Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.

Syncope and Fractal Liminality: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera and the Question of Borders

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1984 film Voyage to Cythera, arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos' career’, whereby an individuating and ultimately humanising ‘recalibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films' characters’. Employing Voyage to Cythera as a starting point, the chapter explores two interrelated concepts and two interlocking mental functions — syncope and fractal liminality. It considers how Voyage to Cythera condenses within its intricate filmic texture Angelopoulos' key paradigm of the ‘boundary phenomenon’. It shows that Angelopoulos' borders can be more accurately represented as ‘fractal liminalities’ — endlessly self-duplicating, transitional lines of separation between parts of an organic entity, or between stages of an ongoing journey, which cannot be located and drawn with any degree of certainty.

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

Megalexandros: Authoritarianism and National Identity

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1980 film Megalexandros (or Alexander the Great), which was released in 1980 and which is generally considered to emblematise a moment of political disenchantment for the director. Megalexandros seeks to join history, myth and current events seamlessly with a healthy disrespect for all things that represent authoritarianism. In confronting the shortcomings of the contemporary Greek popular movement, the film stood alone in the New Greek Cinema. The chapter first considers critical and popular reactions to Megalexandros before discussing the film within the context of the handful of works that examine anti-authoritarian revolutionary strategies. It also looks at Angelopoulos' views on the question of Greek national identity and argues that Megalexandros is an expression of political transition, in which Angelopoulos' sympathies shifted from state socialism and party politics to anarchism or anarchocommunism.

Two Short Essays on Angelopoulos’ Early Films

This chapter presents two essays whose author offers a unique perspective on Theo Angelopoulos, approaching his work from the standpoint of a contemporary auteur and directorial colleague. The first essay reflects upon several meetings with Angelopoulos while the second provides a filmmaker's appraisal of Angelopoulos' technical accomplishments. The author tentatively attributes his friendship with Angelopoulos ‘to the similarity in approach we feel our films take, but it is also thanks to Theo's love for talking. Or, we could even say love for giving speeches’. He also comments on two of Angelopoulos' films, The Hunters and The Travelling Players, arguing that the latter showcases the director's filmmaking and camerawork. He describes Angelopoulos' camerawork as one of lingering affection and the camerawork of hope.

‘Nothing Ever Ends’:Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' last film The Dust of Time (2008), describing it as an apotheosis to the director's visual investment in duration. In The Dust of Time, a voice-over declares that ‘nothing ever ends’. The dust of time is the obliviousness of history. It would seem that the temporality of history is couched in opacity, whereas the work of memory struggles to bring a sense of lucidity to the past, to past experience and, finally, to the experience of the past in the present. The chapter considers The Dust of Time's consistent foregrounding of duration as both aesthetic effect and experiential mode, and how Angelopoulos' films in general encapsulate both these senses of temporal duration: that is, as a phenomenon intimately connected with the nature of the moving image and, secondly, as the more thematic and philosophical notion that ‘nothing ever ends’.

Landscape in the Mist:Thinking Beyond the Perimeter Fence

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' depiction of children in his 1988 film Landscape in the Mist, which meditates on some of the key themes from his larger oeuvre: the repetitions in Greek history, leaving Greece (and staying put), mobility, the courage of children and the fragility of humankind, and God. The key protagonists in Landscape in the Mist are two runaway children, who are sacrificed to redeem an idea of Greece and a belief in paternity, and who possess a kind of innocence that is dangerous. The chapter considers the pensivity in the film and suggests that Landscape in the Mist's progress towards sacrifice is a pensive collaboration between child-protagonists and filmmaker, thinking their way towards a Stygian border beyond which lies the landscape in the mist.

Tracks in the Eurozone: Late Style Meets Late Capitalism

This chapter examines how Theo Angelopoulos' late style mediates a political response to the ascent of neoliberalism in Europe and especially in Greece. Angelopoulos' shift from one aesthetic mode to another might be a kind of exilic disavowal, but it is not problematic or complicating or alienated in and of itself. To be sure, art cinema's will to an ostensibly humanist aestheticism provides a point of entry into thinking how compositional beauty can in fact be political. The chapter offers a reading of The Dust of Time, describing it as a work of late style not only because it articulates within a different and seemingly reactive aesthetic to the earlier films, but also because this new aesthetic remains disjointed. It situates the actual problems in the film within Angelopoulos' evolving aesthetic and within their historical context, and highlights the peculiar relationship between form and history in this work.

Theo Angelopoulos’ Early Films and the Demystification of Power

This chapter examines the ways that Theo Angelopoulos forged a cinema of demystification, whose individual films ‘contested history as the justifying discourse of power and authority’. Angelopoulos' trilogy of History includes Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters. This trilogy is one of the most radical ‘political’ interventions attempted within the established visual poetics of World Cinema. Both historically and culturally, these films were produced at the beginning and the end of a period of extreme experimentation with visual representation, becoming in their own distinct ways meditations on the limits of representability, on the function of cinematic images, and on the visualisation of collective memory. The chapter offers a reading of Angelopoulos' historical trilogy and shows that all three films articulated an integrated vision of how structures and institutions work together to deprive contemporary citizens of their agency and self-determination.

Angelopoulos and Collective Narrative

This chapter examines the role of collective narrative in Theo Angelopoulos' films from the 1970s. It begins with the premise that ‘our failure to grant Theo Angelopoulos the position he deserves in modern cinema’ stems from the fact that modern Greek history remains ‘far less familiar than that of the Western European countries’. It argues that ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’, and considers some of the ways that Angelopoulos depicts this experience as a kind of modern epic. The chapter analyses some of Angelopoulos' first films, including The Travelling Players, Reconstruction and The Hunters.