The Searchers (1954) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976). Sinanos’ subdued monochromatic photography, in different aspect ratios, does not stress the variety and nuanced colouration of the previous two films. It is characterised by grand geometric arrangements, executed with absolute symmetry and balance, without therefore the chaos they imply (as is the scene with the sinking village, the tree with the slaughtered animals or the bright white linens). The scenes of the sinking village become emblematic of a baroque and somehow neoclassical monumental style, which, however, is lacking in variety and complexity. In the previous films, Angelopoulos used frames within frames, small stories within a large narrative, which gave each shot a multilayered and polycentric structure. In this film, the camera stands still in front of these enormous frescos, from a specific vanishing point and a renaissance-like perspective, which seem to suffer from horror vacui through a stylised and abstract geometry. Ultimately, the film presents a succession of monumental stills, photographic and immobilised, deprived of the kinetic qualities of the images in the previous works. The story, loosely again based on the ancient Theban cycle of the Lavdakides family, revolves around Greek refugees from Odessa who arrive in Greece in 1919 and are given a swamp to rebuild their life. Here they create a new world centred on the family. A er the death of his wife, the autocratic father wants to marry his adopted daughter, Eleni, who, however, elopes with his son, Alexi, with whom she already has two children. They join a group of itinerant musicians and wander through Greece until Alexi leaves for America. Eleni stays behind only to see both her sons die

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in the Civil War on opposite political sides. The final scene of the mother weeping loudly in front of the sea is both poignant and archetypal, Lacanian and Aristotelian. Angelopoulos used some of his old actors, like the imposing Yorgos Armenis, the menacing Vasilis Kolovos, the majestic Eva Kotamanidou and even the ambiguous Toula Stathopoulou from his first movie. The choice of the two young and overwhelmed protagonists, Alexandra Aidini and Nikos Poursanidis, was not felicitous, since they never quite calibrate convincingly their roles, and their filmic presence is weak. Their purposefully poetic dialogue is delivered too awkwardly, making them sound artificial and too self-conscious. Yet on many occasions, the film presents images of profound psychological depth and compositional beauty. Angelopoulos used the word ‘magical’ to indicate the function of images in his films (Fainaru 2001: 103); it seems that his main concern in the film is to explore transcendent dimensions of the cinematic sublime that have preoccupied him since Ulysses’ Gaze, by immersing the viewer’s eyes into huge and colourful frescos. The Jungian (and Biblical) archetypal symbolism is vividly present in the surreal scene of the tree with the slaughtered animals. This is how the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, or the phallic Tree of Jesse or even the Tree of Innocence in the Landscape in the Mist are transformed into a tree of murder, slaughter and death. The viewers are invited to enter the age of the assassins: the short twentieth century in its alluring cruelty and glorified barbarism. Ronald Bergan, rather inaccurately, wrote that: ‘The mytho-poetic dimension of the film – a magical fusion of colours, sounds, music and images which expresses the deepest feelings surrounding life and death – is linked, as usual, to a strong political and social context.’18 In reality, the film is the antithesis of The Travelling Players and The Hunters and their political context. It is interested in the emotional conflicts and complexities of its own architecture but not of its characters. The characters try to escape their own history and identity: they struggle desperately to reimagine their existence. Maria Katsounaki wrote: Now the wedding dress is cold, spectral, and the black flags escort a funeral in the river, revolutionary enthusiasm becomes a funeral elegy. . . . pale faces, ‘frozen’ landscapes, water prevailing everywhere, sometimes tranquil like memory, other times threatening like death. Images of another world haunted by thoughts and frustrations. Towards the end, the heroine, half fainted by the pain of loss, soliloquises (condensing a heart-breaking elliptical narrative at the centre of the film): Guard, I am exiled from everywhere . . .19

The use of flashbacks is a strange gesture of reconciliation with the traditional narrative pa erns of classical cinema and it becomes more frequent in his last films.

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Angelopoulos himself reads the initial narrative, in the first scenes, that contextualises the film. His voice becomes the home for the existentially homeless people dominating the story. This is one of the most interesting twists in the film, with the poet announcing the story as in ancient Greek tragedy, especially Euripidean drama. The father and the son are in love with the same woman. This is Angelopoulos’ own version of Euripides’ Phaedra in a context of imploding social realities, before he evolves the drama into Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus’ tragedy of fratricidal catastrophe. Yet it all ends in the house where it began. The Lavdakides family saga of Oedipus and Jocasta resurfaces in a new form in this film; the ancestral home is the source of original crime, the ultimate ontological condition for self-alienation and the perpetual criminal background in all post-war historical experience. The reception of the film was ambivalent: many recognised that Angelopoulos was testing new ground by reversing the evolution of his own filmic imagery, while others thought that the film was too ambitious and failed to fulfil its own premises. Yet the bold visual experimentation that we find in it, together with the layered exploration of existential aspects of love, is beyond dispute. Angelopoulos used melodrama so consciously and deliberately that he constructed an anti-individualistic visual essay on the social life of personal emotions. It is probably the most antimelodramatic melodrama ever made, full of unexpected non-sequiturs, emotional breaks and incomplete storylines – and of course no happy ending or cathartic closure. The unfinished verses of the poet Solomos in his previous film become here fragments of images implying grand narratives that have vanished and cannot be retrieved. Revolutionary utopian projects and their ontological foundations forming the utopian subject without certainties and without horizon is the central theme of this movie. The fragility of human emotions is magnificently visualised by the un-weaving of the pullover when Alexis migrates to America. The thread is severed, and humans lose each other in the tyranny of distance. The film ends rather abruptly and with a strange, almost non-sequitur episode of the death of two children with their mother crying over the body of one of them. The pathos of the scene is rather excessive and challenging. The landscape of death that the sea is for Angelopoulos becomes here almost a return to the colourless amniotic fluids of birth. Sinanos’ camera links this with the final scene of the previous film: the end is a regressus ad uterum, a return to the womb where the first crime and original sin took place. Despite its ‘political façade’, the film is the most psychoanalytic a empt by Angelopoulos to retrieve the paradisiac unity of the womb – something impossible and self-destructive, but also embodying the desire

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to retrieve the only completeness and unity that all humans have ever experienced. His next film, The Dust of Time, brought this experimentation with filmic temporality to such an extreme that very few critics were in the position to accept or even follow it. If The Weeping Meadow is about fragmented visual narratives that seek a formal order to be connected and therefore become meaningful, this final film is a strange experimentation with centrifugal perspectives in time, which only converge on the cinematic image where they can find their unity. The multilayered narrative starts from two moments, one in the past and the other in the present, which coevolve and converge at the end of the film, overturning their temporal positions: the characters in 1949 become the characters they are going to be in 1999, and those in 1999 revert to who they were in 1949. The children are the parents and the parents are the children in a perpetual re-enactment of an existential drama of unrequited love, separation and loss within and over borders in a deterritorialised state of alienation, oblivion and concealment. Viewers are le with the impression that they are watching an episode of the Twilight Zone, as temporal flow moves up and down in a game of unexpected confluences. The young self includes the old by moving towards it while moving away from its present reality. In a sense, the philosophical premise of the film goes back to Heraclitus’ dictum: Hodos anô katô mia kai hôutê (A road up and down is one and the same road) (Heraclitus 1987: 40) and its modern reimagining by J.D. Dunne. In his pioneering study, An Experiment with Time, Dunne argued that past, present and future are continuous and coexistent: ‘The time dimension for any given observer is simply the dimension in which his own world-line happens to extend, through the four-dimensional continuum’ (Dunne 1958 [1927]: 123). Angelopoulos’ last movie is based on exactly this premise, as already noted by Asbjørn Grønstad (Grønstad 2015: 271). In the mind of the viewer, past, present and future coexist and enforce each other in a strange conflation of temporal dimensions. There is a glimpse of such conflation in Reconstruction, but in his final film, time is indeed ‘out of joint’: the three central characters exist in various moments of time simultaneously as different masks or selves of the same emotional continuum. The young Eleni is also the old Eleni and Spyros and Jacob are also their young and old selves simultaneously, as the three central characters in the film. The secrets of old age live in the vital enthusiasm of youth as if history repeats itself in an almost post-human way. The link is, according to Maria Katsounaki, ‘the touch of the filmmaker’, which nevertheless ‘remains incomplete; it is hidden in the History while inspired (and breathing) by the small encounters of a great love affair. It is as simple and as lonely.’20

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The film, a pan-European production with an international cast, was released in 2008. Guerra, Markaris and Silvagni developed an original idea by Angelopoulos. Eleni Karaindrou composed the minimalistic score, and Andreas Sinanos was director of photography. Although it never received a wide release or any prestigious awards, it is, despite its flaws, a master work of exquisite complexity, something that is yet to be discovered as a visual field of contested and somehow colliding paradigms. Angelopoulos cast Willem Dafoe as Alexander, the Greek American director who is making a film about his parents a er the Greek Civil War. Their story, connected to Eleni’s and Spyros’ adventures in the previous film, takes place in Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA over a period of forty years. In this multilingual historical fantasy, the son tries to reconstruct their life, through le ers, photographs and memories, but at the same time he must also live his own life, because his young daughter has become involved with underground gangs and drug dealers in Berlin. Dafoe was probably not the right person for the role, but he occasionally manages to deliver some good moments, especially when he remains silent. Next to him, the neo-biblical figures of Bruno Ganz and Michel Piccoli, both emblematic figures of the seventies’ cinema of liberation and experimentation, offer pure cinematic performances, but Irène Jacob, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s charming protagonist, is cold and distant. Angelopoulos envisaged Harvey Keitel for the role of Spyros, and it seems that he had many ‘difficulties’21 working with Michel Piccoli. The frustration can be detected in Piccoli’s rather stand-offish performative style in contrast to the engaging and introspective acting by Bruno Ganz, who had already worked with Angelopoulos. Other actors, especially for scenes in the imaginary Soviet Union, deserve more a ention. They are surreal and oneiric in their monumental and expansive composition: the whole film can be viewed as a dream-like sequence of shadowy episodes loosely linked as in the memory of an old person whose sense of time is blurred and vague. Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ music in the middle of Kazakhstan seems like an episode from another movie. The enormous whiteness of the snow is the background for the story, indicating the cold oblivion that engulfed the Soviet past, so tragically envisaged by the dismantled statues of Stalin, as prefiguration (and in Angelopoulos’ iconography a postscript) of the sha ered statue of Lenin in Ulysses’ Gaze. The film presents a strong autobiographical element, especially in the scene at the beginning, where Alexander works with the composer for the music of his movie, a clear reference to Angelopoulos and Karaindrou. The film begins in the actual studios of Cineci à as a visual homage to

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the directors who have worked there. (It is also the burial place of Fellini and in a way the film constitutes a homage to him.) What Angelopoulos is stating here is that the legendary studio of the city is the true home of all filmmakers, the birthplace of all European filmmaking; his film ends where everything began when history created cinema and cinema recreated history. The film within the film focuses on modern metallic sounds of traffic, ringtones, cars and radios as underscoring the stimulating cacophony of modern life. This is juxtaposed with the contemporary drama of a confused generation worshiping Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, The Silence of the Lambs and Che Guevara. Angelopoulos revealed that he modelled the room of Alexander’s daughter in Berlin on his own daughter’s room in Athens. Together with the suggestive music by Karaindrou, he used rock music by the modern group 15.15, with their bold and aggressive lyrics of protest and rage. The American touch is also seen in the unexpected presence of a form of dynamic montage, which indicates a rapprochement with the Hollywood aesthetics of his youth. Angelopoulos declared: I never liked the cinema of montage. I accepted it in Eisenstein because it produced a scope that you couldn’t deny. However, I preferred Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible to the one of October. This is the reason for my special love for Antonioni. Especially in his early period when he leaves a fading out, an exhaling, an a ertaste in all his shots. Cu ing in contemporary cinema is violent on most occasions. There are many films that need it, of course, and whoever has seen my latest movie [The Dust of Time] will notice that since the dramatic material of the film needed it, I used some dynamic crossovers, but definitely not those of the American movies.22

Dan Fainaru points out that: ‘Close observers of his cinema will notice that his famous travelling shots are shorter here, and his camera is placed closer to the characters. The editing no longer just stitches together complicated camera movements, but has a role of its own, moving audiences out of one specific time and place and into another.’23 The close-ups zoom in on the details (hands, eyes, etc.) and ultimately the shadowy wrinkles of the human face, reminiscent of Bergman and Fellini. While this is obviously new ground for Angelopoulos, Sinanos’ camera remains cautious and reserved, almost hesitant to approach the enigma and the suffering of the human face. Peter Brune e is mostly critical of the casting choices: Even worse, characters o en act inconsistently – say, by suddenly shouting – which completely destroys the story’s believability. Worst of all, sometimes extremely unconvincing acting (Willem Dafoe is by far the greatest offender), or simply ridiculous improbabilities (for example, when one character continues to nap while two others have a loud conversation seated next to him), make other scenes feel completely fake.24

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Derek Alley also criticises the film: ‘A self-styled “poetic reckoning” of the past century and “a visionary relationship” with the present one, Theo Angelopoulos’ “The Dust of Time” rambles incoherently across two hours in a mass of embarrassingly arch English dialogue and impenetrable plo ing.’25 But the film is much more complex and interesting than critics suggest. Predominantly, it is a film about mood and atmosphere and less about action and movement. It stands close to Bergman’s Saraband and Tarr’s The Turin Horse, which can be seen as prolonged elegies to a visual style and the legacy of a fading century. The film ends in 1999, when the dust of time covers everything and only the cinematic image can save the memory of the twentieth century, the century of cinema. ‘Memory helps us read the present,’ Angelopoulos said, ‘which otherwise is inexplicable’ (Archimandritis 2013: 31). The scenes at the Ontario bar quote films by Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and show the love of Hollywood that Angelopoulos started expressing again at the end of his life. The film is also replete with self-commentary, as the director reflects and meditates on the practices of the director who invents him. As Angelopoulos said to Boskoitis: The narrative could not be achieved beyond what I would call replication, cinema within cinema within cinema again. Three levels of cinematic approach: the first is the real one in Rome. The second is what the director impersonated by Dafoe has already achieved and the third what he plans and imagines in his head. Finally, he himself enters that level and his personal life is dissolved in the filmic reality.26

The Dust of Time is about the society of screens and screening, the new arrangements in the rising century that screen out memory and privilege the eternal now of photographic copies. Angelopoulos explores the unreality of the presumed real in his most misunderstood and misconstrued film. The hyperbolic expression of emotions and the jumps in the script illustrate the question of how we represent human interiority in a time of the complete externalisation of everything. This was the question Angelopoulos was dealing with, or its cinematic representation. A er Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, it became the central question of philosophical thinking in the era of surveillance capitalism. ‘The gain for me,’ Angelopoulos said sentimentalism in the interview to Boskaitis mentioned previously, ‘is to see spectators in tears without the facile sentimentalism of contemporary mainstream cinema.’ The question if modern films can generate genuine and authentic emotional responses to the otherwise alienated spectators is at the heart of this flawed but highly challenging film. The question of a spectral nowness was to be the central theme of The Other Sea, the film Angelopoulos was in the process of making at the time

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of his death. George Archimandritis states that it would have been ‘about the dreams of a generation which struggled and lost them and the despair of a generation that didn’t find the time to dream’ (Archimandritis 2013: 139). The film was planned to express first the atmosphere of social and political crisis that had enveloped Greece and Europe a er 2009, and then the shaking up of existential and humanistic foundations of modern nation-states through the arrival of refugees and migrants as the archetypal strangers who challenge the certainties and the self-assurances of affluent bourgeoisie. Angelopoulos stated that he wanted to express the ‘life, rage and confusion’ of a man who sees the crisis from his window and cries. The story takes place in Piraeus around 2011 and is about the life of a man identified with the Ka aesque initial P, a businessman, the son of a family expelled from Constantinople in 1964 and his daughter E, who dreams, with her Iranian lover, of staging a production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at a factory with workers who have lost their jobs, while trying to escape to Western Europe. P has to supervise the illegal transport of refugees from Greece to Western Europe and becomes ruthless and corrupt to the degree that he plots the murder of his daughter’s lover. The Italian Toni Servillo, protagonist of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008), was given that role, and the production would have been funded by Italian, Turkish, French, German and Greek production companies. Only twenty minutes were actually filmed, based on an ever-changing script. Andrew Horton, in a moving memoir about the last film and their common work on the script, wrote that: ‘Suicide and departure from Greece are the conclusion of Theo’s trilogy, a hard message indeed. And yet one has to admire Theo’s courage in capturing both the complexity of being a human being and the difficulty of being “Greek” in this current world of conflict and confusion’ (Horton 2015: 290). The question of ‘national identity’ in an era of collapsing borders became the central question of Angelopoulos’ late visual style. But we will never know his complete cinematic answer. Aimilia Karali observed that: a permanent element of all his films is the theme of refugees. Not simply as a political or economic event but as a human condition that refers to us all. Angelopoulos himself felt like a ‘foreigner’ – the word he used in Eternity and a Day, as an exile from all around him and from love, with his work as his only home and motherland.27

Several months before he died, Angelopoulos released a short film, Sous-ciel (Céu Inferior) (or Sky Below from the series Invisible World produced by Leon Cakoff and Renata de Almeida) for the São Paulo Film Festival in Brazil, and in which, without script, he recorded the social con-

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trasts of the city of São Paulo through the prominent figure of an itinerant pastor calling people to repentance and life in Jesus Christ. The camera, masterfully handled by Mauricio Jordy and Roberto Santos Filho, hovers gently over the unconscious geometries of the urban brutalist architecture while immersed in the vibrant colours produced by sun rays at different hours of the day. Celebrating the vital energy and fervent belief of a random pastor preaching salvation through Jesus Christ to thousands of uninterested bystanders at the train station makes this film an unexpected and brilliant coda to the expressionist fusions of colours that we found in his last two films. The short closes on the graffiti of the Brazilian street artists Os Gêmeos painted on the walls of the city, while the camera immerses itself in the blinding radiance of the sun. The chromatic euphoria and the unedited ‘natural’ sense of urban temporality are spectacularly condensed to almost seven minutes in this magnificent short film that shows a master of cinematic visuality in his purest simplicity. The brief note at the end of the film is equally interesting and reads like an unsent love le er to Christianity – foregrounding a religious undertone that was a feature of his late films. ‘The people have been deceived’ is wri en in Portuguese by the famous Twin street artists and constitutes his other le er to the great ideas that betrayed those who believed in them. A er Angelopoulos’ sudden death, Peter Bradshaw wrote as a farewell: Ultimately, Angelopoulos’ themes are the great themes of exile and return, and the equivalent interior, spiritual sense of alienation and longing for peace. They connect with another great Greek trope: the wanderings of Odysseus. Angelopoulos’ work was recurrently about this endless journeying towards a home, receding over the horizon. Ulysses’ Gaze was Angelopoulos’ gaze – long, steady and profoundly mysterious.28

This simple obituary recapitulates some seminal themes of Angelopoulos’ filmmaking to which we must add the existential and autobiographical elements that give his films the emotional power and evocative imagery that make him relevant to our current conditions almost ten years a er his death.

After Angelopoulos, What? In 2012, Laurent Rigoulet wrote an article in French for Télérama under the title: ‘Cinéma Grec: après Angelopoulos, le vrai déluge?’ (‘Greek Cinema: A er Angelopoulos, the Real Deluge?’) Through a series of interviews with various new filmmakers, Rigoulet investigated what he called

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‘the energy of despair’ that inspired the up-and-coming moviemakers. Amongst them, Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of Dogtooth (2009), made the most scathing critical statements against Angelopoulos, presenting him as someone completely separated from contemporary realities and whose visual style had degenerated into formal academism. ‘Through his stature and his notoriety, he incarnated everything we hate in Greek cinema. He represented the establishment, the privileges, the entitlements, the impact of a system through which all funding went invariably and since ever to the same cinematographers.’29 Strangely enough, in many ways today, Lanthimos is the filmmaker who continues Angelopoulos’ work on the international stage, both constructively and antagonistically. But Angelopoulos’ very presence indicates that despite the criticism he established a visual language that transcends the limitations and the prejudices of a national cinema and has become a ‘question’, indeed a problematology that pertains to the construction and reception of art-house movies worldwide – something that Lanthimos himself had to face in his recent international films like The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018). Overall, Angelopoulos’ films have le an indelible mark on the history of Greek and European cinema. His films articulate complete aesthetic proposals, with always an explicit purpose to guide spectators on how to see films and how to relate to the cinematic as a way of being. The didactic element is nevertheless dissolved in the aesthetic unity of experience – and Angelopoulos was completely conscious of that. He also knew that filmmakers must always strike a convenient compromise between filmmaking as culture and filmmaking as industry. In one of his earliest interviews, with Olympia Tsipira in 1980, Angelopoulos stated: When a film is released, we are interested in how many tickets will sell or if it is popular. This is wrong. Its recognition comes truly with time. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. The degree that it endures time. And through this endurance its essence emerges. Its true value. There are things that when created were not immediately perceived by spectators, that proposed a new language, an unknown language. It takes time and a certain effort for the spectators to learn this new language.30

His language is both new and old in its complex iconography and semantic referentiality. Despite the unfair, unhistorical, negative criticism against him, his cinécriture transcends even the intentions of its creator, the restrictions of his era, or the potentialities of the cultural horizons that defined it, to the extent we can reconstruct them. Following Agnès Varda, as we saw in the beginning with Robert Bresson, we can locate Angelopoulos’ cinematic language not simply at the level of composing

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impressive or even sublime images but as aspiring ‘. . . for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling and a shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema and nothing else . . .’ (Bénézet 2014: 111). In an era of commodified entertainment, his marginal position yet conscious effort to communicate a new vision about cinema argues that filmmaking ‘. . . is not a profession but a way of breathing’, as himself said. A new language of seeing, an autonomous cinematic language, is also a new language for relating with others, therefore for living. And as he stressed as early as 1982: ‘Essentially, I want to make open films which may become the pretexts for new interpretations’ (in Kolovos 1990: 185). Probably the openness in the semantic structure of his films gives viewers the opportunity but more importantly the aesthetic and moral scaffolding to establish their own individual questioning of ideological beliefs and aesthetic systems that are taken for granted and are considered immutable. The constant changes in his work indicate that the cinematic screen can become the space in which the human mind can look at its own creative potential, intensify its willingness to reimagine itself and understand its own existential limitations. It remains to be seen what the posthumous life of Theo Angelopoulos the filmmaker will be.

Notes  1. ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos: He Taught Us To See’, imerodromos.gr, 27 April 2020. Retrieved from h ps://www.imerodromos.gr/thodoros-angelopoulosmas-emathe-na-vlepoume/.  2. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. n.d. ‘Archive for the ‘Directors: Angelopoulos’ Category: Tony and Theo’. Retrieved from h p://www.davidbord well.net/blog/category/directors-angelopoulos/.  3. Stefanos Kavalierakis. 2019. ‘Th. Tsakalotos: “We made a mistake then”. M. Vafiadis: “Probably my general”: 70 Years A er the Civil Wars’, Lifo, 30 August. Retrieved 2 January 2020 from h ps://www.lifo.gr/articles/greece_articles/ 249467/th-tsakalotos-kaname-lathos-tote-m-vafeiadis-mallon-stratige-moy.  4. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, ‘Archive’.  5. Christos Paridis. 2018. ‘Eva Kotamanidou Speaks on the Filming of The Travelling Players and the Grandeur of Theo Angelopoulos’, Lifo, 27 April. Retrieved from h ps://www.lifo.gr/articles/cinema_articles/190533/i-eya-kotamanidoymila-gia-ta-gyrismata-toy-thiasoy-kai-gia-to-megaleio-toy-thodoroy-aggelo poyloy.  6. Roger Ebert. 2000. ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’, Rogerebert.com, 25 June. Retrieved from h ps://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-moviethe-discreet-charm-of-the-bourgeoisie-1972.

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 7. Theo Prasidis. 2016. ‘The Magnificent Two: A Transnational Dialog Between Theo Angelopoulos and Akira Kurosawa’, Cult Antics, 12 June. Retrieved 10 January 2020 from h ps://cultantics.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/ the-magnificent-two/#_ n11.  8. Forrest Cardamenis. 2017. ‘The Greek Waste Land: Close-Up on Theo Angelopoulos’, MUBI, 27 April. Retrieved from h ps://mubi.com/notebook/posts/ the-greek-waste-land-close-up-on-theo-angelopoulos.  9. Wael Khairy. 2020. ‘A Work of Art Like Life Itself: Theo Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist’, Rogerebert.com, 20 January. Retrieved from h ps://www .rogerebert.com/far-flung-correspondents/a-work-of-art-like-life-itself-theoangelopoulos-landscape-in-the-mist. 10. Vrasidas Karalis. 2014. ‘Religion and Greek Cinema’, Filmicon, 28 December. Retrieved 20 December 2020 from h p://filmiconjournal.com/blog/post/35/ religion_and_greek_cinema. 11. Aimilia Karali. 2012. ‘The Director of Sky Below and The Other Sea’, Prin, 29 January. Retrieved 20 June 2020 from h ps://ilesxi.wordpress.com/2012/ 01/29. 12. Josef Koudelka. n.d. ‘Magnum on Set: Josef Koudelka and Ulysses’ Gaze’, Magnum Photos. Retrieved from https://www.magnumphotos.com/artsculture/cinema/magnum-on-set-josef-koudelka-ulysses-gaze-theo-angelopou los-war-yugoslavia-balkans-harvey-keitel/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medi um=social&utm_campaign=editorial&fbclid=IwAR2saXU1yuXBugmW1J o2hbKAvpAOZrNvpxYTcK9vM-PJV9Ie50LaHxqddiM. 13. Roger Ebert. 1997. ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ [review], Rogerbert.com, 18 April. Retrieved from h ps://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ulysses-gaze-1997. 14. Jonathan Rosenbaum. 1985. ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ [review], Chicago Reader, 26 October. Retrieved from h ps://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ulysses-gaze/ Film?oid=1071847. 15. Dan Schneider. 2007. ‘Eternity and a Day’ [DVD review], Blog Critics Magazine, 12 September. Retrieved 1 June 2020 from h ps://web.archive.org/ web/20070916065205/h p://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/09/12/221133.php. 16. Anon. 2020. ‘Theo Angelopoulos Journey to Eternity’, Cretalive News, 24 January. Retrieved 20 June 2020 from https://www.cretalive.gr/istoria/ taxidi-toy-thodoroy-aggelopoyloy-stin-aioniotita. 17. Quoted in Mandalena Mari Diamanti. 2017. ‘An Eternity and a Day, The Masterpiece of Th. Angelopoulos with the Amazing Music of Eleni Karaindrou’, Klik Music, 25 November. Retrieved 21 June 2020 from h ps://www.klik.gr/ gr/el/music/mia-aioniotita-kai-mia-mera-to-aristourgima-tou-th-aggelopou lou-me-tin-ekpliktiki-mousiki-tis-eleni-karaindrou--2/. 18. Ronald Bergan. 2012. ‘Theo Angelopoulos Obituary’, The Guardian, 25 January. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/25/ theo-angelopoulos. 19. Maria Katsounaki. 2004. ‘Dance of Images and Emotions’, I Kathimerini, 13 February. Retrieved from h ps://www.kathimerini.gr/175825/article/politismos/ arxeio-politismoy/xoros-eikonwn-kai-synais8hmatwn.

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20. Maria Katsounaki. 2009. ‘The “Touch” of the Filmmaker’, I Kathimerini, 12 February. Retrieved from h ps://www.kathimerini.gr/349296/article/politismos/ arxeio-politismoy/to-aggigma-toy-skhno8eth. 21. Antonis Boskoitis. 2017. ‘Theo Angelopoulos: I Was Always Moved By the Persistence of Love’, Lifo, 24 January. Retrieved from h ps://www .lifo.gr/articles/cinema_articles/130352/thodoros-aggelopoylos-emena-pan tote-me-sygkinoyse-i-emmoni-ston-erota. 22. Fani Zozia. n.d. ‘Interview of Theodoros Angelopoulos with Fani Zozia: We Live in a World that Does not Know Where it is Going’, Camera Stylo Online. Retrieved 2 June 2020 from h ps://camerastyloonline.wordpress .com/2009/02/22/theo_angelopoulos_interview_about_the_dust_of_time/. 23. Dan Fainaru. 2008. ‘The Dust of Time’, Screen Daily, 27 November. Retrieved from h ps://www.screendaily.com/features/the-dust-of-time/4042143.article. 24. Peter Brune e. 2009. ‘Film Review: The Dust of Time’, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 December. Retrieved from h ps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ film-review-dust-time-92901. 25. Derek Alley. 2009. ‘The Dust of Time’ [review], Variety, 17 February. Retrieved from h ps://variety.com/2009/film/reviews/the-dust-of-time-1200473607/. 26. Antonis Boskoitis. 2017. ‘Theo Angelopoulos: I Was Always Moved By the Persistence of Love’. 27. Aimilia Karali. 2014. ‘On the Meaning of Art and Life’, Prin, 13 February. Retrieved fromh p://prin.gr/?p=2930. 28. Peter Bradshaw. 2012. ‘Theo Angelopoulos: One Last Unfinished Tale for Chronicler of Modern Greece’, The Guardian, 25 January. Retrieved 23 May 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/jan/25/ theo-angelopoulos-chronicler-modern-greece. 29. Laurent Rigoulet. 2012. ‘Cinéma grec: après Angelopoulos, le vrai déluge?’ [‘Greek Cinema: A er Angelopoulos, the Real Deluge?’], Télérama, 25 April. Retrieved from h ps://www.telerama.fr/cinema/cinema-grec-apres-angelo poulos-le-vrai-deluge,80441.php. 30. Mentioned in the video ‘Angelopoulos on Slow Take and Recognition’. See h ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWq4dj5RCw4.

Chapter 3

The Construction of Theo Angelopoulos’ Cinematic Language



The Emerging Pattern From the ‘polyptych’ of Angelopoulos’ films and their complex lives and a erlives, we can clearly detect the constant transformation of a distinctive visual vocabulary throughout his filmmaking journey. Certainly, there is consistency and continuity, but his constant experimentation with style, mise en scène and subject ma er is undeniable. Angelopoulos’ complex and somehow confusing intellectual trajectory adheres closely to a pa ern of self-development best delineated by Søren Kierkegaard’s protoexistentialist quest of becoming subjective. Kierkegaard’s scheme of aesthetic, ethical and religious stages of human life can be used in the reverse to delineate Angelopoulos’ development. Kierkegaard noted that the movement towards gaining our own subjectivity indicates the concrete and specific ways through which humans realise and compile their own autobiographies: ‘The individual,’ he states, ‘has his teleology within him, has an inner teleology, is himself his own teleology, and his self, then, is the goal for which he strives’ (Kierkegaard 1992: 561). How such teleology is realised as subjectivity becomes a lived understanding of human finitude, one that is therefore the ultimate manifestation of self-consciousness. Angelopoulos started his filmmaking career with strong faith in a political ideology, which we could say was his own foundational religious, and indeed transcendental or absolute, initial stage. The ‘meaning’ in his

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films came from the structures they pointed to; cinematic images at best continued the function of non-cinematic institutions outside the cinematic frame. He then proceeded with an ethical valuation of historical consciousness through his exploration of the individual psyche as the topos of unique and distinct revelations (or in Heideggerian terms unconcealments). Institutions and structures were relegated from active perceptual formations to a background role as symbolic forms. Cinematic images took on a rather autonomous and autotelic function: they valuated structural realities and institutional impositions. In his next and most controversial stage, Angelopoulos proceeded with an aesthetic, or even aestheticised, understanding of lived experience, a process that both confused and inspired him. In the grand frescos of Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), the aesthetic dimension stands against the historical experience: it confronts and negates concrete references and significations. The aesthetic redeems the historical, as images try to encapsulate and indeed replace the invisible transcendental signifiers that emerge in history, through the presence of the uncanny and the ominous. In his final decade, however, a new and distinct stage of inconclusive and abeyant post-aestheticism was manifested through the expressionist emotionalism of its images. It remained incomplete because of his sudden death, but his last films bear the hallmarks of a new reorientation that was never realised. The likely pa ern of development we can extract from Angelopoulos’ work is one that progresses from belief to doubt; from doubt to introspection; from introspection to redemption through aesthetics; and, finally, from aesthetics to the direction of what I called elsewhere ‘the anthropogeography of European nihilism’. Furthermore, as he moved beyond the aestheticisation of history in his final period, Angelopoulos looked towards the ‘human adventure’ with both scepticism and pessimism. He privileged emotional, even sentimental, representations in an a empt to revive the subjective response to the continuing tragedies of history. There remained a strong romantic element to his work, and probably in his personality as well (which is what he meant to indicate through his constant appeal to utopia). In an interview, Rafailidis mentioned that Angelopoulos’ project, in the nineties, was to film Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which reveals his subterranean intellectual links with German romanticism and, by extension, with German cinema. One can draw interesting parallels between Angelopoulos’ work and Wim Wenders’ early Road Movie trilogy – or the work of Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke – especially in regard to his films between 1984 and 2004 and the atmosphere of mal du siècle that permeates them.

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The unique kind of melancholy and malaise that we detect in Angelopoulos’ late work, then, must be understood contextually. Focusing on the ‘melancholic’ broken statue of Lenin in Ulysses’ Gaze, Enzo Traverso finds communism’s ‘. . . displacement out of the stage of history, its transformation into a realm of memory. It is also a return to the origins: communism needs to be rethought and rebuilt’ (Traverso 2016: 98–98). There is a historical explanation for that. Angelopoulos started his work when cinema was constructing a promise to renew European political, social and aesthetic culture, when the individuality of the film director was considered a source for valorising meaning in a political sense. The cinema of the author, or auteur, was the ultimate emblem of that approach. Forty years later, the ‘director’ and all participants in the filmmaking production are mostly transformed into corporate institutions, brand organisations and managerial commi ees. Mainstream cinema marginalised and totally delegitimised the auteur’s claim to the primary role in the creation of their films. Lars Von Trier, Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino, and even Wim Wenders in Pina (2011), seem to have accepted the new ‘function’ for the director, using their names as a guarantee of ‘quality’ while at the same time pursuing maximum possible commercial viability for their work. Yet, as Rosanna Maule concluded in her lengthy study on the new form of auteurism, ‘. . . although the concept of the film author might not constitute a viable theoretical or critical methodology, it remains a crucial standpoint from which to address some phenomena and issues at the core of cinema today’ (Maule 2008: 273). Angelopoulos was rather too old to accept the new ‘function’ of the me eur en scène. This disenchantment defined the function of his cinema and the significations he employed to resist the corporatisation of film production, and to fight back against the growing trend of stereotypical clichés disguised in the politically correct fantasies of identity politics. Andrew Horton prudently called Angelopoulos’ work the ‘cinema of contemplation’, and in the disappointment following the fall of communism, he detects ‘a new humanism’ that will establish ‘. . . yet another “community”, the community of those who gaze and those who are the object of the gaze’ (Horton 1999 [1997]: 201). Angelopoulos became sceptical, even pessimistic, but never lost hope entirely. The political negativity and intellectual fatalism that deeply coloured the cultural and historical theories of his friend Rafailidis never really became part of his ideology. The cinematic gaze was, as Siegfried Kracauer would have put it, the only potential redemption of physical reality, and as such maintained a critical presence in the architecture of his work. Consequently, we must rethink his famous melancholy as a kind of romantic negative capability, in the sense that his films offer a phenomenal

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opening to new horizons of meaning that the viewers must reconstruct for themselves. Their confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty establish the intellectual background for a pursuit of redemption through aesthetic creativity. If we revisit the famous le er by John Keats about negative capability, in which he argues that ‘. . . a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching a er fact and reason’, we see that it’s only then that ‘. . . the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’ (Keats 1899: 277). Such a quest for beauty represents the final ‘Ithaca’ of Angelopoulos’ cinematic and existential journey. His films of the last period are creative explorations of grand restorative and utopian projects for a new kind of society in which cinema and its symbolic universe would embody the collective and individual search for the miraculous. Angelopoulos never lost or renounced his belief that cinema can still ‘ . . . give our audience the credit of being intelligent, to help them understand their own existence, to give them hope in a be er future . . .’ (Fainaru 2001: 149).

Scope and Perspective in Filmmaking Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées a statement that has to be read in French to understand its full semantic impact: ‘Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout étonné et ravi, car on s’a endait de voir un auteur, et on trove un homme’ (Pascal 1964 [1669]: 79–80). Indeed, while watching the films of Angelopoulos we look for the self-conscious auteur and are surprised when suddenly we discover a complete man: a human being gaining full awareness of his self and his senses, of his embodied conscience, all while filming the actual world around him and visualising what we never expected to see. His self is everywhere and nowhere: the authorial eye surveying the expansive cosmos, and in the encounter between the self and the world, an osmosis takes place and a new ‘second reality’ of the cinematic conscience emerges. In order to make this new reality visible, Angelopoulos constructed a cinematic language that initially disarms spectators; then, in a closer examination, it empowers them to confront the dilemmas of their existence – political, aesthetical or religious – with a renewed sense of wonder and awe about what cinema can achieve. Alexander Kluge wrote that: ‘Angelopoulos tells a story about Greece while directing his gaze to other countries. . . . He was a patriot of film history; he wanted to tell the history of his country through the medium of film art’ (Kluge in Koutsourakis & Steven, 2015: X). Angelopoulos’ visual idiom synthesised specific achievements of many filmmakers before him, regional and international, in a surprisingly

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effective and functional manner. It was always a cinematic language with a single purpose: to engage with universal cinephilic audiences and show them how to think visually and experience the world cinematically. Francois Truffaut, the filmmaker behind the famous article on auteurs, observed that the idea of the auteur was born at a moment when cinema ‘. . . was acknowledged as no longer a means of mirroring life, but as a medium by which to intensify it’ (Truffaut 1984: 537). But how does this happen? ‘I believe,’ Truffaut states, ‘that all interesting film-makers – those who were referred to as “auteurs” by the Cahiers du Cinema in 1955, before the term was distorted – concealed themselves behind various characters in the movies’ (Truffaut 1984: 535). Indeed, Angelopoulos the man was the hidden semantic grounding and existential scaffolding for the various characters in his scripts. But, as we have seen, his autobiographical centrality was so artfully woven into his stories, style and se ings that many reviewers missed the profoundly self-aware conscience concealed in all of his films, whether political or post-political. In an article aptly entitled ‘A Requiem to An Unjustly Forgo en Filmmaker’, David Thomson noted: Theo Angelopoulos was a master in a kind of cinema that is not much appreciated nowadays. He loved space and distance and movement, as opposed to close-ups, rapid cu ing and doing anything to hold onto our a ention. He worked in the belief that we could examine a film as we might a place, a person or a problem – walking around it, meditating, taking our time. And he knew that a moving camera, panning, tracking, circling, was a perfect embodiment of such thought processes.1

Thomson’s article, wri en just several days a er Angelopoulos’ death, is a strange and somehow ambivalent homage to the man and his work: cautious in its praise and caustic in its criticism. Yet it is the first time that a mainstream American film critic (a er David Horton and Dan Georgakas) discussed seriously, and without their inveterate exoticisation or idealisation, a filmmaker from the European periphery. Pauline Kael persistently talked about Michael Cacoyannis in her reviews, but no other Greek director has gained so much praise and rejection internationally – although closer to this day Yorgos Lanthimos has garnered considerable praise with his ‘weird films’ like Dogtooth/Kinodontas (2009) and more recently his The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2019), which of course cannot be considered in any way as Greek films. Angelopoulos’ cinematic poetics were based on many elective affinities and conscious convergences. His famous long take, for example, an essential element of his visual grammar, constituted one the most effective strategies to recalibrate representational codes, especially in his early political films. It goes back to Erich von Stroheim’s ‘plan-séquence, the shot

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longer in time, . . . within which selection, timing and emphasis are prearranged and fixed at the time of shooting and cannot be altered in the cu ing-room’ (Dickinson 1971: 110). Here we can detect Angelopoulos’ rejection of Eisenstein’s (and Griffith’s) montage of visually oppositional a ractions. In this manner, Angelopoulos wanted to fuse space and time into a unitary dimension by presenting the continuity between past and present as visual historicity. His images synthesise montage and planséquence in an ingenious way, functioning as the springboard between his mise en scène and the compositional structure of the images themselves. Furthermore, beyond the hermetic and occasionally codified character of Angelopoulos’ movies, a small but steadily increasing number of sophisticated viewers keep watching them with genuine interest, not as a marginal curiosity but in appreciation of his work as a grand experiment in cinematic temporality. Various films appeared in lists compiled by newspapers, film journals and cinephilic websites, chief amongst them The Travelling Players, Landscape in the Mist, Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day. These films are cited as major contributions to international cinematography and are included by many in august lists of the best films of twentieth-century cinema. Angelopoulos’ name is mentioned next to the great masters of cinematic art as a shorthand for the esoteric auteur. During his studies in the early sixties in Paris, his teachers used to call him ‘the new Resnais’ (Fainaru 2001: 128). This nickname indicates the ‘otherness’ Angelopoulos has represented since the beginning of his career, not only for Greek cinema but also globally, through his participation in the great movements of renewal and his persistent philosophical problematisation of cinematic iconography that characterised the sixties. Today Angelopoulos’ work stands apart in splendid isolation bordering on incomprehensible eccentricity. He represents the dead-end of a particular way of filmmaking that is to a degree similar to the final stages in the work of Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman. Such criticism of his work also refers to the dominant modes of production, consumption and reception of films today, for which ‘. . . a basic uniformity, a kind of international or rather western sphere of cinematically tolerable issues’ (Sorlin 1991: 219) already dominated before the end of the millennium. It also refers to the narrowing down of contemporary film criticism’s evaluative and interpretive principles or the rather paradoxical way ‘we understand cinema in the time of the Anthropocene’, as Jennifer Fay has recently argued (Fay 2018: 2). Angelopoulos took many risks with the cinematic medium, not only in the most experimental decade between 1968 and 1978 but also as he continued to modify, fine-tune and occasionally expand his personal understanding of montage, continuity editing and mise en scène. Even

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in the eighties and nineties, as commercialisation, the cult of celebrity and digital effects reconfigured the reception of cinematic representation and redefined the relation with its audience, Angelopoulos challenged the new production system through mostly independent productions, which through their minimalistic simplicity, static images and elliptical scripts wanted to establish an anti-cinema or an alternative perception of the cinematic. His films were full of poetic references that challenged the dominant mode of production when the cinematic and the televisual were converging and fusing with each other. In a moving interview with Gabrielle Schulz following the release of Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos defined his aesthetic postulate with the following question: ‘How can I transform personal experiences into poetry?’ (Fainaru 2001: 120). Towards the end of his life, Angelopoulos produced consciously and deliberately a kind of cinema that looked obsolete and somehow parochial in the early twenty first century, in an era of intense diversity and constant hybridisation in all conventions of genre and visuality. His last films were respectfully (and occasionally disrespectfully) rejected, despite international awards and wide media recognition, especially at international festivals. His transition from the radical cinematic ontology of Goddard to the ‘indirect style’ of Truffaut, awakening ‘emotions, memories, desires’ (Gillain 2013: 284), was both a scandal and a self-marginalisation. At the very moment that new century production modes prevailed and new ‘functions’ were a ributed to the director, Angelopoulos’ films were deemed to be fossils from another era. Even as perceptive a critic as Andrew Tracy perpetuated this judgement, writing: ‘As soggy as its title, The Weeping Meadow assumes its designated place as the latest stage in Angelopoulos’ fossilization, his efforts to give the art of shadows body and mass irretrievably weighing him down.’2 Angelopoulos’ post-millennium films were also spectacular box office failures, seen as they were by very few filmgoers worldwide and screened mostly at festivals or retrospectives. In Greece, ticket sales were also low – less than 30,000 tickets in both cases – especially when, a er joining the Eurozone, the country entered a period of accelerated pseudo-development, one which unfortunately brought about an era of reckless and criminal affluence surrounding the 2004 Athens Olympics. In the Greek film industry, this coincided with the resurrection of elegant and lavish slapstick comedies and indirectly laid the foundations for the rise of the new absurdist cinema, later to be labelled the ‘weird wave’, comprised of filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Alexandros Avranas amongst others. In his last films, Angelopoulos’ visual narrative offered a completely different structuration of history, memory and subjectivity, one which

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challenged the jejune optimism that dominated the visual language of the new directors, who learned their métier in television, advertising and the production of music video clips. This echoed the same approach he took vis-à-vis the dominant European cinematic mode in the eighties and nineties, characterised by Lars von Trier’s self-conscious aestheticism or the Dardenne Brothers’ claustrophobic neorealism. In contrast, Angelopoulos’ immersive and expansive cinema expressed another definition of what cinema is about and pitched itself to another audience entirely. Meanwhile, his Greek colleagues had learned filmmaking on their computer screens and had lost contact with the vital dialogue between the big screen and the socialising rituals that enhanced its cultural impact. For them, going to the movies was not a cultural experience but a rare curiosity. Despite their work being full of technological innovations, jump-cuts, lighting and effects, the perception of an exciting exploration of the medium was and still is absent from them, whereas even in Angelopoulos’ least successful film, The Dust of Time, viewers can sense that something genuinely novel has been a empted, even despite the strong feeling that it has also been le incomplete. However, as Angelopoulos’ friend Rafailidis suggested: ‘A film is good or bad not only if we like it but because its form reveals an easily perceptible constructive intention from its creators. The “architectural plan” which is incorporated within the film itself, we have the duty to find’ (Rafailidis 1996: 124). Indeed, the film critic must point out the ‘architectural plan’ of each movie and evaluate its adherence to its own premises. Such adherence is based on one single element: the personal vision of its director that keeps everything together. Many film critics project onto the films they watch the needs and interests of their personal contextual circumstances and sometimes of their individual needs. They do not see the film in its own terms, in its total or partial otherness, as an autonomous semiotic structure. Indeed, they do not see a film as film, following V.F. Perkins’ famous admonition; they recognise it as a derivative ‘slice of life’ or as commentary on the ‘real’, or, indeed, as a referential index to the history of their emotions. In its disarming otherness, Angelopoulos’ work seems to stand outside the main conceptualisations of filmic representation that we have witnessed since many peripheral traditions, such as Chinese, Korean, Nigerian, Iranian, Romanian, Turkish and Mexican cinemas, amongst others, have become globally visible. Early in his career, Angelopoulos maintained that he did not want to do ‘Greek cinema’ but European and global cinema, his a empt to combat marginalisation and provincialism. In an early discussion with Rafailidis, which he later revisited with the film historian Soldatos, Angelopoulos’ theme remained, thirty years apart, one

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and the same: how can we make global films? The answer he gave was: by visualising and framing ‘universal emotions’. In this case, as the dialogue took place in 1999, before the new millennium, the dominant emotion was that of melancholia: ‘I want to do a film in the colours of rust,’ Angelopoulos stated, ‘to express the melancholy I feel. This melancholy is one of the central elements of our era since we all talk about collapse’ (Soldatos 2015: 214). While Angelopoulos’ cinematic language may have taken meaning from such a quest, it also gave meaning and form to universal moods of visual perception, in the sense of expressing specific horizons of historicity (in this case of implosion and fall), by depicting them cinematically. There is a marked difference, of course, between Angelopoulos’ melancholia and that depicted in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), which is more about ‘depression’, a disjunct that, as Peter Bradshaw put it, renders that film ‘a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture’,3 instead of an expression of genuine weltschmerz: a deep sadness about the inadequacy and imperfection of the world, or, as Frederic C. Beiser defined it, ‘. . . a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering’ (Beiser 2016: 1). Angelopoulos started filmmaking in a conscious and continuous dialogue with directors like Ingmar Bergman, Glauber Rocha, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose radical experiments with form determined cinematic practices in the post-war period. A er many decades, he produced his final films for an international film market dominated by James Cameron, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Lars Von Trier, Kathryn Bigelow, Wong Kar-wai and Alejandro González Iñárritu. The transition from the great father figures to the inquisitive and irreverent children can be detected in the background of Angelopoulos’ filmic evolution: indeed, The Travelling Players is dominated by red flags, The Weeping Meadow by black flags, and finally The Dust of Time by portraits of actors and film posters. The change in the backdrops and se ings reflects a change in aesthetics and filmic practices; yet it also indicates a distinct shi in the expectations of the intended audience. In some ways, however, Angelopoulos’ style and overall cinematic language stands somewhere in the grey areas in which Antonioni and Coppola overlap and converge. His central project, which was becoming clearer even to him a er 1980, was to reinvent the language of cinematic representation through innovative photography, spasmodic screenwriting, challenging acting styles and, ultimately, by constructing a ‘problematic’ form of cinematic visuality, in Georg Lukacs’ sense of the term, as disharmony and disconnection. In the last decades of Angelopoulos’ life, many of his contemporaries, who were increasingly under pressure

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from studios to produce blockbusters rife with digital effects and cheesy superheroes, or indeed to infuse their work with the shibboleths of political correctness, gender, race and sexuality, would have thought of Angelopoulos as a fossil: boring, pretentious, and belonging to another period of modernist experimentation now outdated in an era characterised by postmodern proliferation of genders, racialised discourses and multicultural ideologies.

Discovering Perspective These reactions have missed the point in Angelopoulos’ visual idiom and its scope. Thematic and visual abstraction, the visuality of direct perception based on formal invariants, can be found at the heart of his iconographic achievement, establishing what might also be called a Platonic cinema of abstractions. Space, objects and their colours are all materialisations or corporealisations of light. Space is the most significant corporeal presence in Angelopoulos’ images. For this reason, even in the darkest scenes his images exude a vibrant luminosity that radiates with intensity and dazzles with its concreteness. Such corporealisation of space is founded on the Platonic and Neo-Platonic concept of eurhythmia, for its geometric proportion and mathematical order. Despite the visualisation of the ‘nightmare of history’ behind Angelopoulos’ images, there is a Byzantine approach to his image-making that is post-historical and deals with images as events of collective convergence and image-making as the abstraction of such collective identifications. As Gervase Mathew has observed about Byzantine art: ‘The primary aesthetic aim became the a empt to portray the inevitable development of exactly proportioned movement’ (Mathew 1963: 4). The slowness and the unhurried pace of Angelopoulos’ narrative visuality creates a ritualistic suspension of time, which is the most important dramaturgic quality of his films. In an overlooked Greek article, Konstantinos Michos called Angelopoulos ‘the most significant Greek choreographer’ and stated: From the guilty body of the immigrant in Reconstruction, to the crawling and restless walking through time and space bodies of the actors in The Travelling Players, to the breathless yet swollen from feasting bodies in The Hunters, to the slow like an animated statue body of Megalexandros, to the ever-moving as if escaping bullets body of Thanassis Vengos, all bodies in Theo Angelopoulos carry the History of his country.4

The corporealisation of space happens because of the rupture that the human body causes: there is no such thing as a history-less nature in Angelopoulos, as there is in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), or Terrence Malick’s The

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Thin Red Line (1998). Everything is historical, fragile, vulnerable and mortal and therefore social, political and existential. As Simone Weil observed: ‘The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence’ (Weil 2009: 278). Angelopoulos’ frames visualise the continuum between history and nature and explore the fragility of human presence within the silence of the physical world. Andrew Horton also observed the ‘significant ways [Angelopoulos is] making use of the long tradition of Byzantine iconography’ (Horton 1999 [1997]: 26–30) and the extremely ingenious manner in which he used the transcendental function of unhistorical iconic forms in order to intensify historical experience and consciousness. On the other hand, Angelopoulos’ work comes firmly from the Greek cinematic tradition both as culture and as industry. In a way, and more than any other filmmaker, Angelopoulos problematised Greek cinematic representation by making ‘Greece’ (or more precisely ‘Hellas’) a subject of visual reimagining in itself. In 1975, he wrote: Greek cinema must go beyond the stage of self-exclusion, which is not simply financial, but simultaneously, cultural and ideological. This is not due simply to the fact that our language is not spoken by many people, but to the fact that we produce works destined for the domestic market. There is another tendency which was expressed this year: movies that are relevant to the space, but try to enter foreign markets, while using elements that are already parochial. This shows a lack of contact with what happens in global cinema, as a problematic, and at the same time, it is a kind of intellectual snobbism. (Angelopoulos in Soldatos 2004: 177)

Early on, Angelopoulos understood that Greek cinema had to abandon its thematic and stylistic insularity – which was in effect proof of its derivative and imitative structure – and problematise its visual poetics and thematic pa erns. For this reason, his films are not simply visual constructs but challenging cultural interventions. They represent and yet criticise representation, they talk about cultural reality through a transcultural perspective and finally propose a novel way of looking at images as intentional artefacts and representations that are nevertheless founded on the ambiguities of the medium and, most importantly, on the ambivalences of the auteur. As mentioned, Angelopoulos’ work changed radically over the years. In his fourteen films, we can detect various cinematic paradigms colliding and disappearing while at the same time synthesising local and transnational conditions of representation and production. His internationalism made him a dominant but also somehow marginal figure in his own country. His films defined many changes in the Greek cinematic industry and culture, and it is important to be aware of this development in order

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to appreciate the aesthetic scope and structural density of his cinematic language. On the basis of such foundational aesthetics, we can also understand the relationship between photography and painting in Angelopoulos’ films and the various ways he worked during the different stages of his evolution to create kinetic images that encapsulate the static sculptural depth of photography while also reproducing the emotional energy of the chromatic expressionism of painting. Angelopoulos was a conscious mythopoetic image-maker, both an iconoclast and an iconographer, in his a empt to recalibrate the way that we perceive cinematic images in the era of their mechanical reproduction within a society of spectacle. Elsewhere, I have called this project ‘Angelopoulos’ ocular poetics’ (Karalis 2017: 157– 90), based on what has been underestimated in the study of his work. This project was articulated by Angelopoulos himself as follows: World cinema thinks of Eisenstein when we say, ‘montage of a ractions.’ Then there is Hollywood’s sense of ‘parallel cu ing’ developed from Griffith. But what interests me is what I think of as montage within the scene. In my films, montage exists not through the cut, but through movement. I feel montage can be treated through the continuous shot involving time and movement which involves space. In these shots of mine, time becomes space and space becomes time. (Fainaru 2001: 87)

In this, he tried to encapsulate movement within stillness and stillness within movement, presenting filmic shots as crystallised enantiodromies, as images moving inwards and outwards at the same time. If, according to Jean-Luc Godard, the history or histories of cinema cannot be understood without the temporal structures of viewing as defined by montage, then Angelopoulos’ contribution to the field of visual representation, against the traditions of Eisenstein, Orson Welles, and even Godard himself, has to be assessed in its ambition to reconfigure the dominant ways of seeing through the confluence of divergent elements, even though his a empt may be flawed and remains forever incomplete. Angelopoulos’ images are kinetic because of the reflexive tension between the opposites that constitute them. He did not always achieve this, but in his best moments the energy and the force of such moments is truly awe-inspiring, embodying in an image what T.S. Eliot, one of Angelopoulos’ most-loved poets, called ‘the still point of the turning world’ (Eliot 1965: 177). In a sense, since his early work, Angelopoulos wanted to reinvent cinematic grammar. Indeed, one could claim that he wanted to reconfigure the ‘cinematic’ as a specific way of structuring the world through visual temporality. His ambition has to be understood also as a link between established local and transnational practices; within his own tradition, Angelopoulos had to create a cinematic ‘intelligence’ by expanding the

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horizon of filmic visuality, which until then had been captive (despite some notable exceptions) to both the pictorial perception of Byzantine iconography and the verisimilar realism of Hollywood narrative structures. Therefore, it was quite early in his career that Angelopoulos understood the greatest dilemma in the cultural imaginary of his society: if Greek filmmakers wanted to be contemporary and establish the aesthetic specificity of ‘Greek’ cinema, they had to deal first with the lack of perspective as imposed by Byzantine iconography, which dominated Greece’s visual regimes for so many centuries, and at the same time differentiate themselves from the slavish imitators of the American commercial cinema. The Russian filmmakers of the Soviet era, themselves co-inheritors of the Byzantine tradition, managed to achieve this through Sergei Eisenstein and the Soviet school’s introduction of montage of a ractions (although Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) and its poetic dream-like style presents striking affinities with certain Angelopoulos films, while Zvenigora (1928) hints at the circular duration of The Travelling Players). In the Greek film industry, despite the proliferation of films a er 1945 and the valiant efforts of directors like Yorgos Tzavellas, Gregoris Gregoriou, Maria Plyta, and later Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros, Greek cinema gained li le international a ention because it did not possess sufficient formal and thematic specificity. While firmly based on the contradictions of his own cultural tradition, Angelopoulos struggled to make distinct and recognisable the emancipation of the Greek visual regimes of seeing from the addictions of the past and the limitations of the present. The emancipation of the Greek filmic language from the past and the establishment of a new filmic temporality emerged a er Angelopoulos carefully recalibrated existing conventions over time to expand their visual potential and explore the complexities of human visuality. How did he do this? David Bordwell calls his central innovation ‘the planimetric shot’, in which ‘the protracted image outruns its denotative and symbolic aspects, striving instead for both emotional expressivity and formal abstraction’ (Bordwell 2005: 176). However, Angelopoulos, instinctively or intentionally, worked with many different forms of perspective in his films and more specifically within the same shot and frame. Such interplay of perspectives in the construction of his images was perfected over time, but already with The Hunters and O Megalexandros it is obvious that Angelopoulos was interweaving three or even four kinds of perspective in a way that no other cinematographer had a empted before, not even Tarkovsky. Angelopoulos’ images follow linear perspective (The Hunters, O Megalexandros, Ulysses’ Gaze), perceptive perspective (Voyage to Cythera, Landscape in the Mist), isometric perspective (The Sus-

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pended Step of the Stork, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow) and, in a strange manner, the inversed perspective, that most emblematic of Byzantine practices, which was employed in his first film Reconstruction and partly in his last. I must mention also here the completely Renaissance-like, almost Leonardo da Vinci-esque, sense of perspective we see in Angelopoulos’ short film Athens, Return to the Acropolis (1983), which was based on the hybrid iconography of Yannis Tsarouchis. Through such interchange of perspectives, Angelopoulos a empted what Egon Sendler argued about Medieval iconographers: that they encapsulate efforts ‘. . . to represent space, and their strange character expresses the artist’s conception of real space. The painters assumed the task of transposing the three dimensions of natural space onto the two-dimensional board surface’ (Sendler 1999: 119–27). Because of such multi-perspectival construction, Angelopoulos’ films pulsate with questions and ambiguations about cinematic space that never offer relief or closure. Ultimately, they are open-ended texts inviting viewers to a strange and somehow intriguing experience in visual wonderment, challenging contemporary television conformism and videoclip complacency. Together with Béla Tarr and Alexander Sokurov, Angelopoulos represents the radical past of experimentation: all three filmmakers denied themselves the luxuries of working on television programmes, which would have put them more in tune with the felt visual temporality of their contemporary audiences, who were fixated on speedy jump-cuts, accelerated transitions and snappy dialogue. It is telling that the other internationally known director from Greece, Yorgos Lanthimos, learned his visual temporality not through Japanese films screened at the Paris Cinémathèque but in television studios and editing rooms, working on commercials and video-clips for pop songs (some of which are real masterpieces in their own field). Between Angelopoulos and Lanthimos, there is an unbridgeable gap, highlighting the transition from the cinematic as inventive mythopoeia to the post-cinematic as inverted self-referentiality. Steven Shapiro discussed the post-cinematic affect created by contemporary films, music videos and media works ‘. . . as machines for generating affect and for capitalising upon, or extracting value from, this affect’ (Shapiro 2010: 3). Today, the function and purpose of films has changed profoundly and probably permanently. Such change constitutes a completely different approach to cinema and the structures of feeling it establishes or energises. Whereas post-war generations thought that cinema could contribute to changing the world, today most cinematographers want to extract utilitarian value from the world within the society of what Guy Debord calls the ‘integrated spectacle’. The spectacle of the world is so mediated by technology that it is has

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‘radically altered the art of government’ (Debord 1998: 87) and the art of seeing one’s position in society. Given the huge difference in the raison d’être of filmmaking between past and present, dile antish approaches indicate what we cannot understand about any work of a previous era. It is interesting to remember that both Tarr and Sokurov have stopped making films, and the pioneers in filmmaking today are directors from Asia and Africa, where societies are transitioning towards the techno-utopias of neoliberal capitalism while facing strong reaction from within. The great problem of today’s film criticism is the heresy of presentism: the tendency to judge the past with the standards, the needs and the interests of the present moment – a general tendency in the era of identity politics, which indicates the inability of contemporary people to look at the past in its ‘complete otherness’, as Roland Barthes called it. The diachronic and evolutionary perspective has been lost: we either easily discard past works of art as irrelevant, or relegate them to the museum as sacred relics to be canonised and venerated. Angelopoulos himself would not have liked either approach. He was a self-critical cinematographer – a manic perfectionist, as he called himself – who reworked and re-edited his films many times throughout his life, trying to eliminate even the most trivial technical flaws. We must not only see his oeuvre as a work in progress but also each one of his films: each one is re-signified from the next one. Seen in their totality today, we can extract unifying pa erns and axes that express Angelopoulos’ trajectory within the field of the cinematic. As Andrew Sarris stated: ‘The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully. This meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings with skill and purpose’ (Sarris 1996 [1968]: 30). The works of directors like Angelopoulos are of course extremely multilayered and heterogeneous artefacts with a deep personal mark. Despite his collaboration with great directors of photography, screenwriters and actors, his films exude and construct a dense and compact individual perception about filmmaking and film-watching, forming a kind of biomythography. The mythic structures of the films and the life of their director are interwoven in a dense narrative cinecriture: a writing with a holistic form of representational intention. In Angelopoulos’ movies, we can see both the artist and the man interacting and evolving together. As Sarris again stated, following a famous metaphor by André Bazin: ‘the cinema is both a window and a mirror. The window looks out on the real world both directly (documentation) and vicariously (adaptation). The mirror reflects what the director (or other

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dominant artist) feels about the reflection. Modern cinema tends to fog up the window in order to brighten the reflection’ (Sarris 1996 [1968]: 31). Ultimately, Angelopoulos belongs to a select group of controversial but groundbreaking filmmakers like Alexander Dovzhenko, Orson Welles, Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose work can recalibrate expectations and reconfigure the ways we valorise and evaluate the cinematic experience today, in an era of identity politics, frantic populism and neo-nationalistic resurgence.

Sex and the Polis It is hard to find any representation of any identity elements embedded consciously in any film by Angelopoulos (although some echoes of ecological considerations we can detect in Landscape in the Mist). It is true that he has a rather bleak depiction of homosexuality in three of his films – namely Days of ’36, The Hunters and Landscape in the Mist – but it is also true that the act of heterosexual sex is depicted with disdain that almost verges on disgust as well. Angelopoulos treats sex as the most visible space in which human beings fail to experience moments of authenticity and genuine love. It becomes instead a weaponised tool one wields to dominate, use or subdue another person. Sexuality is depicted as absence and lack, and occasionally as strife against existence. Furthermore, desire as the impulse to move towards alterity remained an unvisualised undercurrent in most of his films, mostly remembered and associated with extreme circumstances, especially in the love triangles and incestuous encounters. The depiction of a casual sexual encounter between Voula, Spyros’ daughter, and a sailor in Voyage to Cythera culminates with Voula looking directly to the camera and stating, in a totally Brechtian manner: ‘When I don’t want to feel dead I discover my body.’ It is one of the most mechanical yet explosive sex scenes outside of the orgy in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Although it also exists as an undercurrent of all Angelopoulos’ films, love is central as an over-riding theme in his Trilogy of Silence, manifesting as, paradoxically, both an absence and a source of self-revelation. In The Landscape in the Mist, sex manifests in a tragic episode of rape, taking place in the dark like the off-stage murders in Greek tragedy. The dark depiction of sex as rape, violence and blood and as initiation to adulthood and history is another confronting subtext in his work. In The Beekeeper, it is a performance onstage, in a cinema that, sometime in the past, screened Hitchcock’s I Confess. In Ulysses’ Gaze, sex takes place as a symbolic reunion with the elusive mythical woman with a thousand

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faces, as the same actress, Maia Morgenstern, performs every role at once: from the seductress to the faithful wife, Circe and Penelope at the same time. Sex in The Weeping Meadow is an illicit activity: a way for an older generation to dominate the young, including strange overtones of sexual abuse and incestuous pregnancies. Finally, in The Dust of Time, sex occurs as an act of despair on a bus, violently interrupted midway and therea er transformed into impotence, despair and the death of desire. While sex as a means of intimacy and affection is only hinted at in certain Angelopoulos films, the most revealing scenes regarding sexuality occur in The Travelling Players. The young Ismene tantalises and infantilises the black-marketeer with her naked body as he masturbates listening to childish songs, all for the sake of acquiring some olive oil for her family during the famine cause by the German Occupation. Here sex is distance, and self-indulgent narcissism, a means of shu ing the other out: his eyes are closed, keeping Ismene out completely as he fantasizes about something or somebody else. Yet the most powerful scene is the ritualistic stripping naked of a fascist soldier in the same film. The scene is probably one of the most powerful denunciations of political oppression in cinema and invests the human body with the mystique of power, transforming it into the site of complete and absolute domination. Yet as the clothes are taken off one by one and the phallus, the hidden god of western metaphysics, becomes exposed, this ritualistic stripping, and the nudity it generates, also become acts of political demythologisation and rebellion against the corrosive a empts by power to dominate desire. The sensual body of the soldier needs the fetishist investment of military uniform to become sexual, or indeed to generate desire in itself – a sexual dynamic already presented in the most notorious film of the previous year, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). At the very moment the uniform is thrown off, the body regains its vulnerability and fragility – it essentially regains its shame as part of cultural self-awareness, ultimately through shame acquires its very humanity. But despite its exposure, it still remains a body with no autonomy, a mechanical enforcer of semiotic submission to the oppressive strategies of power. In his movies of the eighties, especially The Beekeeper, Angelopoulos talked about the silence of love. This film is a response to Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1973), implicitly juxtaposing Marcello Mastroianni to Marlon Brando: the European masculine sex symbol to the American one, the animalistic sexuality of Brando in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) to Mastroianni’s sophisticated intellectualised desire in Antonioni’s La No e (1961) or Fellini’s 8 1⁄2. However, beyond the depiction of love and lovemaking as an act of failed communication, there is something extremely intriguing in Angelopoulos’ exploration of sexuality: his depic-

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tion of the human body itself. In the beginning, the body is an instrument and a discreet episode, but gradually it gains its full emotive power and complete self-awareness only through aging. The aged body is probably the most revealing element in Angelopoulos’ cinematic mythology: it is the only existing archive, the living library of collective memory, as in Ulysses’ Gaze, where Mr Levy is the preserver of a city’s visual memory. Angelopoulos’ films are about voluntary associations between friends, implicit treaties drawn up between men and women in order to create a society of unbroken fraternities that will defeat time, aging and oblivion. In a way, there is no gender or conflict between genders in his films: the human body is presented in its existential finitude and finality, elements painfully shared by women and men of any sexual orientation and origin. Furthermore, as Angelopoulos grew older, his films explored old age and its recalibration of lived experience. The Dust of Time is about precisely this: the struggle to see history and visualise reality through the eyes of an aging and, eventually, an ultimately old, incapacitated and dying body. The slowness of time and the sensory hypersensitivity of being old, of looking at the present with the nostalgia and the surrender of conscious mortality, found in Angelopoulos’ final film is one of its most poignant depictions since Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) and Vi orio de Sica’s Umberto D. (1952). In his early films, Angelopoulos presented sexuality, gender and race as expressions of a dehumanising class consciousness, in the tradition of Georg Lukács. They were not manifestations of each other’s responsiveness to alterity but the most visible and tangible expression of reified existence. Gender or race as categories expressed the lack of meaningful communication between objectified beings living in parallel universes that only collide with and destroy each other, unable to break through the fortified loneliness of their despair. As Lukács observed: ‘The rational objectification conceals above all the immediate – qualitative and material – character of things as things. When use-values appear universally as commodities they acquire a new objectivity, a new substantiality which they did not possess in an age of episodic exchange and which destroys their original and authentic substantiality’ (Lukács 2010 [1923]: 92). The radical departure towards something new came with his meditation on mortality, being-towards-death and being-in-time, Eternity and a Day: a film that framed his mature problematics of cinematic gaze, which he would explore in the last decade of his life, a critical decade in the history of cinema. During this last period, Angelopoulos tried to depict the anxiety of individuals to break through the walls of alienation and self-alienation and experience the fragility of an existence within a language beyond the tech-

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nologised jargon of contemporary societies, in contrast to the conformist existence of a life without the historical sense that inspired modernist traditions. The ultimate Homeric monologue of his main character at the very end of Ulysses’ Gaze effectively encapsulates and recapitulates this project: ‘When I return it will be with the clothes of someone else/ No one will be waiting for me.’ The nameless body of an active presence searches for an end, for a destination and, following Lukacs, a totalising comprehension of social experience. A er the political language of his early films, Angelopoulos struggled to invent a visual language, first for the modernist reality of existential fragmentation and then for the postmodern condition of living in a borderless and ultimately deterritorialised world. His ‘ocular poetics’ presented the special education of the eye in an a empt to see the fragmented world of daily experience cinematically and realise that ultimately it is the cinematic frame that gives coherence and structure to the chaos of history. The progression of Angelopoulos’ films is based on such an axis of development, in which the reification of class consciousness is exacerbated by the pulverisation of being, when we eventually start entering the postmodern world of virtuality, hyper-reality and hyper self-reflexivity: rather obvious markers of modernity as a wasted project, which are quite awkwardly depicted in his last film. In order to make this condition of seeing and being seen in his later output cinematically visible, Angelopoulos toned down the affective energy within his cinematic images and composed visual synecdoches through elliptical minimalism and self-referentiality, bringing him close to Alain Resnais and Godard. Self-referentiality is one of the most interesting stylistic elements that establishes the implied dialogue throughout his work, and in a way it can be seen as a gesture to the cinema of pastiche and parody, which emerged during the nineties through the work of Ridley Sco , David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

Angelopoulos amongst the Postmodernists As I have stressed, the truth is that Angelopoulos’ cinematic style changed considerably across his career, especially in the eighties, and therefore it stands to reason that I should include his own self-perception of his work. Andrew Horton’s characterisation of his oeuvre as the cinema of contemplation applies mostly to the second period of Angelopoulos’ artistic output, whereas Jameson’s talk about the melancholia in his work refers the films made around 2000; and, ultimately, these two notions are quite close. The same can be said about the political element of his films – which

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belongs essentially to the seventies – through which Angelopoulos struggled to demystify power and history, employing his most experimental and ‘alienating’ filmic strategies, which became emblematic of his directional style. Landscape in the Mist is mostly a self-referential film, almost made as critical parody of his own style and based on self-quotation and recycling of his previous films’ images and stories. In an extremely eloquent fashion, the existentialist Angelopoulos mocks the political modernism of his early works – others would claim that he pays homage to it. The changes in the political context of cinematic production led to changes in the structure of the cinematic text itself. As Cristina Degli-Esposti wrote: ‘postmodern cinema is made of and from the accumulation of information that, through memories and quotations, presents a rereading and rewriting of things so that the act of communication tends to supersede the content of communication’ (Degli-Esposti 1998: 5). Landscape in the Mist in particular constructs a meta-narrative in an epistemological sense to depict the reconfigurations and the re-evaluations that Angelopoulos was a empting to emphasise – namely, the death of politics, the end of ideological projects and ultimately the debunking of antiquarian and archaeological understandings of the past. The interesting thing about this case is that Angelopoulos does not parody his earlier work out of a sense of deconstructive mania or fashionable rebelliousness but out of the genuine need and urge to de-imagine and then re-imagine the cultural discourses that have constituted political identities and instituted contemporary art-house cinema. Angelopoulos understood that if cinema was to regain its social function, filmmakers had to become self-reflexive and indeed self-critical – an approach that we see appearing in his mythopoetic language until his final film. A er Eternity and a Day, which looks like a farewell to his previous cinema, Angelopoulos started exploring a hyper-emotional style, with illusionist techniques and an almost operatic structure that recalibrated the style of his previous work. His last two films indicate a new turn in his ocular poetics: while maintaining central stylistic devices of his previous films, Angelopoulos delved into almost Hollywood-like visual conventions of his moribund world. Neon lights, stark-coloured pa erns and carefully choreographed movements suggest that Aristotle was truly back and emotional catharsis was the central compositional structure in these films. Despite their flaws, Angelopoulos went further in his own selfcriticism here and tried to reinvent himself cinematically in the manner of the late exuberant Fellini or even the polychromatic frenzy of Vincente Minnelli. Because of such protean metamorphoses, Angelopoulos is effectively the cinematographer for the twenty-first century, as he managed to cap-

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ture the existential inertia of contemporary political subjectivity; in Lukácsian terms, its voluntary self-concealment. Voyage to Cythera and his films therea er explored not simply the death of ideology but also the condition of living in a post-ideological society in which there are no projects of political regeneration. In the particular case of Angelopoulos, we have a filmmaker who did not follow the example of Rossellini, and who, in his ‘educational films’ a er the rise of le -wing radicalism, returned to the roots of European Enlightenment in order to revive the ideas and the anxieties that led to modernity. On the other hand, he also did not follow the example of Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, who, having been frustrated by secularism or persecuted by the political establishment, turned to religious spirituality in order to anchor contemporary people to the perennial traditions of the past. Instead, Angelopoulos relentlessly pursued projects of reinventing political cinema, and though he produced uneven results, he always challenged the limits of visual cinematic practices. His indirect but powerful visual criticism of his own style, but also that of other auteurs, shows his cautious debt to the postmodernist tendency for pastiche and parody. We can see it as a gesture of reconciliation with the dominant aesthetics of his time and less as a form of ‘hyper-self-reflexivity’ based on the ‘pleasure of repetition’ and replication melting ‘into a multiplicity of signifying worlds’ (Degli-Esposi 1998: 13). However, as new voices and perspectives were emerging during the same period, Angelopoulos’ cinema became a rather bewildering peculiarity of the past. In 2005, the up-and-coming absurdist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos released his deconstructive film Kine a (2004), in which he parodied and dismantled Angelopoulos’ cinematic narrative, inaugurating a period of intense questioning and somehow neglect of Angelopoulos’ work. It was strange that at the moment his personality and intervention in public affairs became dominant – especially a er winning the Cannes Prize, and he became something of a national cultural icon, not to say an institution – the value of Angelopoulos’ work was drawn into question and gradually marginalised. Other directors from the seventies generation, like Pandelis Voulgaris and Yannis Smaragdis, seem to continue an implied dialogue with Angelopoulos’ work, whether adversarially or with admiration. Many younger directors, like Athina Rachel Tsangari, Panos Koutras and Christophoros Papakaliatis, together with Lanthimos, have constructed their personal visual languages as a persistent dismantling of Angelopoulos’ long take, his grand narrative enjambments and his circular vision of temporality, which today in the era of post-truth seem like modernist anachronisms and relics of a past without relevance to the questions and the preferences of contemporary cinema (whatever this might mean). Despite their

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negative approach, however, some of them keep returning to his films: Papakaliatis’ What If (2012) and Worlds Apart (2015) seem like gestures of reconciliation with Angelopoulos’ sense of cinematic time, and Tsangari’s Chevalier (2015) looks like a feminist take on Angelopoulos’ The Hunters. Angelopoulos’ flirtation with postmodernist self-referentiality was brief, but it le behind some interesting seeds of visual rebellion and subversive practices, which were employed, even if only unconsciously, by the young rebels that were to wage the deceptively called ‘weird wave’, probably against their own debt to Angelopoulos. However, for him personally, postmodernism was not a sustainable parameter within his visual ethics. If, as Fredric Jameson observed, ‘postmoderns’, while conscious of their historical construction of their present, ‘have nonetheless forgo en how to think historically’ (Jameson 1991: ix), then Angelopoulos’ acute sense of historicity did not allow any space for such oblivion. His images are replete with the historical memories of their present: they are events of disclosure and not incidents of forgetfulness. In this respect, Angelopoulos’ visual language, despite its ruptures and reorientations, maintained an admirable unity and cohesion. Historical memory was the central organisational principle of his cinematic visuality.

Acting and Re-acting Angelopoulos achieved his intense and somehow challenging self-reflexivity by employing a wide variety of actors and performance styles, reconfiguring as he did so the perception of the actor’s corporeal presence. Beyond the Brechtian mode Angelopoulos employed (as expressed through Brecht’s epic theatre), there is an important aspect of the presentation itself: the evocative moods around the actors he chose for each movie. Many things have been wri en about the Brechtian acting in Angelopoulos’ films, but in truth he effectively abandoned this mode a er 1977. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Spike Lee, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier all use Brecht’s distancing techniques in one way or another, especially when the films present themselves as films to their audience. For example, Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) and Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) each incorporate another level of signification by showing the artificiality of the medium. Angelopoulos employed this especially in The Travelling Players and The Hunters, each with their extremely naturalistic monologues delivered by actors looking straight at the camera (as a breaking down of the ‘fourth wall’) but only gesturally in the Voyage to Cythera, Landscape in the Mist and the final scene of Ulysses’ Gaze. What is interesting, however,

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is that the actors he uses seem to have been extracted, as it were, from a completely different cinematic context. Their faces and bodies constitute markers of conflicting cultural archives, evoking different emotional atmospheres extracted out of radically alien milieus. Mairi Hronopoulou, for example, was one of the most popular stars of the musicals by the vernacular auteur Yannis Dalianidis. Similarly dislocated are actors like Dionysis Papagiannopoulos, Ilias Logothetis, Vassilis Vouyiouklakis, and of course the king of slapstick comedy Thanassis Vengos, to name just a few from Angelopoulos’ Greek casts. Most of them were the great stars of the old commercial cinema or traditional theatre who had mostly played in populist comedies, period dramas, urban melodramas and colourful musicals. By incorporating actors from these backgrounds, Angelopoulos transformed the movie into a site of semantic and aesthetic dissonance: when audiences saw Mairi Hronopoulou, for example, they had the implicit expectation she would be playing a singing and dancing femme fatale dressed colourful clothes and high heels. In Angelopoulos’ movies, specifically The Hunters and Voyage to Cythera, Hronopoulou is transformed into a highly ambiguous character, full of interiority and conflicts and essentially destroying her own iconic status with her image embodying psychological forms of involuntary dysfunctionality. Angelopoulos unframed his actors from stereotypical typecasting and gave them new filmic space by problematising their presence: their bodies became the locus of an uncanny relationship with our own past as viewers of their previous impersonations. Eva Kotamanidou, the main female presence in many crucial films, ended up defining the new way of depicting a female corporeality brimming with sexual urges, yet somehow without sexualising the female body. Starting with her most intense performance as Electra in The Travelling Players, Kotamanidou narrates to the camera her character’s violent rape by fascists with complete detachment, pointing out connections between her rape and the deaths of demonstrators against English troops. Kotamanidou took part in some of Angelopoulos’ most ambitious and important films. Before this, she predominantly worked in the theatre, and the theatricality of her performance style can be easily detected, from her youthful first appearance in The Travelling Players to her most consummate and reserved presence in The Weeping Meadow. The versatility of her style and the variety of emotional responses she evokes were among the aesthetic undercurrents that gave Angelopoulos’ films the strongest sense of both continuity and transformation. From her Brechtian performance in The Travelling Players to her self-reflexive style in Landscape in the Mist, right up to her final disembodied archetypal nourishing mother in

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The Weeping Meadow, Kotamanidou remained a centripetal spatial image in the cinematic language of Angelopoulos, gathering the hidden libidinal energy of each film and evoking and intensifying their emotional atmospheres. In an interview, she recollected: As screenwriter and director, Angelopoulos gave his films a poetic colour. He never re-created history exactly as it happened. He extracted the essence in the way he perceived and filmed it. I myself at least, coming out of the Art Theatre and loving poetry, I found this in all his frames. Electra was my most loved role in the theatre. Until then (1975) I had never impersonated her but later I played her role in the theatre. The soliloquy on the December Events moved me deeply even during the rehearsals. I knew from history what happened then, but Angelopoulos wanted it performed in a Brechtian style, from a distance. In Greece we have misinterpreted distanciation. Brecht didn’t ask for his actors to distance themselves; he stopped the text and inserted songs.5

Kotamanidou’s corporeal theatricality was crucial for what was the most important scene in The Hunters – a hallucinogenic sexual encounter with the King and the hidden god of the western political imaginary, the fertilising penis – the presence of which is diffused in the historical continuum and is desired by everyone in the film. This is probably one of the most confronting performances in the history of simulated, unpornographic self-satisfaction in cinema. Furthermore, the dance scene in O Megalexandros sees her perform some of the most impressive ‘biomechanical corporeal movements’ in world cinema, akin to Liv Ullmann’s in Persona and Scenes from a Marriage. Kotamanidou’s cinematic presence was itself a consolidating stylistic building block in Angelopoulos’ visual semiotics and expressed the fusion of stillness and movement he always tried to achieve. It would be unfair, of course, not to mention the presence of Thanassis Vengos in Ulysses’ Gaze. Vengos was an actor of the old commercial Greek cinema, although his many slapstick comedies occasionally presented some unse ling and disturbing social realities. His strange appearance as a psychopomp in this film, with his prophetic u erances about nature, history and the death of Greece, is definitely one of the greatest moments of his career. Rafailidis wrote the following about his performance: Angelopoulos deliberately makes Vengos u er this macabre prophecy [about the death of Greece]. Vengos is the great symbol of the common man in Greece, a man who runs and never arrives anywhere because it is impossible in his country to arrive anywhere. Vengos the magnificent never ceases to startle us with his life and work. Only an outstanding filmmaker could understand that his was the most suitable human being to read the eulogy over the death of Greece. (Rafailidis 2003 [1969]: 133)

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The ultimate function of actors in the visual mythopoetics of Angelopoulos was to enhance the creative tension between expectation and presentation. The unconscious evocation of a past role, which had almost typecast certain actors, was consciously used to cause a semantic and emotional friction with the presumption of spectators. Vengos also represented the flowering of Greek cinema in the early sixties, and his comedies framed the reactions of the working class to the rise of relentless capitalist expansion. Using the same corporeal presence to express the end of an era and the death of a culture exacerbates the tragic message of the film and brings its experience closer to a liminal state of unease and wonderment. In the architectural skeleton of the film, it also frames the invisible presence of something that Angelopoulos struggled to explore: a centreless universe dominated by the ephemerality of shadowy idols a er the death of God was declared.

The Phantom of Religion In his youth, for a short period of time, Angelopoulos joined the rather notorious conservative religious organisation Life (Zoe). However, in an interview with Pere Alberó, he revealed that: ‘I was around seventeen when I woke up one morning and God had disappeared from my life . . . leaving behind a substantial void. God was a point of reference . . . something like magic help, [which] with time was replaced in a way by my faith in socialism, and the socialist idea’ (Alberó in Stathi 2001: 77). Angelopoulos flirted with religion and spirituality in two of his films, but obviously he was unable even to entertain the idea of any religious faith. His work transformed the post-ideological condition into anti-metaphysical conditioning and structuring of the image. This is nothing like the post-metaphysical cinema of Sokurov, for example, or the ecstatic naturalism of the late Kurosawa. In Sokurov’s films, there is a distinct Dostoevskyan perception of the tragic coexistence of good and evil in human life, which Sokurov expresses quite clearly in his long conversations with Aleksndr Solzhenitsyn. Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) vibrates with the religiosity of the mysterium fascinans of a contemporary conscience that exhumes its ancestors for empowerment. Even Wim Wenders’ militant agnosticism was mitigated later in the nineties with his incredible documentaries about religious phenomenology in Siberia, Australia and Altamira. Further, the mystical eroticism of directors like Terence Davies (especially the sado-masochistic rituals leading to communion in his early Trilogy) or the grand mythologies of fall and resurrection that we see in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life seem to

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express the same anxiety and dread at the possibility of a meaningless history and a life destroyed by the absurd. With the exception of Landscape in the Mist, in which the quest for an absent father is obviously a parable for the search of ontological and theological origins,6 it is only in O Megalexandros that Angelopoulos explores an atmosphere of religious reverence and sometimes even ecstatic ritualism, expressed in the traditional forms of Byzantine iconography and the pulsations of its colours. Yet it would not be easy to claim that there is a religious sensibility in these images. On the contrary, as is obvious in Landscape in the Mist and in The Dust of Time – films completed twenty years apart from each other – the feeling of reality as absence and loss is transformed by Angelopoulos into the representation of history and memory as absence and loss. In Landscape, two inexperienced children are lost, while in the last film three mature people who have spent all their life adventuring and struggling also feel the same existential panic and dread of having been lost throughout their entire lives. The same can be said for the three communist fighters in The Beekeeper and also for the lost characters in The Weeping Meadow. At the heart of all Angelopoulos’ aesthetic projects, right up until the end, lies the trauma of having lost something, an inexpressible quality of life, about which Angelopoulos has the central character of Eternity and a Day deliver a long monologue in front of his dead, or perhaps sleeping, mother. There is always a phantom in the works of Angelopoulos and his generation: the phantom of religion. In a previous study, I called it the ‘anthropogeography of European nihilism’ (Karalis 2017: 185) because it seems that Angelopoulos’ unwillingness to anchor reality to any metaphysical code of meaning, and the implicit elevation of history into a self-validating process, creates or perhaps exacerbates a push towards the nihilistic void of an existence without horizons of transcendence. It is obvious that although vestiges of religiosity appear occasionally, and only, in Landscape in the Mist, religious frisson is totally missing for Angelopoulos’ films. We can, if we like, see this as an implied critique of his two largest cinematic inspirations, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. But even in that movie, which is punctured by miracles and wonders, the broken hand of god is framed by the social embrace of the polis: it is a political and indeed communal event, not an individual mystical experience. Furthermore, the existentialist element that permeates Angelopoulos’ films is more pronounced by contextual references to the era when socialism collapsed and neoliberal market capitalism declared the end of history. The culture of waste, environmental degradation and human trafficking of consumer society of unlimited growth – so destructively exposed in Eternity and a Day – seem gradually to become the dominant themes in his

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last films, although their presence can be felt already in his work from the eighties, with the chilling depiction of architectural brutalism and noise pollution in the Athenian cityscape of Voyage to Cythera. Angelopoulos’ last film, despite its stylistic complexities, is precisely about the alienated and atomised existence experienced in modern capitalist, presumably post-historical, societies, in which no rituals of communal bonding exist anymore and the feeling of belonging has all but evaporated. The Dust of Time is probably Angelopoulos’ most contemporary film, exploring the predicament of the postmodern subjectivity: an experience of a centreless reality at the same time as living only for the moment. If history in Angelopoulos’ previous films gave a sense of continuity and connection, the characters of his last films experience a devastating nowness, unable to connect with their past and/or recognise the past as part of themselves. Visually, Angelopoulos uses parallel temporal storylines from the past and present to depict the confusing realities of postmodern and capitalist societies. The visual translation of the social dystopia and its mental images of self-destruction create that atmosphere of continuous disintegration that we find in The Dust of Time. Within the context of what was called the ‘weird wave’ in Greek cinema, though also felt in the cinema of crisis that developed in many countries around the world at the same time, Angelopoulos refused to participate in the devaluation of historicity through the spectacular and specular images that we find in science fiction movies, or films that express the loss of community, by directors such as Béla Tarr, the Dardenne Brothers, Nanni More i, Roy Andersson, Aki Kuarismaki, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk or indeed many Hollywood directors, like Kathryn Bigelow, David Lynch and Jane Campion. Angelopoulos reinscribed his images with a renewed emotional valuation of experience, expressed indirectly and without the illusionism of commercially successful movies, and he proposed a new vision for a secular-aesthetic humanism: a vision centred on human fragility, vulnerability and ultimately disempowerment. If his early films were actually about power, his last films are about powerlessness and the ways that ordinary people, uprooted, homeless and unable to relate to projects of ‘ultimate concern’, experience the collapse of their emotional reality. The transition to the state of fear and angst about a history without meaning is what we see in his last film, which anchors its significance on a hopeless love affair. Most interpretations of his works focused on the exploration of Greek political history, especially in his early years. Indeed, his first films explore history as a process of repetition in a circular and somehow archetypal, almost Jungian, manner, using classical myths, which circles back to T.S Eliot’s idea that it is the ‘. . . way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a

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shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (Eliot 1975: 177). However, in order to find stable centres to anchor the vicissitudes of historical upheavals, Angelopoulos, in a typically modernist manner, reinscribed classical myths onto the shi ing landscape of politics and the instability of political pa erns as they took place during the formative years of his life – especially as found in the work of his favourite Greek poet George Seferis – echoing Eliot’s mythical method. Seferis’ most influential poems are entitled Mythistorema (1935) and are exactly about the fusion of myth and history as a redemptive narrative for today. Angelopoulos’ films make constant references to Seferis’ verses: ‘I woke with this marble head in my hands;/ it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down./ It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream / so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to disunite again’ (Seferis 1981 [1935]: 7). These verses echo throughout Angelopoulos’ work and permeate the mythopoetic structure of almost all his movies, presenting poetry as the language that secures an almost timeless, though definitely diachronic, sense of cohesion and integration, rather than religion or spirituality. In a way, Angelopoulos gave his personal response to Tarkovsky’s religious understanding of the creation of cinematic images as ‘evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God’ (Tarkovsky 1989: 242) by suggesting that cinematic images indicate the autonomy of human creativity, and that ‘you make a film in order to perceive with greater clarity what it is that is not clear in your consciousness’ (Fainaru 2001: 109). If for Tarkovsky images are traces of the divine presence, and more specifically of the apophatic God of the Christian mystical tradition, for Angelopoulos images are formal essentialisations of the human desire for mutual understanding and through such interpersonal osmosis for transcendence. Ultimately, for Angelopoulos poetry became more crucial than political theory or historical knowledge. Yet a suspicious reader can feel a growing romanticisation, indeed dehistorisation, of Greek history, and certain spurious forms of subliminal identification with a perennialist perception of the nation, as found in his Balkan epic Ulysses’ Gaze. It is obvious also that such identification did not last for long. Furthermore, a er 1997 and his existentialist elegy to mortality, Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos changed both his perception of history and the depiction of temporality in more Heracletian terms. A new perception of time is announced at the beginning of the film: ‘time is a child playing, throwing the dice, the kingdom owned by a child’ (Heraclitus 1987: 36). The transformation was deep and had profound consequences on the visual language with which

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Angelopoulos experimented in his under-rated films The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time. In both films, history is again the realm of creative unconcealment, despite the occluding practices and discourses of culture and society that were so intrusively depicted in the biopolitical surveillance of his last film. It is the human psyche in its autotelic being that is mirrored in the work of art, and not simply the political imprint of the surrounding society. In certain interviews, Angelopoulos stated that his final answer to the questions of temporality and historicity was to be given in his projected film The Other Sea, whose completion his death le in perpetual abeyance. The ‘last modernist’ was gradually transformed into a Quixotic desperado, a empting more and more ambitious projects even when he had to face the suspicion of the critics and the rage of new cinematographers but also, most importantly, the vacuum of faith and hope that dominated cultural realities. This almost heroic element indicates a persistent project that inspired him and represents his legacy to the global cinematic culture. The platonic injunction at the beginning of Ulysses’ Gaze, that ‘if a soul wants to know itself must look into another soul’, became the central axis of his ultimate cinematic ethics. But this gaze into the soul was also an exploration of the most difficult aspect of his work, an extremely unse ling step towards self-transcendence in history through the presence or indeed the emergence of the sublime.

In Search of the Cinematographic Sublime As indicated earlier, Angelopoulos’ quest, especially in the period between 1984 and 2000, was to construct a visual language for the cinematic sublime in a way that would be both cinematic and sublime, by transforming pictorial stillness into kinetic imagery. It would be quite hypothetical to search for the origins of such a quest; the idea of historical epics that we see in The Travelling Players and O Megalexandros contains in spermatic form the first intimations of the presence of the sublime in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. However, how the sublime becomes a cinematic form is a vexed and somehow confusing question, as cinematic images are closely tied to contextual realities and references outside of the frame, while idealised forms of action or characterisation – as, for example, in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible – become excessively stylised and abstract. As Francois Lyotard observed: ‘The sublime is the child of an unhappy encounter, the encounter of the Idea with form. The encounter is unhappy because the Idea reveals itself to be so unwilling to make concessions . . .’ (Lyotard 1994: 124).

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The sublime as cinematic form does not abide in the specificity of the objects depicted or the monumentality of the images; it emerges out of a semantic conflict between sign and signifiers, between the form and its meaning. Beyond being a mise en scène, the sublime in cinema is most importantly mise en abyme, both literally and metaphorically. The image mirrors something that is not there, although its traces can be seen everywhere, even in a broken film negative. The devoured fallen God, the broken hand of god, the dismembered statue of Lenin and the encounter with Death are all liminal images of a profound semantic conflict between implied oppositions. The deified leader should rule, the hand of god should guide, the gigantic statue should inspire, the proximity of death should horrify. Yet in Angelopoulos, all these images, being in ruins, generate empathy, verging almost on tragic pity – or eleos in Aristotelian language – and show that the people who believe are more crucial than what they believe in. Angelopoulos is interested in the collision between the form and its destiny and the severance of the affective bonds between them. The broken statue of Lenin is not Lenin anymore: it is a dismembered idol, a god that failed, another illusion. Yet what makes these visual experiences sublime is the degree of faith and the extent of failure invested in a fallen symbol, enacting a fall from grace that presupposes the ability to receive grace in the first place. The effect of the sublime according to Longinus is ‘. . . not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves. Invariably what inspires wonder, with its power of amazing us, always prevails over what is merely convincing or pleasing’ (Longinus 1991: 163). This is what Angelopoulos’ certain filmic images and sequences achieve: the epiphany of an ecstatic moment of self-transcendence that does not emerge out of a religious or mystical experience but out of the persistent intensification of human experience through what Bresson called ‘cinematography’, which ‘does not analyse or explain but re-composes’ (Bresson 1986: 9). In this sense, Angelopoulos expresses a Hellenic perception of the sublime, associating it with transformative beauty and much less, if at all, with a Burkean sublime as ‘incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible’ (Burke 1990 [1759]: 58). In a way his perception also contradicts the post-war widely spread idea, especially in the fine arts, as epigrammatically articulated by Barne Newman that ‘The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty’ (Newman 2010 [1948]: 26) and discover the sublime ‘in terrible objects operating in a manner analogous to terror . . . which is a source of the sublime’ (Burke 1990 [1759]: 36) Even if we give the word ‘terror’ a different meaning, the concept of a destructive and annihilating sublime does not exist in his films. Angelopoulos’ progress towards achieving the sublime in his films was complex

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and full of setbacks. Sometimes Angelopoulos’ films resist the presence of ‘Angelopoulos’ himself. There is no sublime in his early films, not even in The Travelling Players, despite their epic monumentality and grand political gestures. These early films are, following the famous expression by Erich Auerbach, ‘fraught with background’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 12); they need excessive ‘footnotes’ and explanatory notes to guide the spectator through their semiotic universe. These films are closed and, semantically, not self-sufficient. Yet the death of Alexander, in the final scene of the film, is truly sublime, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans at the same time, because it cannot be explained and cannot be inferred from the previous action. It happens unexpectedly, and its aesthetic suddenness interrupts the logic of the narrative and the consequentiality of its plot. This, quite aptly, is also connected to the revolving galaxies we see at the beginning of Angelopoulos’ next film, which also appear out of nowhere and confuse the assumptions of their spectators. The historical and the cosmic seem to converge in Angelopoulos’ films a er this while still maintaining their tension and their semantic asymmetry. In the collision between history and cosmos, there is no background in or around: the spectator sees them directly and does not have to explain them conceptually or symbolically. They are simultaneously direct experience and immediate intuition: they remain self-sufficient, pure forms outside the provenance of interpretive logic, challenging the mental predilections of the viewers and critics by enlarging the scope of their visuality. They are what Morley characterised as ‘fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder and order, and the disruption of the stable coordinates of time and space . . . in looking at the relevance of the concept to contemporary art, we are also addressing an experience with implications that go far beyond aesthetics’ (Morley 2010: 12). In Landscape in the Mist, Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos infused his cinematic language with the quest for the unseen emergence within and through the seen images. The mise en abyme narrative strategy in these films amplifies, transforms and transpositions objects onto a new level of symbolic and diegetic function; it interiorises natural space and the space of history by transforming them into an infinite reflection on foundational structures of perception, understanding and experiencing. The experience of the infinite unseen is what brings Angelopoulos close to Bresson, despite the absence of religious faith. The broken hand of god in the Landscape in the Mist is an invitation: it calls conscience to self-understanding and as such it can be both historical and transcendental, like the first appearance of the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Discussing Immanuel Kant’s perception of the sublime, William Shaw suggested that: ‘Sublimity, therefore, resides in the human capacity to think beyond the bounds of the given’ (Shaw 2006: 83), and discussing the same concept Ian Greig argued that in Kant’s noumenal sublime we find ‘the metaphysical infinitude of our own rationality’ (Grieg 2002: 372). Certainly, Kant’s idea of the sublime is more complex, since it raises questions for the apprehension and appropriation of cinematic images. However, Kant’s observation that ‘the sublime gives, on the whole, no indication of anything final in nature itself’ (Kant 2000: 65) indicates the endless ability of the human imaginary to establish pa erns of recognition, or indeed self-recognition, in the unknowable realm of conscience beyond the known and the seen. The beyond in an image is not a transcendental reality but an enlargement and enhancement of its visual fields. Here we must return to Lyotard’s conception of the sublime, which Ashley Woodward interpreted as his likely ‘. . . response to nihilism, which accepts its premises but demonstrates the possibility of a different conclusion: that the negation of the sensible by the intelligible and transcendental is not necessarily accompanied by a loss of the sensuous feeling of life, but rather may be a endant to its intensification’ (Woodward 2011: 66). The Angelopoulian sublime is therefore his own cinematic, or indeed cinematographic, project in Bresson’s sense, expressing a way to transcend the prevailing nihilism of history and its hegemonic occluding discourses. Tarkovsky’s Andrey Roublev, The Mirror and most obviously Stalker have suggested something analogous to the sublime as ecstatic materiality, something we can also find in Angelopoulos. Moreover, certain films from German expressionism, mainly Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of horrors (1922) and, somehow, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) could be included in the list of films that a empted such visual sublimity, a tradition that started with D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and continued into later films like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) and Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). In more recent times, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) immerses itself in the cosmological sublime in the creation scene, although the rhetoric of the music does somewhat unse le the ecstatic transcendence of the images. There are also scenes of sublime transcendence in Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), especially the ba le scene, in which destructive violence transforms the visual experience with is artful brutality into a vision of hyper-reality (heavily assisted by the grandeur of Shakespeare’s King Lear storyline).

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In Angelopoulos’ films, the transcendent and numinous break though the everyday and the quotidian. They puncture actual social history and personal experience and then vanish. They are the call of god, or indeed of the Other, in Landscape in the Mist, and the transforming presence of death in Eternity and a Day. Angelopoulos’ filmic sublime is emergence: without the assistance of tragic catastrophe or epic magnitude in the images of these films, the sublime is manifested as a rupture in the continuum of material being, an opening of the horizon that gives phenomena their transformation in time. The visual manifestation of an imminent otherness, one that is always close but only experienced in rare moments of absolute transparency, is at the heart of Angelopoulos’ sublime, a vision not anchored to religion, ideology or mysticism, although it presupposes the notion of grace. Furthermore, despite the inevitable analogies with them when talking about Angelopoulos, neither Renoir nor Bresson seem to have grappled with this cinematic dimension, nor did Bazin, who always tried essentially to legitimise or even justify realism in all its expressions. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978) and finally Fitzcarraldo (1982) all tried to revive this tradition, but overall Herzog’s cinematic language was imprisoned by the paradoxical imperative to be didactic rather than to transport viewers out of their individualistic ethic of self-realisation. Brad Prager writes regarding Herzog’s foundational experience of the sublime as ‘. . . inevitably emerging out of the historical context. [. . .] Sublimity is more an opportunity to reflect on historical processes than a claim that one is experiencing something authentic, trans-historical or even ‘essential;” (Prager 2007: 15). The awkwardness and the confusion that many viewers feel with Angelopoulos’ films is because he consciously tried to revive a cinematic dimension that was lost – especially as a desideratum a er the Second World War – and reinvent it in the era of televisual illusionism. Even in films by directors like Terrence Malick, Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky or even Lars von Trier and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who all touch upon the unrepresentable as a cinematic dimension, we detect a strong narrative illusionism that presents trauma, horror and catastrophe as lack and loss. Angelopoulos’ sublime presents the cinematic screen as the gathering event of unconcealment – the moment of aletheia, a visual opening to being – embodied in moments of intensified existence. This sublimity is not the feeling of spiritual ecstasy that we experience in front of grand natural landscapes or the revelatory iconography of the appearance of God in the great prophetic texts of religious traditions. It implies the experience of what Jean-Luc Nancy called ‘the means by which art suspends or disrupts itself in view of something other than art’ (Nancy

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1993: 27) and argues that ‘the sublime represents . . . nothing less than that without which the beautiful could be nothing but the beautiful’ (Nancy 1993: 34). This is what we have already called the autotelic character of the sublime, which articulates visually or otherwise a synthesising gestalt with the viewer’s visuality. For Angelopoulos, the sublime breaks though the limitations of everyday conformism and reinstalls the individual to its existential centrality: the individual itself becomes the revelation of the forces that produced its social beingness, its autonomous existence in the world and for the world. The Angelopoulian sublime foregrounds the end of the individualistic être-en-soi by elevating the mitwelt of present relations and past encounters to the ultimate code of meaning in history. It is about the unconcealment of beings in their plurality, specificity and uniqueness and has nothing to do with the abstract notion of a transcendent Being beyond history: the broken finger of a departing deity points to the integrating and restorative imaginary of the human mind as it finds itself surrounded by the ambiguities, the anxieties and the uncertainties of its frailty, suffering and vulnerability. Discussing Nancy’s sublime. Philip Shaw concluded that ‘. . . for Nancy, the sublime is that which enables the beautiful to surpass itself, and so to be open to the possibility of a presentation that is always to come’ (Shaw 2006: 150) Within the quest of such possibility-to-come, Angelopoulos’ transition from his political youth to his existentialist maturity found its most ‘awesome’ expression in the opening scene of Voyage to Cythera, when the revolving galaxies in the night sky are suddenly condensed in the body of a child, who then looks at the world with awe, fear and admiration. The sublime abides in the gaze of wonderment the child wears in front of the vast spectacle of history and the cosmos. It is as I have argued in the past: in the cinema of Angelopoulos, ‘the sublime [visualises] the tragic character of human knowledge and the tension between the knower and the known. We know things, nature, and reality, and yet the knowing I is beyond understanding and cannot be an object of cognition. In such a great chasm and divide, we build all our theories about the experience of sublimity’ (Karalis 2010: 11). Angelopoulos’ films stage the sublime as the tragic self-awareness of human life caught in the struggle to overcome formlessness and achieve transcendence against the background of the ideological illusions and failures of modern secular cultures. They insist on intersubjectivity as the place out of which the sublime emerges without privileging the ontology of the medium itself, constructing images of pure ‘cinematograph’ in the tradition of Bresson and Tarkovsky. ‘Can’t you see? Beyond the mist back in the distance. Can’t you see a tree?’ asks the young man in Landscape in the Mist. ‘No, answers the boy.

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Nothing.’ In the dialectic nexus of seeing everything and nothing simultaneously on a broken film negative, we can locate Angelopoulos’ project for the sublime through and out of cinematic images.

Notes  1. David Thomson. 2012. ‘A Requiem to an Unjustly Forgo en Filmmaker’, The New Republic, 2 February. Retrieved from h ps://newrepublic.com/ article/100211/theo-angelopoulos-greece-other-sea-ulysses-gaze.  2. Andrew Tracy. 2009. ‘Spotlight: Trilogy, The Weeping Meadow’, Cinema Scope. Retrieved from h ps://cinema-scope.com/spotlight/spotlight-trilogythe-weeping-meadow-theo-angelopoulos-greece/.  3. Peter Bradshaw. 2011. ‘Cannes 2011 Review: Melancholia’, The Guardian, 18 May. Retrieved from h ps://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/may/18/ cannes-2011-review-melancholia?intcmp=239.  4. Konstantinos Michos. 2012. ‘The Best Greek Choreographer’, Lifo, 4 April. Retrieved 30 January 2020 from h ps://www.lifo.gr/team/readersdigest/29845.  5. Christos Paridis. 2018. ‘Eva Kotamanidou Speaks About the Filming of The Travelling Players and the Grandeur of Theo Angelopoulos’, Lifo, 27 April. Retrieved from https://www.lifo.gr/articles/cinema_articles/190533/i-eyakotamanidoy-mila-gia-ta-gyrismata-toy-thiasoy-kai-gia-to-megaleio-toythodoroy-aggelopoyloy.  6. Vrasidas Karalis. 2014. ‘Religion and Greek Cinema’, Filmicon, 28 December. Retrieved from h p://filmiconjournal.com/blog/post/35/religion_and_ greek_cinema.

Conclusion: Final Words Unframing the Political: Angelopoulos Beyond Orientalism



Finally, who was Theodore Angelopoulos, the filmmaker? Beyond the symbol of post-communist melancholia or sceptical political modernism, Angelopoulos was a reformer who started making films within an aesthetic vacuum and managed to reinvent certain hegemonic conventions in ocular perception, ultimately proposing a new visual language for cinematic representation with global relevance. In his transition from the local to the transnational, he mastered the art of filmic self-reflexivity by confronting the clichés of the dominant commercial cinema and the conventions of art-house movies. In a way, Angelopoulos had to be Griffith and Eisenstein at the same time: he had to invent stories and translate them into pure visual forms. His scripts indicate how inventive and imaginative he was with mythmaking and its effective visualisation. He was an auteur with his own exclusive version of auterism: sometimes transparent and lucid but other times opaque and self-referential. The reasons behind such duality were simultaneously personal and societal. As his native country did not have a recognisable tradition of auteurs, with the exception of isolated figures like Gregory Markopoulos and his unique film Serenity (1958) or the early Takis Kanelopoulos, Angelopoulos had to connect with Italian, Japanese, German and French directors and delineate a personal genealogy external to that of his own tradition. There are many filmmakers who could be included in his personal genealogy. We have already mentioned Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Miklós Jancsó, Wim Wenders and Michael

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Haneke but also younger directors like Maurice Pialat, Giani Amelio, Victor Erice, even Olivier Assayas and in a sense Luc Besson, or certain ‘third cinema’ filmmakers like the Filipino Lav Diaz and the Nigerian Djibril Diop Mambéty. Angelopoulos’ cinematic language expresses what is called in harmony ‘unity in diversity’ as it is made of multiple visual dialogues, iconographic connections and aural interrelations, The affinities with some of the filmmakers mentioned above may be tentative and somehow debatable but reflect the homologous structures in contextual practices for the production, reception and interpretation of films. It is interesting that Wim Wenders offered to finish the last movie that his death le incomplete, as he considered Angelopoulos’ films as acts of resistance against the vulgar Americanisation of European cinematic tradition and therefore quite close to his own cinematic projects.1 Elective affinities aside, Angelopoulos’ own autobiography was part of the biography of his films. As I argued from the beginning, even if we explore all the circumstances of his life, we will not be able to explain the narrative singularity and aesthetic intricacy of his work. C.C. Jung stated that: ‘All conscious psychic processes may well be causally explicable; but the creative act, being rooted in the immensity of the unconscious, will forever elude our a empts at understanding. It describes itself only in its manifestations; it can be guessed at, but never wholly grasped’ (Jung 1967: 87). Angelopoulos’ immense unconscious and creative idiosyncrasy eludes totalising interpretive approaches because of its semiotic and symbolic complexity. It seems that most of his conscious creative effort focused on the constant quest for the originary gaze into the human soul, which heralded the beginning of his most ambitious work. The originary gaze into the soul was identical, as he stated around the end of his life, with a certain ‘persistence for love’ (eros in Greek), which for him was the animating force in all his films. ‘I was always moved by the persistence for love,’ he said about his last completed film. ‘As something that prevails over time and does not dissolve, as something not exclusive! By showing the relationship between a woman and two men, I speak about love which is not a regime of possessiveness.’2 Such osmosis between the search for the gaze and the persistence of eros culminated in the quest for the sublime as the uncanny and the mundane converged in his films, with a varying degree of intensity and success. In a strange way and despite the highly personal quest, his exploration gave his camera a unique ‘impartiality,’ as it was: ‘. . . continually modified but not overwhelmed by the a itude of film-maker and audience so that ‘fact’ becomes concept, object becomes symbol; the abstract is approached through the concrete; the particular takes on wider and deeper significance while retaining the full impact of its particularity. The

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impersonal record is charged with the tensions of an intimately personal response from both film-maker and audience. (Perkins 1993 [1972]: 187).

The intriguing dialectic between the abstract and the concrete, the personal and transpersonal constitutes one of the most dynamic elements of his work – and indeed its most challenging ethical dimension, with significant theoretical consequences. The old realist heresy, however, persists and defines the ways that his work is still framed and understood. Even a sensitive and radical interpreter of cinema like Paul Cousins wrote that ‘Angelopoulos’ grand tracking shots are in the spirit of Mizogushi, their complexity capturing the country’s complicated history’ (Cousins 2011: 376). The statement is simultaneously naïve and misleading. In this monograph, I tried to disentangle the history of his country and the story of his filmmaking. They overlap in many instances, but there are many elements in his films that cannot be deduced by the politics of Greece or cannot be reduced to their historical circumstances. (From another perspective, however, Angelopoulos’ transnational and to a degree translingual films might offer the possibility to look back at Greek cinematic history in fresh and provocative ways.) Consciously and deliberately, Angelopoulos differentiated himself from the production mode and the visual practices of his native country, both transcending and rejecting them, while trying to preserve what could be incorporated into his own aesthetic universe of local representations for a wider global audience. If cinematic history can be seen as a series of ongoing or discontinued conversations through genres, styles or formal gestalten, most of his interlocutors were outside his own cultural milieu. In the implied dialectics of their connections, we can locate the semantic frameworks that could offer certain specific interpretive principles about his films and his overall cinematic enterprise.

Beyond Angelopoulos with Angelopoulos Angelopoulos experienced early in his career the crisis and ultimate implosion of radical rebelliousness and political optimism that inspired many filmmakers of his generation worldwide. Such disenchantment forced him to stand apart from prevailing iconographies of popular or indeed sometimes populist political cinema. It made him push his work towards the limits of cinematic visuality, constructing a cinematic form that blurred the boundaries between the filmic and the post-filmic. The difference, for example, between Costa-Gavras’ Z (1968) and Angelopoulos’ Days of ’36 is more than indicative of how he understood the concept

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of the political. ‘Days of ’36,’ he said, ‘is the opposite of Z. In Gavras’ film there is a clear distinction between heroes and villains; it is a movie without moral ambiguities or grey areas in ethical dilemmas.’ The same goes for the political ‘message’ of the film, as ‘everything in it,’ according to Angelopoulos, ‘is predictable and fits in well with the middle-class ideology of its audience.’ ‘My films,’ he added, ‘are trying to be more hybrid, without a beginning or an end. I a empt to introduce a sort of “anti-suspense” ritual, something of the kind Oshima created in Death by Hanging, recently released in Greece’ (Fainaru 2001: 13). In a way, Gavras’ Z with its ‘middle-class ideology’ meant the end of politics, which also meant the end of all representation, with the rise of specular and spectacular visuality of digital effects and their enhanced pseudo-naturalism. Furthermore, in his a empt to restore and reinvigorate political cinema, Angelopoulos reformed his own cinematic language as he witnessed a growing disconnection between the Le and the working class. ‘Working class movement is not travelling any more with the Le ,’ he stated in 2009. In the past the Le began with the working-class movement. Today it seems that some profess to represent it. Represent whom? On whose authority? . . . It is a not a ma er of returning to the past but of searching for a new political language. There is no place for the Le without a new political discourse. The greatest problem is that for years now we are only expressing negativity, criticism. We don’t have a new political language to marry contemporary circumstances and the problems that emerge today.3

In his a empt to construct that new political language through cinema, Angelopoulos reimagined the whole tradition of filmic representation from Eisenstein to Rocha and Godard and proposed a personal way of looking at the construction of cinematic images themselves. Consequently, his relentless self-criticism liberated cinematic form from all pretensions for mimetic representation that could point to an inevitable and necessary continuity between life and screen. From the beginning of his career, he suggested that the process of making films implied a critique of historical experience and that the cinematic screen was the only remaining space for the critical reordering of the real in an era of false consciousness and the emerging society of the spectacle. Hence his camera avoided the reproduction of the dominant narratives with their conflicts and emotional tensions in the condensed timespan of one hundred minutes, as framed by the dominant Hollywood practices. By expanding time on screen, he offered his viewers the opportunity to reflect on the act of seeing and interpreting cinematic images, indeed forced them to feel uncomfortable with their own complacency and complicity to the illusory temporality of contemporary movies.

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He also avoided the romantic perception of emotional life as made of conflicts by focusing on the internalised landscapes of self-reflection, which he de-dramatised by elongating their temporality through the slow movement of the camera and the incorporation of silence in the dialogue. Towards this goal, he constructed highly complex and sophisticated cinematic hyper-realism – constantly experimenting with its temporal and visual potentialities – foregrounding the fluidity of identities and identifications that communities adopt in order to confront the vicissitudes of their historical existence. Yet in such an era of constant flux and immense change, he imagined invariable forms of reference and centres of meaning, which he tried to visualise and monumentalise, even a er their historical disappearance.

Towards Expressionist Abstraction Definitely there are flaws and shortcomings in most of his films. However, his most interesting films are the most flawed ones because in them Angelopoulos was renegotiating the limitations and the potentialities of his visual idiom and cinematic perception. I will further argue that the political and philosophical propositions he articulated through them have far-reaching implications about the nature, the future and the ultimate reality of cinema as a medium. Following Bresson, he distinguished between the mimetic function of cinema and ‘pure writing with images’. In his effort for pure images, he was almost always uneven and unsymmetrical: sometimes, he overprivileged form at the expense of communicative expression, while in others he is carried away by the ingenuity of his own innovations, emphasising atmosphere and mood. But a closer analysis shows that it was the gravity of the radical proposals tested in his films that makes them so unstable and unse led as filmic gestalten and not the abilities or the intentions of the filmmaker. In his earliest films, there was a strong tendency towards formalist abstraction, which was later replaced by a persistent quest for empathic identification through dynamic expressionism. The Platonic geometry of his early films was gradually replaced by Orphic polychromy and fusion. The conflict between abstraction and empathy (if we revive Wilhelm Worringer’s aesthetic dualism) is the ultimate ba lefield that we experience in his works. As Worringer argued, although empathy indicates a powerful urge for ‘self-alienation’, the tendency for abstraction indicates ‘. . . an urge to seek deliverance from the fortuitousness of humanity as whole, from the seeming arbitrariness of organic existence in general, in the contemplation of something necessary and irrefragable’ (Worringer

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1997 [1908]: 24). Sometimes, in his works, these two visual regimes, the Platonic-Byzantine and the Neoplatonic-Renaissance paradigm, seem incommensurable, and their asymmetries are too obvious. But in his quest for pure images and in his search for the cinematic sublime, Angelopoulos fused them both, risking communication with spectators and acceptance by critics. Such interplay between meaning and message was a monumental gamble that created two or three great filmic artefacts and numberless pure cinematic fragments. He did so without ‘orientalising’ himself or his films and without exoticising the Greek experience but presenting it in its full intensity, gri iness and contradictoriness. His sacred spaces were the petrol stations, the dilapidated cinemas and the dingy restaurants of the Greek countryside; his Alexanders were the lost idealists and romantic desperados, the defeated and the losers of history, with their unrecorded and mundane stories. By giving visual identity to these overlooked realities, he presented the introspective conscience of his culture without reverting to stereotypes and clichés that neoclassical fantasies or medieval utopias have invested their ‘Greeks’ with. Furthermore, he presented the inner conflicts and aspirations of his fellow citizens as political actors without projecting onto them the libidinal economies and the sexual panics that tourist industries had created in the post-war Europe in order to make images of ‘Greece’, and the Mediterranean, marketable commodities. With his movies, Angelopoulos was not selling ‘Greece’ or ‘Greekness’; there is no archaeological mystique in his films, or Mediterranean blue, sexual seductiveness, or even Albert Camus’ solar metaphysics. On the contrary, he un-imagined dominant visual symbols, even for his compatriots, by infusing them with new unse ling and disturbing meanings in an era of intense collapse and semantic confusion in the collective and individual imaginary of Europe. Angelopoulos explored unknown spaces and unseen landscapes in which modernist fragmentation or postmodernist nihilism could find unexpected cinematic signifiers for their potential imaginings and thus overcome their inbuilt tendency towards formlessness. In doing so, he also undermined and indeed sha ered all conventions about the romanticised legacy of revolutionary socialism through the ‘spectacularisation’ of its symbols or the nostalgic idealisation of its achievements. Angelopoulos realised that the great idea of his youth – socialism – was totally dead but insisted on foregrounding the power of vision and the need to dream of a society otherwise. Ultimately, his films frame and foreground not the broken statues of classical Greece but those of Lenin and Stalin as the failed prophets of a modernity who deceived ‘the people’ with their seductive and hallucinogenic rhetoric. ‘The people have been

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deceived’ is the ultimate statement from his last short film, immersed into the chromatic euphoria of elemental forces in the urban social laboratory of Brazil. Furthermore, Angelopoulos did not with his name want to add any ‘authenticity’ to any specific version of the imploded socialist and Le wing projects. On the contrary, he consciously subverted expectations about what constituted political visual culture and proposed challenging projects about new ‘utopian’ openings beyond the bureaucratic socialism of the Le and the era of oppressive capitalist specularity. There was definitely a certain pessimism in his final work as indicated by statements like the following: ‘The age of politics is over,’ he said in one of his interviews. ‘We live now in the age of managers. The age when prime ministers govern their countries as if they were football teams. And the Le remains silent and cannot imagine the future. It does not have dreams and when dreams are silent, bureaucrats take over.’4 With his constant existential quest, he foregrounded his most enduring legacy, practically arguing that cinema could be one of the few remaining metanarratives of modernity able to explore, or even to construct, the possibility of an overarching code for meaning in history and life. His personal insistence on this project is what gives his last films the character of staunch resistance, defending the ‘big screen’ against the ‘. . . danger of becoming glorified trailers creating a buzz for the DVD or downloads to televisions, laptops, games consoles, personal music players and mobile phones’ (Parkinson 2012 [1995]: 288). It is obvious that with his complete oeuvre, Angelopoulos a empted, through an aesthetic titanism, to rewrite the visual language of cinema. It would be totally misleading to overlook the aspects he succeeded in because he failed in many other. As Pseudo-Longinus would have claimed: ‘. . . his faults are more remarkable than the failings of his virtues’ (Longinus 1991: 47). The question of course is, more than anything else, ethical. In an era of prevailing fragmentation and commercialisation, he rearticulated some of the most persistent questions of the human mind in cinematic terms, circumscribing a field of visuality that gives images a post-realistic, almost metaphysical, or indeed metahistorical, raison d’être.

A New Mission for Cinema? Angelopoulos was not using images rhetorically to manipulate the emotions, responses and thoughts of his viewers; on the contrary, he emptied them from any kind of subliminal subscript of coercion, seduction and deception. His cinematic project started with certain fundamental political

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questions, evolved into an existential quest about modernity, then problematised all forms of identity while morphing into the visual exploration of the ontological grounding of contemporary homelessness, when it was interrupted. Through all such changes, however, his cinematic language maintained a strong political message, in the most constructive sense of the word, even when his films dealt with the most personal emotions of alienation, loss and trauma. Cinema had a new mission for the next century: ‘You make a film in order to perceive with greater clarity what is not clear in your consciousness’ (Fainaru 2001: 109). Making films in the era of post-metaphysical or anti-metaphysical thinking means to elucidate the new projects of liberation and emancipation that remain unclear and vague on the horizon of history. His project, of course, did not set out in any programmatic or deliberate manner, as it might sound. It was full of ups and downs, twists and turns, self-admiration and self-irony. Angelopoulos had an honest and sharp awareness of such cognitive and aesthetic asymmetries in his work. The following statement may function as his self-revelation and self-criticism: I don’t want to educate people; I try to find a way from chaos to light. We live in confused times where values do not exist any longer. Melancholy goes along with confusion and disorientation. But the questions people ask themselves are still the same. Where do I come from, where do I go? Questions about life, death, love, friendship, youth and age. (Fainaru 2001: 120).

We must find the time to watch his films again.

Notes  1. Anonymous. n.d. ‘Wim Wenders Wants to Complete Angelopoulos’ The Other Sea’. Iefimerida. Retrieved 1 June 2020 from h ps://www.iefimerida.gr/ news/37278.  2. Andonis Boskoitis. 2009. ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos: I Was Always Moved By the Persistence for Love’, Lifo, 27 April. Retrieved 2 June 2020 from https://www.lifo.gr/articles/cinema_articles/130352/thodoros-aggelo poylos-emena-pantote-me-sygkinoyse-i-emmoni-ston-erota.  3. Anonymous. 2020. ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos: He Taught Us To See’. Imerodromos, 27 April. Retrieved 2 September 2020 from h ps://www.imerodromos.gr/ thodoros-angelopoulos-mas-emathe-na-vlepoume/.  4. Vranas Roussos. 2004. ‘Contradictory Predictions and Evaluations’, Ta Nea, 10 March. Retrieved 1 June 2020 from h ps://www.tanea.gr/2004/03/10/greece/ antifatikes-ektimiseis-kai-problepseis/

Photo Essay Transformations of the Gaze in Theo Angelopoulos’ Films



The stills presented here delineate the transformations of the cinematic gaze throughout the films of Theo Angelopoulos. Each image becomes the interface between the viewer and the viewed, or the source of light and the bodies that resist it. The eye sees what wants to be seen. The gaze of history is transformed into the gaze that looks back through the opening of vision and the humanisation of time. It articulates sites of catharsis. In Angelopoulos, the intense gaze into the human soul frames the quest for the sublime. Each image stands for the (re)presentation of a different temporality. Time plays games with us. Each frame captures and reveals the radiance of mundane trivialities. From Reconstruction to The Dust of Time, Angelopoulos’ films are about the healing of traumas. Cinema revolutionises reality. It intensifies reality. It de-creates the obvious.

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The Gaze of the Returning Father (from Reconstruction, 1970).

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The Gaze of History without Individuals (from Days of ’36, 1972 and The Travelling Players, 1974–75).

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The Gaze of Death and Hallucination (The Travelling Players, 1974–75 and The Hunters, 1977).

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The Gaze of Myths and Legends (Megalexandros, 1980).

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The Gaze of the Cosmos and of Man (Voyage to Cythera, 1984).

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The Gaze of the Screen (The Beekeeper, 1986).

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The Gaze of the Hidden God (Landscape in the Mist, 1988).

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The Gaze that Saves the Phenomena (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991).

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The Gaze into the Soul (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995).

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The Gaze of the Mother of All (Eternity and a Day, 1998 and The Weeping Meadow, 2004).

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The Gaze of New Gods (The Dust of Time, 2008).

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The Gaze of Lost Causes (Sky Below [Céu Inferior], 2012).

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

The Cinematographic Gaze (Lumière et compagnie, 1995).

Filmography



The Broadcast (Η Εκπομπή) (1968) Length: 23 Minutes. Black & White. Country: Greece Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Theodoros Katsadramis (Ideal Man), Lina Triantafillou (Journalist), Nikos Mastorakis (Journalist), Mirka Kaladzopoulou (Glamorous Star)

Production

Theo Angelopoulos

Reconstruction (Αναπαράσταση) (1970) Length: 110 Minutes. Black & White. Country: Greece Distinctions: Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film, Best Actress Award and Critics’ Award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (1970). Georges Sadoul Award (Best Film of the Year Shown in France) (1971). Best Foreign Film Award, Hyeres Film Festival (1971). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Stratis Karras, Thanassis Valtinos

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Takis Davlopoulos

Music

Greek Folk Music

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis



Filmography

Cast

Toula Stathopoulou (Eleni Gousis), Yannis Totsikas (Christos Grikakas), Michalis Fotopoulos (Costas Gousis), Thanos Grammenos (Eleni’s Brother), Alexandros Alexiou (Police Inspector), Theo Angelopoulos, Christos Paligiannopoulos, Telis Samandis and Panos Papadopoulos (Journalists), Petros Hoidas (Judge), Yannis Balaskas (Police Officer), Mersoula Kapsali (Sister-in-law), Nikos Alevras (Assistant to Prosecutor)

Production

Giorgos Samiotis

Production management

Christos Paligiannopoulos

178

Days of ’36 (Μέρες του ’36) (1972) Length: 100 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Best Director and Best Cinematography Awards, Thessaloniki Film Festival (1972). International Film Critics Association (FIPRESCI) Award for Best Film, Berlin Film Festival (1972). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos and Stratis Karras

Director assistants

Nikos Koutelidakis, G. Fotiadis, Th. Grammenos

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Vassilis Syropoulos

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Mikes Karapiperis

Music & sound production

Giorgos Papastefanou

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Giorgos Kiritsis (Lawyer), Christoforos Chimaras (Minister), Takis Doukakos (Chief of Police), Kostas Pavlou (Sofianos), Petros Zarkadis (Lukas Petros), Christophoros Nezer (Prison Warden), Vassilis Tsaglos (Guard), Yannis Kandilas (Kreezis), Thanos Grammenos (Sofianos’ Brother)

 179

Filmography

Production

Giorgos Papalios

Production management

Giorgos Samiotis

The Travelling Players (Ο Θίασος) (1974–75) Length: 230 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Cannes (1975). Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress and Greek Critics Association Awards, Thessaloniki Film Festival (1975). Interfilm Award (Forum of New Cinema), Berlin Festival (1975). Best film of the Year, British Film Institute (1976). Italian Film Critics Association: Best Film in the World (1970–80). FIPRESCI: One of the Top Films in the History of Cinema (1980). Grand Prix of the Arts, Japan and Best Film of the Year, Japan (1980). Golden Age Award, Brussels (1985). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Director assistants

Takis Katselis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Assistant director of photography

Vassilis Christomoglou

Editing

Takis Davlopoulos and Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Patsas

Music

Loukianos Kilaidonis

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Eva Kotamanidou (Electra), Aliki Georgouli (Mother), Stratos Pachis (Father), Maria Vassiliou (Chrysohemis), Vangelis Kazan (Aegisthus), Petros Zarkadis (Orestes), Kyriakos Kativanos (Pylades), Yannis Firios (Accordionist), Nina Papazaphiropoulou (Old Woman), Alekos Boubis (Old Man), Kostas Stiliaris (Militia Leader), Grigoris Evangelatos (Poet).

Production

Giorgos Papalios

Production management

Stefanos Vlachos

Collaboration in organization

Giorgos Samiotis, Christos Paligiannopoulos, Le eris Charonitis

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Filmography

The Hunters (Οι Κυνηγοί) (1977) Length: 165 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Golden Hugo Award for Best Film, Chicago Film Festival (1978). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Stratis Karras

Director assistants

Takis Katselis, Nikos Trantaffilidis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Music

Lukianos Killaidonis

Music & sound production

Loukianos Killaidonis

Lyrics of original songs

Le eris Papadopoulos

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Vangelis Kazan (Savvas), Be y Valassi (Savvas’ Wife), Giorgos Danis (Yannis Diamantis), Mary Chronopoulou (Giorgos’ Wife), Ilias Stamatiou (Antonis Papadopoulos), Aliki Georgouli (Antonis’ Wife), Nikos Kouros (The General), Eva Kotamanidou (The General’s Wife), Stratos Pachis (Giorgos Fantakis), Christophoros Nezer (The Politican), Dimitris Kamberidis (The Communist).

Production

Theo Angelopoulos Productions with the participation of INA

Executive production

Nikos Angelopoulos

Production management

Stefanos Vlachos

Alexander the Great [Megalexandros] (Ο Μεγαλέξαντρος) (1980) Length: 210 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece and Italy Distinctions: Best Film, Best Cinematography, Best Set Decoration and Best Sound at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (1980). International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival (1980).

 181

Filmography

Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Petros Markaris

1st assistant director

Le eris Charonitis

Director assistants

Stavros Kaplanidis, Stefanos Daniilidis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

2nd assistant camera operator

Andreas Sinanos

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Music

Christodoulos Halaris

Sound

Argyris Lazaridis

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Georgiadis

Cast

Omero Antonu i (Alexander), Eva Kotamanidou (Alexander’s Daughter), Grigoris Evanelatos (Alexander’s Schoolteacher), Michalis Yannatos (Dragoumanos), Laura de Marchi (Italian Anarchist), Francesco Ranelu i (Italian Anarchist), Brizio Montinaro, Norman Mozato, Claude Betan (other anarchists), Toula Stathopoulou (Village Woman), Thanos Grammenos (Village Man), Christophoros Nezer (Mr Tzelepis), Miranada Kounelaki (Ms Tzelepis), Ilias Zafiropoulos (Alexander as a Schoolboy).

Production

R.A.I., Z.D.F., Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre

Executive production

Phoebe Stavropoulou, Lorenzo Ostuni

Production management

Stefanos Vlachos

Village One, Inhabitant One (Χωριό Ένα, Kάτοικος Ένας) (1981) Length: 20 minutes. Colour. Country: Greece. Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

 182

Filmography

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Screenplay collaboration

Costas Resvanis

Musical themes

Popular songs

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis

Production

YENED for the television series Reporters

Additional shootings

Andreas Sinanos

Athens, Return to the Acropolis (Αθήνα, Επιστροφή στην Ακρόπολη) (1983) Length: 43 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

1st assistant director

Takis Katselis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Mikes Karapiperis

Musical themes

Manos Hadjidakis, Dionyssis Savopoulos, Lukianos Kilaidonis

Poetry

Giorgos Seferis, Tasos Leivaditis

Sound

Thanassis Georgiadis

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis

Production

Trans World Films, ERT TV, Theo Angelopoulos Productions

Additional shootings

Andreas Sinanos

Texts

Costas Tahtsis

2nd assistant director

Charis Papadopoulos

Film segments

“The Travelling Players”, “The Hunters”, “Alexander the Great”

Cameo Appearance

Kostas Meleounis, Giorgos Alexiou, Giorgos Chatziioannou, Niki Miridaki

Narration of texts

Petros Fyssoun, Kostas Arzoglou

 183

Filmography

Voyage to Cythera (Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα) (1984) Length: 137 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Silver Lion, Venice Fil Festival (1988), C.I.C.A.E. Award, Venice Film Festival (1988). FIPRESCI Prize (1988., Interfilm Award, Berlin International Film Festival (1989). Silver Hugo, Chicago International Film Festival (1988). European Film Award (1989). Best Foreign Film, SECS Film Festival Brazil (1992). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Thanassis Valtinos and Tonino Guerra

Director assistants

Takis Katselis, Charis Papadopoulos, Nikos Sekeris

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Assistant film editor

Dimitris Veinoglou

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis, Dinos Ki ou, Nikos Achladis

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Manos Katrakis (Old Man Spyros), Giulio Brogi (Alexandros), Mary Chronopoulou (Voula), Dionyssis Papayannopoulos (Antonis), Dora Volanaki (Katerina, Old Woman – Spyros’ Wife), Athinodoros Proussalis (Police Captain), Michalis Yannatos (Coast Guard Officer), Vassilis Tsaglos (President of the Dock Workers’ Union), Despina Geroulanou (Alexandros’ Wife), Tassos Saridis (German Soldier).

Production

Greek Film Centre, Z.D.F., Channel 4, R.A.I., Greek Television, Theo Angelopoulos Productions

Production management

Giorgos Samiotis, Pavlos Xenakis, Phoebe Stavropoulou, Vera Likouressi

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Filmography

The Beekeeper (Ο Μελισσοκόμος) (1986) Length: 120 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Dimitris Nollas, Tonino Guerra

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Takis Yannopoulos

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Nikos Achladis

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni (Spyros), Nadia Mourouzi (The Girl), Serge Reggiani (The Sick Man), Jenny Roussea (Spyros’ Wife), Dinos Iliopoulos (Spyros’ Friend).

Production

Greek Film Centre, ERT-1 TV (Greece), Paradis Films (Paris), Basicinematografica (Rome), Theo Angelopoulos Productions

Production management

Emilios Konitsiotis

Landscape in the Mist (Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη) (1988) Length: 125 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Silver Lion Award for Best Director, Venice Film Festival (1988). Felix (Best European Film of the Year) Award (1988). Golden Hugo Award for Best Director and Silver Plaque for Best Cinematography, Chicago Film Festival (1989). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra and Thanassis Valtinos

1st assistant director

Takis Katselis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Editing

Yannis Tsitsopoulos

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Anastasia Arseni

 185

Filmography

Music

Eleni Karaindrou and the rock group The Last Drive and their song Every Night

Sound

Marinos Athanassopoulos, Alain Contault

Special effects

Gino de Rossi

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Tania Palaiologou (Voula), Michalis Zeke (Alexander), Stratos Tzortzoglou (Orestes), Eva Kotamanidou (Actress), Aliki Georgouli (Actress), Vassilis Kolovos (Truck Driver), Vassilis Vouyouklakis (Restaurant Owner), Ilias Logothetis (Seagull), Vangelis Kazan (Actor), Stratis Pahis (Actor), Mihalis Giannatos (Train Station Master), Kiriakos Katrivanos (Actor), Giannis Fyrios (Accordionist), Nikos Kouros (Theatre Owner), Nadia Mourouzi (Waitress), Toula Stathopoulou (Woman in Police Station), Gerasimos Skiadaressis (Soldier), Sokrates Alafouzos (Bike Customer), Dimitris Kaberidis (Uncle), Tasos Palatzidis (Train Conductor)

Production

Greek Film Centre, Greek Television (ERT-1), Paradis Films (Paris), Basicinematografica (Rome) and Theo Angelopoulos Productions

Production management

Emilios Konitsiotis, Dominique Toussaint

The Suspended Step of the Stork (Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού) (1991) Length: 138 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Golden Train Award, Grand Jury Prize, and Humanitarian Award at the Faro Island Film Festival (1991). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos

Director assistants

Takis Katselis, Eleni Petraki, A. Lambridis, P. Staikos, G. Katakouzinos, S. Daniilidis

Director of photography

Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos

Editing

Yannis Tsitsopoulos

 186

Filmography

Sets

Mikes Karapiperis

Costumes

Giorgos Patsas

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Marinos Athanassopoulos

Production sound mixer

Thanassis Arvanitis, Francoise Mysy

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni (The Politician Who Disappeared), Jeanne Moreau (Politician’s Wife), Gregory Karr (Alexander, The Journalist), Ilias Logothetis (The Colonel), Dora Chrysikou (The Young Bride), Vassilis Vouyouklakis (The Production Director), Dimitris Poulikakos (Television Cameraman).

Production

Greek Film Centre, Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Arena Films (France), Vega Films (Switzerland), Erre Produzioni (Italy)

Executive production

Phoebe Economopoulos, E. Konitsiotis

Production management

Emilios Konitsiotis, Pier Alain Shatzman

Production assistants

Kostas Lambropoulos, Nikos Sekeris

Lumière et Compagnie (1995) Length: 52 seconds. Black and White. France and Greece. Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Director of photography

Sarah Moon

Assistant director

Margarita Manda

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Cast

Nikos Haralambous (Ulysses)

Production assistant

Margarita Margiou

Ulysses’ Gaze (Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα) (1995) Length: 179 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Grand Jury Prize and International Critics’ Prize, Cannes Film Festival (1995). Felix of the Critics (Film of the Year 1995). FIPRESCI Prize, European Film Awards (1995), Best Foreign Film, French Syndicate of Cinema critics, (1996), Best Foreign Film, Turkish Film Critics Award (1996).

 187

Filmography

Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris

Collaboration in script adaptation

Giorgio Silvagni

Directors of photography Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos Editing

Yannis Tsitsopoulos

Sets

Giorgos Patsas and Miodrac Mile Nicolic

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis

Production sound mixer

Bernard Leroux

Cast

Harvey Keitel (A.), Maia Morgenstern (Woman in Florina/Penelope, Kali/Calypso, Widow/Circe, Naomi Levi/Nausica), Erland Josephson (Ivo Levy), Thanassis Vengos (Taxi Driver), Giorgos Michalakopoulos (Nikos), Dora Volanaki (Old Lady in Albania), Mania Papadimitriou (The Mother in A.’s Memory).

Production

Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre, MEGA Channel, Paradis Film, La Generale d’Images, La Sept Cinema, with the participation of Canal +, Basicinematografica, Instituto Luce, RAI, Tele-Muenchen, Concorde Films, Herbert Kloider and in association with Channel 4

Producers

Giorgio Silvagni, Eric Heumann, Dragan Ivanovic-Hevi, Ivan Milovanovic

Executive production

Phoebe Economopoulos

Production management

Kostas Lambropoulos

Eternity and a Day (Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα) (1998) Length: 130 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece Distinctions: Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1998). Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Music, Best Set Decoration, Best Costume Design and Best Supporting Actress (for Eleni Gerasimidou) at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (1998).

 188

Filmography

Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra and Petros Markakis

Directors of photography Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos Editing

Yannis Tsitsopoulos

Sets

Giorgos Ziakas, Costas Dimitriadis

Costumes

Giorgos Patsas

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Nikos Papadimitriou

Production sound mixer

Kostas Varipompiotis

Cast

Bruno Ganz (Alexander), Fabrizio Bentivoglio (The Poet), Isabelle Renauld (Anna), Achilleas Skevis (The Boy), Alexandra Ladikou (Anna’s Mother), Eleni Gerasimidou (Urania), Iris Hatziantoniou (Alexander’s Daughter), Nikos Kouros (Anna’s Uncle), Alekos Oudinotis (Anna’s Father), Nikos Kolovos (The Doctor)

Production

Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Greek Television ERT-1, Paradis Films, Intermedia S.A, La Sept Cinema, A GreekFrench-Italian Co-production

Executive production

Phoebe Economopoulos

Production management

Le eris Charonitis, Nikos Sekeris

The Weeping Meadow (Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει) (2004) Length: 200 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece FIPRESCI Prize, European Film Awards (2004). Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra

Collaboration to the final Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni version of the screenplay Director of photography

Andreas Sinanos

Editing

Giorgos Triantafyllou

Sets

Giorgos Patsas, Costas Dimitriadis

Costumes

Ioulia Stavridou

 189

Filmography

Music

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound

Marinos Athanassopoulos

Production sound mixer

Bernard Leroux, Kostas Varipompiotis

Cast

Alexandra Aidini (Eleni), Nikos Poursanidis (Alexis), Giorgos Armenis (Nikos), Vassilis Kolovos (Spyros), Eva Kotamanidou (Kassandra), Toula Stathopoulou (Woman in the Café House), Michalis Yannatos (Zisis), Thalia Argyriou (Danai), Grigoris Evangelatos (Teacher), Alex Moukanos (Nondas)

Production

Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Center, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT S.A., A ica Art Productions (Athens), BAC Films S.A, Intermedia S.A, Arte France

Executive production

Nikos Sekeris

Executive producer

Phoebe Economopoulos

Coproducers

Jean Labadie, Amedeo Pagani, Giorgio Silvagni

Preproduction and organisation of the first period of the production

Kostas Lambropoulos

The Dust of Time (Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου) (2008) Length: 125 Minutes. Colour. Country: Greece. Director

Theo Αngelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni

Director of Photography

Andreas Sinanos

Editing

Giannis Tsitsopoulos, Giorgos Helidonides

Sets

Andrea Crisanti, Dionisis Fotopoulos, Alexander Scherer, Konstantin Zagorskij

Music

Eleni Karaindrou (composer) ERT orchestra conducted by Alexandros Myrat Piano Soloist Natalia Michailidou Vocals by Alexandros Michos, Marlain Angelidou, Christos Mastoras, Liana Papalexi, Alexandros Balakakis, Eva Lauka

 190

Filmography

Musical themes

“All that you want” “The true face of beauty” by 1550 “Eifersucht” by Barbara Ehwald

Sound

Marinos Athanassopoulos, Jerome Aghion

Production sound mixer

Kostas Varibopiotis

Cast

Willem Dafoe (A.), Bruno Ganz (Jacob), Michel Piccoli (Spyros), Irene Jacob (Eleni), Christiane Paul (Helga), Reni Pi aki (Composer), Kostas Apostolidis (Secretary), Alexandros Milonas (Man on Train), Norman Mozzato (Hotel Manager), Alessia Franchin (A.’s Secretary), Valentina Carnelu i, Tiziana Pfiffner, Chantel Brathwaite (Young Eleni’s Friend), Herbert Meurer (Doctor), Sviatoslav Yshakov (Grandfather), Vladimir Bogenko (Head of Conservatory), Ivan Nemtsev (German Organ Specialist), Petros Alatzas, Tatiana Gladneva, Arish Galibian, Lev Sankin, Anja Lais, Jerry Mastrodomenico, Zoia Vasiytina, Vadim Pianov, Igor Mikhelson, Andreas Bach, Tim Jansen, Nicque Derenbach, Dela Gakpo, Nina Sytina, Gennadij Ermakov, Ilia Kharchev, Filimon Fotopoulos, Olga Bybnova, Sergey Iordan

Production

Theo Angelopoulos Film Productions

Executive production

Kostas Labropoulos, Yorgos Panagopoulos Guido Simone i, Till Derenbach

Executive producer

Phoebe Economopoulos

Coproducers

Greek Film Centre, Greek Ministry of Culture, ERT S.A., Νova, Studio 217 Ars, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Lichtmeer Film, Filmsti ung Nordhein – Westfalen, Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF), ARD Degeto, Classic Srl, Regione Lazio / Fi.La.S Spa, MiBAC – Ministero per i Beni e le A ività Culturali, Eurimages

Sky Below (Céu Inferior) Segment from Mundo Invisível (2012) Length: 8 minutes. Colour. Brazil.

 191

Filmography

Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Directors of photography Mauricio Jordy, Roberto Santos Filhio Editing

Daniele Rezende

Music

Andre Abujamra

Production

Leon Cakoff, Renata de Almeida, Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Debora Ivanov, Gabriel Lacerba

Production managers

Leon Cakoff, Renata de Almeida

Executive producer

Sonia Hamburger

Co-producers

Mostra Internacional de Cinema San Paolo International Film Festival & Gullane, HBO

The Other Sea (Η Άλλη Θάλασσα) (2012) Incomplete. Colour. Greece, Turkey and Italy. Director

Theo Αngelopoulos

Screenplay

Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay collaboration

Petros Markaris, Rea Galanaki

Director of photography

Andreas Sinanos

Costumes

Giorgos Ziakas

Sets

Katerina Angelopoulou

Music

Eleni Karaindrou?

Assistant directors

Panayiotis Portokalakis, Alexandros Labridis, Eleni Angelopoulou

Sound

Marinos Athanasopoulos, Aris Athanasopoulos

Production advisor

Costas Lambropoulos

Cast

Toni Servillo (P.), Irene Stratogopoulou (E.), Yiannis Perlegas (Orestes), Andreas Constantinou (Sahab), Vassilis Koukalani (Hussein), Ence Fezollari (Ali), Niki Sereti (Housemaid), Dimitris Piatas (Mr Pitscham), Julia Souglakou (Ms Pitscham), Marialena Rozaki (Poly), Elizabeth Moutafi (Jenny), Lena Papaligoura (Lucy), Manos Vakousis (Lawyer) Antigone Kouloukakou (P.’s wife).

 192

Filmography

Production

Theo Angelopoulos Film Productions

Executive production

Takis Katselis

Executive producer

Phoebe Economopoulos

References



Alberó, Pere. 2000. ‘On the Three Transformations: Traveling with a Nietzschean Camera through Theo Angelopoulos’ Cinema’, trans. by Claire Skandame, in Irini Stathi (ed.), Gazes at Angelopoulos’ World. Thesalloniki: Thessaliniki Film Festival & Kastaniotis, pp. 77–82. Andrews, Nigel. 1999. ‘The Arts, Greeks Bearing a Gi of Celluloid’, Financial Times, 6 May. Angelopoulos, Theodoros. 1969. ‘Goals of New Cinema by Francois Liberet,’ in Modern Cinema (Synchronos Kinimatografos), no. 1, September 69, p. 11. ———. 1977. The Hunters, the Script. Athens: Themelio Publications ———. 1978. ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos: Cinema is still at Makronisos,’ Bulletin of Pan-Hellenic Cultural Movement, Athens, January-February, 1978, pp. 18–20. ———. 1998. Eternity and Day, the Script. Athens: Kastaniotis Publications. ———. 1995. Ulysses’ Gaze, the Script. Athens: Kastaniotis Publications. Archimandritis, Yorgos. 2013. Theodore Angelopoulos: with Naked Voice. Athens: Patakis Publications. Aristole, 1995, Poetics, edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, Massachuse s, Harvard University Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology for the Creative Eye. Berkley: University of California Press. Auerbach, Erich. 2003 [1953]. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bazin, Andre. 1992 [1973]. Jean Renoir, edited by Francois Truffaut, translated by W.W. Halsey II and William Simon. New York: Da Capo Press. ———. 2005. What is Cinema, Volume 1, translated by H. Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bell, David. 2004. Ukiyo-e Explained. London: Global Oriental. Beiser, Frederic C. 2016. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bénézet, Delphine. 2014. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Ben-Shaul, Nitzan. 2007. Film: The Key Concepts. Oxford-New York: Berg Publishers. Bergson, Henry. 2001 [1889]. Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, translated by F.L. Pogson. New York: Dover Publications.

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References

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Index

 Acquarello, 2, 54n Aeschylus, 35, 59, 64, 109 Aidini, Alexandra, 108 Alberó, Pere, 144 Alley, Derek, 113, 119n Almeida, Renata de, 114 Alper, Öscan, 91 Althusser, Louis, 4, 65 Altman, Robert, 68 Amelio, Giani, 156 Anderson, Roy, 146 Anderson, Wes, 68, 122 Andrew, Geoff, 100 Andrews, Nigel, 105 Angelidi, Antouaneta, 69 Angelopoulos, Theo, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17n, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 35, 38, 42, 43, 44, 52, 54n, 55n, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117n, 118n, 119n, 154n, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163 and acting, 141–142 and Aristotle, 4, 53, 66 and Arvanitis, 46–48 Athens or Three Visits to the Acropolis, 78–79, 133 Auteur, 8–15, 134–135 Autobiography, 2–3, 4 Balkans, 15

The Beekeeper, 24, 49, 83–86, 135 and Brecht, 4–5 The Broadcast, 19–20, 22, 56–57 Cinephilia, 16–17 Civil War, 69–70 Communist Part, 34–35, 158, 161 Contemporary Cinema (journal), 20–22 Days of 36, 22, 47, 60–64, 135 and ‘deep Greece’, 41–42, 58 The Dust of Time, 25, 39, 53, 110–113, 127, 136, 137, 145, 146, 148 and Eisenstein, 131 Eternity and a Day, 24, 39, 45, 46, 47, 102–106, 121, 125, 126, 133, 139, 145, 147, 150, 152 and false consciousness 64, 65 The Forminx, 19 and German Cinema, 121–122 and Grand History, 52 Greek history, 27–31, 32–34, 39–41 The Hunters, 23, 36, 45, 71–73, 132, 135, 141, 142 and Karaindrou, 48–50 and Kierkegaard, 120–121 and Kurosawa, 23 Landscape in the Mist, 24, 42, 47, 87–91, 125, 132, 135, 139, 141, 145, 150, 152 Melancholia, 122–123, 128 Montage, 51, 131 Myth, 58, 59, 75 and nihilism, 145–148

Index

Nouvelle Vague, 31–32 O Megalexandros, 23, 73–76, 129, 132, 143, 145 The Other Sea, 26, 113–115, 148 Paris, 31 and PASOK, 36–37 and perspective, Byzantine 129–130, 132–133 and postmodernism, 138–141 Reconstruction, 22, 41, 58–60, 133 and religion, 144–143 and screenwriting, 45–46 and sex, sexuality, 62, 135–137 Sky Below/Céu Inferior, 43 slowness, 11–12 sublime, 148–154 The Suspended Step of the Stork, 24, 38, 42, 91–95, 133 The Travelling Players, 22–23, 28, 29, 35, 36, 45, 47, 64–71, 125, 128, 129, 132, 136, 150 Ulysses’ Gaze, 24, 39, 46, 49, 51, 95–102, 121, 122, 125, 135, 141, 143, 147, 150 Village One, Inhabitant One, 77–78 Voyage to Cythera, 24, 29, 47, 79–83, 132, 135, 140, 141, 142, 146, 153 The Weeping Meadow, 25, 42, 49, 106–110, 126, 133, 136, 143, 148 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 11, 13, 20, 24, 31, 43, 51, 60, 68, 70, 79, 82, 92, 112, 125, 128, 136, 155 Antoniou, Angeliki, 39 Antonuti, Omero, 73 Archimandritis, Yorgos, 29, 30, 52, 113, 114 Aristotle, 4, 53, 59, 66, 77, 87, 108, 149 Armenis, Yorgos, 108 Arnheim, Rudolf, 10 Aronofsky, Darren, 152 Arvanitis, George, 32, 40, 46, 47, 48, 54n, 56, 60, 63, 78, 84, 89, 91, 103 Photo–sculpture, 47 Assayas, Olivier, 156 Auerbach, Erich, 150 Avranas, Alexandros, 126

 201

Baudry, Pierre, 83 Bazin, André, 8, 67, 89, 93, 94, 134 Beaton, Roderick, 79 Bebedelli, Despina, 103 Becker, Wolfgang, 8 Becke , Samuel, 87 Beiser, Frederic C., 128 Bell, David, 44 Bénézet, Delphine, 117 Ben–Shaul, Nitzan, 89, 90 Bentivoglio, Fabrizio, 103 Bergan, Ronald, 108 Bergman, Ingmar, 13, 24, 31, 47, 51, 61, 69, 81, 87, 97, 105, 112, 113, 118n, 125, 128 Bergson, Henry, 14 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 31, 47, 62, 66, 67, 69, 85, 107, 136, 155 Besson, Luc, 156 Bickerton, Emilie, 31 Bigelow, Kathryn, 38, 128, 146 Biro, Yve e, 12 Bordwell, David, 25, 68, 117, 132 Borges, Jorge Luis, 79 Boskoitis, Antonis, 113, 119n, 162n Bo ici, Chiara, 9 Boulmetis, Tassos, 39 Bradshaw, Peter, 115, 119n, 128, 154n Brakhage, Stan, 13 Brando, Marlon, 136 Brecht, Bertolt, 4, 53, 66, 70, 72, 114, 135, 141, 142 distanciation 4, 143 Bresson, Robert, 1, 8, 44, 45, 50, 51, 62, 73, 75, 84, 116, 135, 140, 145, 149, 150, 153, 159 Cinecriture 1, 134 Brogi, Giulio, 24, 82 Brune e, Peter, 112, 119n Buñuel, Luis, 28, 72 Burke, Edmund, 149 Burks, Robert, 47 Byzantine Aesthetics, 129–130 Cacoyannis, Michael, 23, 34, 36, 41, 60, 64, 124, 132

 202

Cadou, Catherine, 23 Cakof, Leon, 114 Cameron James, 128 Campion, Jane 39, 146 Camus, Albert, 18, 86, 160 Cardamenis, Forrest, 90 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 32 Cavafy, C.P., 18, 60, 101 Cavani, Liliana, 67, 136 Celan, Paul, 45, 105 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge 24, 146, 152 Chabrol, Claude, 19, 31 Chahine, Yussef, 8, 13 Chalkou, Maria, 32 Chan–Wook, Park, 39, 146 Chaplin, Charlie, 51 Chekhov, Anton, 18 Chopin, Frédéric, 103 Ciment, Michel 13, 17n Clément, René, 87 Cocteau, Jean, 2 Coen Brothers, 39, 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81 Conrad, Joseph, 100 Coppola, Francis Ford, 66, 68, 128 Cousins, Paul, 157 Craxi, Be ino, 36 Cuarón, Alfonso, 122 Curtiz, Michael, 18, 30 Dafoe, Willem, 14, 26, 53, 111, 112 Dalianidis, Yannis, 25, 35, 46, 142 Damianos, Alexis, 21, 34 Danikas, Dimitris, 6 Dante, Alighieri, 93, 104 Dardenne Brothers, 127, 146 Dassin, Jules, 23, 33 David, Jacques–Louis, 97 Davies, Terence, 13, 38, 71, 98, 144 Debord, Guy, 52, 113 Society of the Spectacle, 52, 133–134 Degli–Esposti, Cristina, 139, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, 48 Deren, Maya, 13 Dermentzoglou, Alexis, 94 De Sanctis, Giuseppe, 28

Index

Diamanti, Mandalen Mari, 118n Diaz, Lav, 71, 155 Dickinson, Thorold, 125 Dimopoulos, Dinos, 46 Dimopoulos, Michel, 20 Donen, Stanley, 113 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 18 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 51, 132, 135 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 51, 61, 151 Dunne, J.D., 110 Dyer, Geoff, 10 Dylan, Bob, 112 Ebert, Roger, 25, 72, 99, 117n, 118n Eberwein, Robert, 13 Economides, Yannis, 39 Economopoulou, Phoebe, 23 Eisenstein, Sergei, 45, 47, 49, 51, 66, 74, 112, 125, 132, 148, 155, 158 Eliopoulou, Vasiliki, 91 Eliot, T.S., 45, 57, 96, 101, 106, 131, 146, 147 mythic method, 57 Elsaesser, Thomas 16, 17 Erdoğan, Yilmaz 24 Erice, Victor 85, 156 Euripides, 75, 109 Fainaru, Dan, 2, 11, 19, 30, 61, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 106, 108, 112, 119n,123, 124, 126, 131, 147, 162 Fais, Michel, 45, 54n Fay, Jennifer, 125 Fellini, Federico 8, 13, 24, 31, 51, 102, 112, 125, 128, 136 Filaktos, Filippos, 68 Filho, Roberto Santos, 115 Finos, Filopoimin, 20, 28, 33, 35 Ford, John, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 61, 76, 79 Friedrich, Caspar David, 97 Ganz, Bruno, 14, 24, 26, 52, 102, 103,111 Garbarek, Jan, 49, 84

 203

Index

Garne , Tay, 59 Gavras Costa, 19, 157, 158 Gaziadis, Dimitris, 28 Georgakas, Dan, 25, 67, 74 Georgakopoulou, Vena, 54n Georgouli, Aliki, 72 Giannaris, Constantine, 39 Gillan, Anne, 126 Godard, Jean–Luc, 19, 20, 31, 45, 50, 51, 63, 131, 138, 155, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 89, 121 Gonzales, Felipe, 36 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 86 Goritsas, Sotiris, 39 Grammatikos, Nikos, 39 Greco, El, 74 Greenaway, Peter, 141 Gregoriou, Gregoris, 34, 132 Greig, Ian, 151 Griffith, D.W., 66, 125, 151, 155 Grimm, Brothers, 87 Grønstad, Asbjørn, 110 Guera, Tonino, 24, 83, 85, 87, 91, 95, 102, 107, 111 Guevara, Che, 112 Gyzis, Nikolas, 74 Halaris, Hristodoulos, 48, 54n, 74 Haneke, Michael, 121, 141, 155 Hanlon, Dennis, 71 Hatzidakis, Manos, 33, 78 Hawks, Howard, 18 Hegel, G.W.F., 7, 93, 104 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 77, 80, 103, 121 Heraclitus, 106, 110, 147 Herzog, Werner, 43, 63, 121, 152 Hess, Jared, 68 Hitchcock, Alfred, 47, 50, 72, 85, 135 Hobsbawm, Eric, 75 Homer, 70, 95, 100, 101 Horton, Andrew, 2, 25, 50, 82, 94, 95, 114, 122, 130, 138 Hronopoulou, Mary, 33, 72, 80, 82 and acting, 142–143 Hsiao–hsien, Hou, 135

Huston, John, 18 Huxley, Aldous, 53 Ibrohori, Kaiti, 63 Iliadis, Dennis, 39 Iliopoulos, Dinos, 85 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 128 Iordanova, Dina, 16 Jacob, Irène, 14, 26, 111 Jameson, Fredric, 25, 141 Jancsó, Miklós, 8, 20, 31, 51, 66, 70, 155 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 72, 141 Jordy, Mauricio,115 Josephson, Erland, 24, 97 Joyce, James, 64, 95 Jung, C.G., 108, 156 on creativity, 156 Ka a, Franz, 96, 114 Kalantzopoulou, Mirka, 56 Kalatazov, Mikhail, 51 Kanellopoulos, Takis, 34, 69, 155 Kant, Immanuel, 8 on the Sublime, 7, 151 Kantiotes, Augustinos, 38 Excommunication of Angelopoulos, 39 Kapnisis, Kostas, 33 Karaindrou, Eleni, 48, 49, 54n, 81, 84, 88, 90, 91, 98, 103, 106, 111, 112, 118n Karali, Aimilia, 7, 92, 114, 118n, 119n Karalis, Vrasidas, 2, 35, 41, 49, 71, 84, 118n, 131, 145, 153, 154n Karamanlis, Cosntantine,36 Karayiannis–Karatzopoulos Productions, 33 Karr, Gregory Patrick, 92 Karras, Stratis, 59, 60 Kar–wai, Wong 39, 128 Kashkasian, Kim, 49 Katrakis, Manos, 80, 82 Katsadramis, Theodoros, 56 Katsaros, Michalis, 45

 204

Katsounaki, Maria, 108, 110, 118n, 119n Katsouridis, Dinos, 46 Kavalierakis, Stefanos, 117 Kazan Elia, 20, 34, 136 Kazan, Vangelis, 63 Keats, John, 123 Negative capability, 123 Keitel, Harvey, 25, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 111 Kenji, 55n Khairy, Wael, 90, 118n Khondji, Darius, 47 Kiarostami, Abbas, 8 Ki–duk, Kim, 146 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5 existential stages, 120 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 111 Kilaidonis, Loukianos, 48, 66 Kluge, Alexander, 27, 121, 123 Knyazhinsky, Alexander, 47 Kolovos, Nikos, 56, 57, 62, 72, 83, 117 Kolovos, Vasilis, 108 Korras, George, 20 Kotamanidou, Eva, 71, 72, 108, 117, 154n and acting, 142–143 Koudelka, Josef, 95, 96, 118n Koundouros, Nikos, 30, 34, 35, 41, 85, 132 Koutras, Panos, 39, 140 Koutsourakis, Angelos, 26, 27, 123 Kracauer, Siegfried, 122 Kuarismaki, Aki, 146 Kubrick, Stanley, 11, 44, 68, 81, 135, 150 Kurosawa, Akira, 23, 31, 38, 43, 47, 51, 54n, 58, 68, 74, 105, 118n, 137, 144, 151 on Angelopoulos, 75 Kusturica, Emir, 24, 96 Lacan, Jacques, 104, 108 Ladikou, Alexandra, 103 Lambeti, Ellie, 33 Lang, Frizt, 151 Langer, Susanne K., 12, 13

Index

Langlois, Henri, 31 Lanthimos, Yorgos, 9, 26, 39,124, 126, 133, 140 on Angelopoulos, 116 Laskos, Orestes, 28 Lassaly, Walter, 60 Laughton, Charles, 87 Lean, David, 47 Lee, Spike, 141 L’ Herbier, Marcel, 19 Leivaditis, Tasos, 78 Lenin, Vladimir, 98, 111, 149 Leone, Sergio, 66 Lester, Richard, 19 Levi–Strauss, Claude, 18, 65 Liberet, Francois, 20 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 10, 12 Loach, Ken, 67 Logothetis, Ilias, 142 Longinus (Pseudo), 161 sublime, 149; see also sublime Lorde, Audre, 17n Lubezki, Emmanuel, 47 Lukacs, Georg, 137, 140 problematic hero, 128 reification, 138 Lumiere Brothers, 38 Lychnaras, Kostas, 19 Lykouresos, Takis, 20 Lynch, David, 128, 138, 146 Lyotard, Francois, 148 Magri e, René, 96 Malick, Terrence, 38, 47, 129, 144, 151 Mallarme, Stephan, 99 Mamangakis, Nikos, 33 Mambéty, Djibril Diop, 63, 156 Mamoulian, Rouben, 151 Manchevski, Milcho, 8 Manda, Margarita, 39, 96 on Angelopoulos, 106, 107 Maniaki Brothers, 96, 99, 100 Manousos Manousakis, 34 Manthoulis, Roviros, 34, 35 Markaris, Petros, 24, 60, 63, 73, 91, 95, 97, 102, 103, 107,111

 205

Index

Marketaki, Tonia, 19, 35 Markopoulos, Gregory, 155 Markopoulos, Yannis, 33 Marley, Bob, 112 Marx, Karl, 2, 69, 99 Mastorakis, Nico, 22, 68 Mastroianni, Marcello, 14, 24, 54n, 84, 92, 93, 103, 136 Mathew, Gervase, 129 Maule, Rosanna, 122 McLuhan, Marshall, 10 Melancholia, 122, 123, 128 Mercouri, Melina, 33, 36 Metaxas, Ioannis, 22, 27, 29, 61, 64 Michalakopoulos, Yorgos, 98 Michos, Konstantinos, 129, 154n Miller, Henry, 78 Minelli, Vincent, 66, 113, 139 Mini, Panayiota, 69 Mitropoulou, Roula, 20 Mitry, Jean, 18 Mi errand, Francois, 36 Miyagawa, Kazuo, 47 Mizogushi, Kenji, 23, 31, 51, 155, 157 Moreau, Jeanne, 14, 24, 92, 93 More i, Nanni, 39 Morgenstern, Maia, 97, 136 Morley, Bob, 150 Morrison, Jim, 112 Moskvin, Andrey, 47 Mourikis, Vangelis, 39 Mourouzi, Nadia, 85 Mulvey, Laura, 70 Murnau, F. W., 51, 151 Nancy, Jean–Luc, 152, 153 Newman, Barne , 149 Nezer, Christophoros, 63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 100 Nihilism, European, 121 Nikolaides, Nikos, 35, 68 Nollas, Dimitris, 85 Nykvist, Sven, 47 Orwell, George, 53 Os Gêmeos, 115

Oshima, Nagisa, 20, 27, 158 O o, Rudolf, 88 Ozu, Yasujirō, 31, 87, 135, 155 Papadimitriou, Mani, 98 Papakaliatis, Christophoros, 140, 141 Papalios, George, 60 Papandreou, Andreas, 36 Papastathis, Lakis, 20, 21 Papayiannopoulos, Dionysis, 80, 142 Pappas, Irene, 33 Paridis, Christos, 117, 154n Paris, James, 20, 33 Parkinson, David, 161 Parthenis, Konstantinos, 74 Pascal, Blaise, 123 Pasolini, Pier–Paolo, 20, 31, 68 Peresiadis, Spyridon, 64 Perkins, V.F., 127, 157 Pialat, Maurice, 156 Piccoli, Michel, 14, 26, 111 Pirandello, Luigi, 80 Placido, Michele, 103 Plato 76, 95, 129, 159 Plessas, Mimis, 33 Plyta Maria 34, 132 Polansky, Roman, 67 Polonsky, Abraham, 18 Poulantzas, Nicos 4, 65 Poulikakos, Dimitris, 85 Pouliopoulos, Pandelis, 32 Poursanidis, Mikos, 108 Prager, Brad, 152 Prasidis, Theo 54n, 118n Prokofiev, Sergei, 49 Proust, Marcel, 50, 98, 102 Puiu, Christi, 24 Rafailidis, Vasilis, 2, 13, 20, 21, 22, 25, 56, 71, 82, 85, 88, 93, 100, 101, 102, 122, 127, 143 Rauch, Jean, 19 Rave o–Biagioli, Kriss, 16 Ray, Satyajit, 8 Reagan, Ronald, 84 Reggiani, Serge, 24, 84

 206

Renan, Ernest, 79 Renauld, Isabelle, 103 Renoir, Jean, 93 Resnais, Alain, 13, 31, 58, 125, 138 Rigoulet, Laurent, 115, 119n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 45, 88, 101 Ritsos, Yannis, 18, 105 Rive e, Jacques, 19, 31 Rocha, Glauber, 8, 11, 19, 128, 155, 158 Rohmer, Eric, 20, 31 Rose, Steve, 54n Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 25, 99, 118n Rosi, Francesco, 31, 73 Rossellini, Robert, 31, 140 Roussea, Jenny, 85 Roussos, Vranas, 162n Ruiz, Raúl, 81 Sadoul, Georges, 18 Saitô, Takao, 47 Samiotis, George, 58 Sanjinés, Javier, 71 Santos, Nelson Pereira dos, 19 Sarris, Andrew, 10, 32, 134, 135 see also, auteur Sartre, Jean–Paul, 18, 86 Schlöndorf, Volker, 19, 79 Schneider, Dan, 105, 118n Schulz, Gabrielle, 126 Scorsese, Martin, 25, 43, 75, 97 Sco , Ridley, 138 Sco , Tony, 70 Seferis, George, 18, 27, 45, 58, 73, 76, 78, 101, 105, 147 poems, 147 Sendler, Egon, 133 Serdaris, Vangelis, 35 Servillo, Toni, 114 Sfikas, Kostas, 20, 63, 69, 102 Shakespeare, Willian, 71, 101, 151 Shapiro, Steven, 133 Shaw, Philip, 153 Shaw, William, 151 Sica, Vi orio de, 137 Signorelli, Luca, 104 Silvagni, Giorgio, 95, 107, 111

Index

Sinanos, Andreas, 91, 103 cinematography, 111–112; see also Eternity and a Day, The Weeping Meadow; the Dust of Time Sinnerbrink, Robert, 16 Siopahas, Christos, 37 Sirk, Douglas, 9 Skevis, Achilleas, 103 Smaragdis, Yannis, 20, 39, 63, 140 Sokourov, Alexander, 39, 134, 144 Soldatos, Yannis, 26, 86, 93, 94, 127, 128, 130 Soldini, Silvio, 103 Solomos, Dionysios, 45, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109 Poems; see also Eternity and a Day Solzhenitsyn, Aleksndr, 144 Sorlin, Pierre, 125 Sorrentino, Paolo, 114, 122 Spasov, Radoslav, 24 Spengler, Oswald, 100 Spielberg, Steven, 68, 87, 152 Stalin, Josef, 33, 111 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 34 Stathi, Irini, 94, 144 Stathogiannis, Panos, 55n Stathopoulou, Toula, 59, 63, 88, 108 Stendhal, 18 Sternberg, Josef von, 151 Steven, Mark, 26, 27, 123 Stinas, Agis, 32 Storaro, Vi orio 47 Strasberg, Lee 34 Stroheim, Erich von 66, 124, 151 Stuart Hughes, H. 36 Sublime, 7–8, 148–151; see also Kant; Hegel; Lyotard; Longinus. Tachtsis, Costas, 78 Tarantino, Quentin, 39, 128, 138 Tarkovsky, Andrey, 11, 13, 24, 44, 45, 47, 51, 62, 68, 70, 79, 83, 90, 92, 97, 102, 128, 129, 132, 135, 140, 145, 147, 151, 153 on nostalgia, 24 Tarr, Béla, 39, 96, 113, 134, 146

 207

Index

Tassios, Pavlos, 35 Tatasopoulos, Stelios, 28 Taviani, Brothers, 20, 66, 67, 69, 82 Television introduced to Greece, impact, 57 Thatcher, Margaret, 42, 84 Thanouli, Ele heria, 67 Theodorakis, Mikis, 33, 78 Theodoridis, Kostas, 60 Theodorpoulos, Dimitris 42 Theophilos, Hatzimihail, 74 Theos, Demos, 20 34, 35, 68 Thomopoulos, Andreas, 68 Thompson, Kristin, 117 Thomson, David, 5, 25, 124, 154n Tiepolo, Giovani Ba ista, 74 Tisse, Eduard, 47 Tolstoy, Leo, 18 Tornes, Stavros, 20 Tracy, Andrew, 126, 154n Traverso, Enzo, 122 See also melancholia; weltschmerz Trier, Lars von, 39, 122, 127, 128, 141, 152 Trotsky, Leo, 32 Tro a, Margarethe von, 77 Truffaut, Francois, 10, 19, 31, 87, 124, 126 Tsakalotos, Thrasyvoulos, 70, 117 Tsangari, Athena Rachel, 26, 126, 140, 141 Tsarouchis, Yannis, 74, 78, 133 gay imagery, 78 Tsipira, Olympia, 116 Tucker, Robert C., 12 Tumarkin, Maria, 31 Tzavellas, Yorgos, 34, 41, 132 Tzimas, Stavros 38, 54n Ueda, Shôji, 47 Ullmann, Liv, 143 Vafeiadis, Markos, 70, 117

Vakalopoulos, Hristos, 20, 91 Valassi, Be y, 72 Valtinos, Thanasis, 24, 59, 63, 87 Varda, Agnès, 31, 39, 116 Vasileiou, Thanassis, 97 Vengos, Thanassis, 98, 129 and acting, 143–144; see also Ulysses’ Gaze Vinci, Leonardo da, 133 Visconti, Luccino, 24, 59 Vivaldi, Antonio, 49, 82 Volonki, Dor, 98 Volonte Jean Maria, 24, 96 Vougiouklaki, Aliki, 33, 35 Voulgaris, Pandelis, 20, 35, 39, 40, 68 and Angelopoulos, 140 Vouyouklakis, Vassilis, 142 Walsh, Raoul, 18 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 8, 71 Weil, Simone, 130 Weir, Peter, 68 Welles, Orson, 9, 51, 70, 131, 135, 151 Weltschmerz, 127, 128 Wenders, Wim, 24, 77, 121, 122, 144, 162n finishing Angelopoulos’ last film, 156–7 Widmar, Jörg, 47 Wiene, Robert, 151 Wilmington, Michael, 90 Woodward, Ashley, 151 Wordsworth, William, 86 Worringer, Wilhelm,160 Empathy and Abstraction, 159 Young, Freddie, 47 Yusov, Vadim, 47 Zamiatin, Yevgeny, 53 Zozia, Fani, 40, 51, 54n, 55n, 119n Zulawski, Andrej, 19