The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos 9780748697960

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The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos

The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos Edited by Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven

EDINBURGH University Press

© editorial matter and organisation Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9795 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9796 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0911 7 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgementsviii Note on the Text ix Forewordx Alexander Kluge Introduction – Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven Part i Authorship   1 Theo Angelopoulos as Film Critic Maria Chalkou   2 Two Short Essays on Angelopoulos’ Early Films Nagisa Oshima   3 Generative Apogee and Elegiac Expansion: European Film Modernism from Antonioni to Angelopoulos Hamish Ford   4 The Gestus of Showing: Brecht, Tableaux and Early Cinema in Angelopoulos’ Political Period (1970–80) Angelos Koutsourakis   5 Angelopoulos’ Gaze: Modernism, History, Cinematic Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink

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23 39 45 64 80

Part ii Politics   6 Angelopoulos and Collective Narrative 99 Fredric Jameson   7 Theo Angelopoulos’ Early Films and the Demystification of Power 114 Vrasidas Karalis

vi  c o nt e nts  8 Megalexandros: Authoritarianism and National Identity Dan Georgakas   9 Tracks in the Eurozone: Late Style Meets Late Capitalism Mark Steven Part iii Poetics 10 Cinematography of the Group: Angelopoulos and the Collective Subject of Cinema Julian Murphet 11 The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos Caroline Eades 12 Syncope and Fractal Liminality: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera and the Question of Borders Dany Nobus and Nektaria Pouli 13 Landscape in the Mist: Thinking Beyond the Perimeter Fence Stephanie Hemelryk Donald 14 An ‘Untimely’ History Sylvie Rollet

129 141

159 175 191 206 219

Part iv Time 15 Angelopoulos and the Time-image 235 Richard Rushton 16 Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze249 Smaro Kamboureli 17 ‘Nothing Ever Ends’: Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration 264 Asbjørn Grønstad Afterword – Theo Angelopoulos’ Unfinished Odyssey: The Other Sea275 Andrew Horton Theo Angelopoulos’ Filmography 292 Notes on Contributors 301 Bibliography304 Index317

Figures

 I.1 The Travelling Players3  I.2 The Suspended Step of the Stork8  2.1 The Travelling Players42  3.1 The Broadcast46  4.1 Reconstruction71  5.1 Ulysses’ Gaze 87  5.2 Ulysses’ Gaze 89  6.1 Megalexandros111  7.1 Days of  ’36 119  8.1 Megalexandros133  9.1 The Dust of Time149 10.1 Diagram for the opening scene of Days of  ’36165 10.2 The Hunters166 11.1 Eternity and a Day179 12.1 Voyage to Cythera197 13.1 Landscape in the Mist209 14.1 The Suspended Step of the Stork228 15.1 The Weeping Meadow 243 16.1 Ulysses’ Gaze 259 17.1 The Dust of Time 265   A.1 Andrew Horton and Theo Angelopoulos on set for The Other Sea 276

Acknowledgements

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his book would not have been possible without the support of a great number of people. First, we are indebted to the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales for sponsoring the ‘Theo Angelopoulos: History as Form’ symposium in 2013. Particularly, we would like to thank the heads of the research committee, George Kouvaros and Chris Danta, who supported our application for funds related to the symposium and the book. We are grateful to Phoebe Economopoulos for providing us with rare documents on the filmmaker’s oeuvre and for doing her best to answer our enquiries while working on the project. We would like to thank Julian Ross, Precious Brown and Eszter Katona for translating chapters published in this volume. We are obliged to Go Hirasawa for putting us in touch with Nagisa Oshima Productions; and many thanks are due to the latter for allowing us to reprint two essays by this great filmmaker. An earlier version of Dan Georgakas’ chapter appeared in The Journal of Modern Greek Studies (18.1 2000: 171–182) and we thank the journal for permission to reprint some of this material. We would also like to extend our thanks to George Kouvaros and Andrew Horton for reading sections of the book and for helping us to improve them. Kristin Grogan did an excellent job proofreading the manuscript. We remain indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of the book proposal. We are thankful for Hazel Reid from Words Around, who copy-edited the manuscript; she has been superb to work with. Gillian Leslie, the commissioning editor for Film Studies at Edinburgh University Press, believed in this book from the very beginning and we are obliged to her for helping us to bring this project into shape. Working with Richard Strachan from EUP is also a pleasure. Finally, we would like to thank all our contributors for their passion, patience and hard work.

Note on the Text

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n each chapter, we provide in parentheses the original foreign title and the year of release only for the first mention of each film. Similarly, for each character mentioned we provide in parentheses the name of the actor portraying the character only the first time the character is named in that chapter.

Foreword Alexander Kluge Translated by Eszter Katona

I

n film history, there is one sentence that is for me irrefutably true: the not-filmed criticises that which is filmed. A variant of this assertion can be found in Angelopoulos’ To Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), in which a Greek director (played by Harvey Keitel) comes back from the USA to Europe and goes in search of undeveloped rolls of film by the Manakis brothers from 1905. This film is about the question of tradition, about the contradictions between the past and the present historical moments. Angelopoulos tells a story about Greece while directing his gaze to other countries. Rainer Werner Fassbinder told me once that he really loved American cinema, but that he understood himself primarily as a German filmmaker. It was the issues of his homeland, the conflicts of his origin that he wanted to deal with in his films. Angelopoulos’ last project was to be dedicated to the Greek crisis. He was a patriot of film history; he wanted to tell the history of his country through the medium of film art. For me, the theme of the Odyssey-film is a fundamental beginning: every ambitious director searches for missing rolls of film. This is an ambition that authors of moving images carry within themselves. We are archaeologists, predators of the past, spinning threads of time through the centuries. Our model is Arachne. A similar principle in literature: the Library of Alexandria burnt down but we refabricate its texts with the novels, plays and poems of today. Angelopoulos’ technique is the protest. His films are realistic because they refer to a reality in which people try to orientate themselves. This connects them with the wanderings of the Odyssey. The opposite of unfamiliarity is trust: the places around me, the objects in my field of vision, the people that I touch. Trust is a category of intimacy and openness. We are currently witnessing that in many countries around the world: people are losing collective confidence in and sympathy for their governments. Angelopoulos would

foreword   xi have accompanied these developments with his own eyes. He would have responded to these intense political eruptions in Ukraine, Syria, or Northern Iraq with his sense of time. The long takes and uncut images are to accustom the viewer to the place of action and characters. The breathing of the film corresponds to the demands in the lungs of the viewer.

I NTRODU CTION

Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven

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he twenty-eighth Cannes Film Festival in 1975 was marked by the ­enthusiastic reception of a film that did not officially represent Greece, the country of its production. The right-wing government of the time refused to nominate it because it considered the leftist portrayal of modern national history offensive. Yet a Greek filmmaker and his crew managed to smuggle a copy of this film and show it as part of Pierre-Henri Deleau’s renowned programme, the Directors’ Fortnight. The filmmaker was Theo Angelopoulos and the film Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975). While the organisers of the festival were trying to find ways to sidestep the rules stipulating that only national commissions could be awarded festival prizes, by May 20, 1975 this 230-minute film had enjoyed its fourth screening in Cannes. Deleau’s anecdote typifies the passionate response of the cinéphile community: I remember once we had a four-hour film, and we thought no one would stay until the end. But it was Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players: it got a standing ovation. At the back of the auditorium, there was this strange-looking man walking up and down in an almost military fashion, staring straight at Angelopoulos, who had his back to the stage. The man started to walk towards him and Angelopoulos began to get worried. Then he went down on his knees, kissed Angelopoulos’ feet and left without saying a word. It was Werner Herzog. Later, when I mentioned this to Werner, he told me that the film had made him jealous so he had to genuflect before the filmmaker. That’s the rivalry between great filmmakers, a kind of good jealousy. (cited in Mandelbaum 2008) Eventually, the Cannes Film Festival broke its own rules, and The Travelling Players received the FIPRESCI Grand Prix. The film’s storyline follows a group of actors who travel in Greece during the turbulent years 1939–1952,

2  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven so as to perform a traditional bucolic drama, Golfo. Their performances are routinely interrupted by the major traumatic events of Greek history: the Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s, the Italian invasion in 1940, the German occupation, the Greek Civil War, and the years after the defeat of the Left in the Civil War. The following year, Hugh Jenkins, the UK minister of Arts, said that The Travelling Players ‘was the most original and most important movie of 1975’, (cited in Stamatiou 1976) and the film was subsequently awarded Best Film of the Year by the British Film Institute. In France and Britain, writers in journals such as Positif and Sight and Sound announced the birth of ‘a new epic cinema’ (Jordan 1975) and ‘a film reverberating with metaphor and meaning’ (Wilson 1975: 58), while in Germany a film critic went so far as to claim that The Travelling Players was as significant in the history of cinema as The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Roma Città Aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) (Buchcka cited in Themelis 1998: 126). Meanwhile, the film was successfully sold in Europe, in Asia and in South America, and Angelopoulos thus became a world-renowned director, whose unique style would influence filmmakers across the globe. These filmmakers include Chen Kaige,1 Jorge Sanjinés, Bernardo Bertolucci,2 Jessica Hope Woodworth, Peter Brosens, Bahman Ghobadi, and many more. But who was this Greek filmmaker who emerged from relative obscurity to become one of the canonical figures in modernist European art cinema? In France, this was not the first time he had been the topic of discussion within cinéphilic circles. In 1962, studying at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies) in Paris, Angelopoulos acquired notoriety for refusing to shoot the compulsory shortfilm assignment using the standardised dramaturgical tropes. Instead, he decided to re-shoot a scene from Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1959) using a 360° pan. While his colleagues at the Institute responded wholeheartedly to the young filmmaker’s completed project, his teacher took disciplinary action and recommended Angelopoulos’ expulsion from the school. A protest letter was signed by his classmates, as well as by important film intellectuals such as George Sadoul and Jean Mitry, but it all came to no avail. Forced to leave the IDHEC, Angelopoulos found temporary refuge in Jean Rouch’s Musée de l’Homme, where he familiarised himself with formal tropes associated with cinéma vérité. Angelopoulos was also a committed cinéphile. Prior to studying cinema he worked as a ticket seller in the Cinémathèque in Paris and as he recalled he became one of the rates de la Cinémathèque (rats of the Cinémathèque), and watched a plethora of films ranging from classical Hollywood to European and Asian cinema. Such was his belief in the visual capacity of the medium to communicate meaning that he enthusiastically watched dozens of Japanese films, even though there were no subtitles available (Archimandritis 2013: 24).

i n trod u ct ion   3

THEODOR ANGELOPOULOS' epic masterpiece now available 35mm + 16mm

THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS ex> 'Made incredibly under the noses of Colonel Papadopoulos' military police during the recent regime, Angelopoulos' THETRAVELLI NG PLAYERS examines with a passionate radicalism the labyrinth of Greek politics around that country's agonising Civil War. This is done through the eyes of a troop of actors whose pastoral folk drama 'Golfo the Shepherdess' is continually interrupted as they become unwitting spectators of the political events that ultimately polarise them. This compttx. slow. four hour film will

obvi ously provide problems for people raised on machine·gun· rapid intercutting techniques. Editing is very restrained and some takes last up to five minutes, but the stately pace of the film soon becomes compulsive, magical - rather like SOLARI$ - and the shabby provincial Greece of rusting railway tracks and flaking facades the slow camera examines is visually beguiling. The closing passage when one of the actors is buried after being executed, and his colleagues raise their hands spontaneously above their heads to applaud not a performance, but his life, is one of the most moving things I've seen in all cinema.' - David Perry. Time Out 'An extraordinary achievement ... it lives in the memory.'Derek Malcolm, Guardian 1

Massive achievement ... Aristotetean and Brechtian.' -

OIVid Robinson, Times 'Overpowering ... a major work.'- Dilys Powell, Sunday Times 'Intricate and stunning.'- Financial Times 'The cult movie of the moment,' Alexander Walker, Evening Standard 'Is going to taka its place as one of the screen's enduring masterpieces ... utterly engrossing.' - Felix Barker, Evening News 'A masttrpiece of modern cinema.' - David Wilson, Sight and Sound ENTHUSIASM Film Magazine No 1 Straub/Huillet

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4  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven Angelopoulos’ Parisian training was fundamental to his subsequent desire to make films that would engage with questions of national and historical specificity by using the late modernist style and a visual language that, as Alexander Kluge points out in the foreword to this book, could address historical concerns, dreams and failures on a global scale. Thus, not unlike other representatives of the New Waves in World Cinema, his project was thoroughly anti-nationalist. As Paul Willemen rightly observes, films concerned with issues of national specificity are always ‘anti-nationalist’ because they refuse to subscribe to nationalist homogenising projects (2006: 36). In the case of Angelopoulos, one needs to add, they also play a political role, since they intend to actively shape the audience’s view of the historical particularity and therefore situation of a specific country. The mode of late modernist art cinema, as András Bálint Kovács observes, was (and it still remains) particularly pertinent in this regard, precisely because it also served the ‘modernization of a traditional national cultural environment through its integration into the modern cinematic universe’ (2007: 181). In Angelopoulos’ case, this modernisation also involved building an audience by writing seriously about cinema hence, like a number of filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague, he started his career as a film-critic. Yet the task of modernising the Greek cultural landscape had, for Angelopoulos, a utopian dimension. In 1969, in an interview with his friend Vassilis Rafailidis, he explained that the cinema they desired was not the escapist one that helps one forget about everyday problems, but a cinema that keeps insistently reminding the viewer of his or her everyday reality (cited in Rafailidis 2003: 137). Tellingly, this desire went hand in hand with a belief in using a set of stylistic and formal narrative devices associated with modernism. As Kovács argues, the endeavoured modernisation of national film cultures in the 1960s relied deeply on ‘the employment of a set of universal stylistic solutions’ (2013: 3–4) that were successfully applied to different cultural traditions. In this context, the modernisation of different national film cultures entailed a wish to use cinema as a means of rethinking the reality of the nation by appealing to an audience beyond the national borders. This grand project initiated by the modernist art cinema says something about the utopian dream of cinema turning into a universal language of images, a dream very much thwarted by the emergence of sound and spoken dialogue. It is possible to concede here that the late modernist cinematic project was an attempt (albeit a failed one) to internationalise different film cultures without evading questions of national and historical specificity. Put simply, one cannot dissociate the films of Godard, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni, Solanas, Jancsó, Oshima, the Taviani brothers, Pereira dos Santos, Rocha, or Angelopoulos from the national and historical contexts to which they refer. The fact that many of these filmmakers were more popular abroad

in troduction   5 than in their homelands testifies to the great potential that modernist art cinema had in globalising national film cultures that shared common stylistic elements and modernist norms. Indeed, one might venture to suggest that modernist art cinema is a good example of a sustained attempt to allow for the inclusive mobility and exchange of cultural objects, which were able to address a number of national historical questions. Alain Badiou, a confirmed adversary of abstractly universal ideas, has indicated the ways that filmmakers committed to national historical enquiries have produced films with universal appeal. In a passage worth quoting, Badiou claims that: During at least one temporal sequence, the cinema’s mass dimension was not incompatible with a direct concern to invent forms in which the  reality of a country occurs as a problem. This was the case in Germany, as the escort of leftism (Fassbinder, Schroeter, Wenders . . .), in Portugal after the 1975 revolution (Oliveira, Botelho . . .), and in Iran after the Islamic revolution (Kiarostami). In all of these examples it is clear that what cinema is capable of touches the country, as a subjective category (what is it to be from this country?). There are cinema-ideas concerning this point, such as its previous invisibility is revealed by the event. The cinema is then both modern and broad in its action. A national cinema with a universal address emerges; a national school, recognizable in everything up to its insistence on certain formal aspects. (2013: 143) The productive paradox in Badiou’s formulation is precisely that filmmakers preoccupied with their national reality managed to increase the visibility of their outputs and the national questions these outputs sought to address by means of their reliance on a set of transnational stylistic features. For instance, Fassbinder’s films, which were very much concerned with Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), travelled successfully abroad precisely because of their employment of recognisable formal solutions, such as excessive melodramatic pathos, formal abstraction and Brechtian technique, all of which were successfully reconfigured by the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. It is precisely because of what we are calling the ‘lingua franca’ of modernist formal traits that audiences across the globe had the opportunity to engage not only with the formal innovations of his films but also with the historical past of Germany. Theo Angelopoulos is another example of a filmmaker whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, 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 century. Angelopoulos was one of the most prominent and committed cinematic formalists whose monumental images

6  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven respond to urgent historical questions that remain pertinent even today. Let us consider his work following the commonplace (and at times problematic) periodisation of his oeuvre. In his first two films, Η Εκπομπή (Broadcast, 1968), and Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) the question of representation figures strongly and both films blend reality and fiction to address issues of mediation. The influence of Jean Rouch is apparent for in Broadcast we are dealing with the ways the media manage not only to regulate identity construction but also to cultivate fantasies of social mobility and individualism. In Reconstruction, the very issue of representation becomes the central task of the film. The attempt to reconstruct a murder never shown on screen diverts the viewers’ attention from the particular (an isolated dramatic event) to the general, namely the social and political causes of the crime and the ethics of representation. Thus the pressing question here could be summarised as such: how can one use the language of cinema to represent a dramatic event and create a dynamic relationship with history? In the historical tetralogy3 – Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), The Travelling Players, Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980) – the question of historical representation is the central theme of each film. In each one the emphasis is placed on modern Greek history; but the scope of these films encourages the viewer to reconsider the European postwar historical narrative. The films ask us to see history not from the point of view of grandiose historical figures, as it is the case of most period films, but from the point of view of the people as a collective subject. In Days of ’36, memories of the pre-war fascist dictatorship allude to the traumatic reality of the 1967–74 US-backed military junta of the colonels. In The Travelling Players, the employment of the myth of Atreides in a modern context results in the first cinematic recounting of modern Greek history from a leftist point of view. The formal texture of the film and its reliance on myth, folk songs and camera testimonies makes much, according to Angelopoulos, of historical memory not as an individual recounting but as the collective memory of the people (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 32). In Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) the victors of history, the Greek bourgeoisie, are forced to do their own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and come face to face with their responsibilities regarding their own role in turning Greece into a US-client state marked by electoral fraud and military coups. Finally, in Megalexandros the parable of a failed socialist experiment becomes a prescient metaphor for the forthcoming collapse of the dream of socialism in Eastern Europe. In the trilogy of silence, Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986), and Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) the emphasis shifts to the effects of history on individuals whose lives are marked by forced displacement, and failure to adapt to a world with no utopian aspirations. The trilogy of borders that follows consists of

in troduction   7 Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1999). It focuses on the after-effects of contemporary history drawing attention to issues of economic and political migration and to the lack of collective dreams during the reanimation of political conflicts in the Balkans. The last two completed films, Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) and Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) are the opening instalments of an unfinished trilogy, cut short by the director’s unexpected death in 2012. In these films, Angelopoulos returns retroactively to historical questions. The Weeping Meadow reassesses Greece’s modern history, while The Dust of Time endeavours to come to terms with some of the major events following the end of World War II, transitioning from the final days of Stalinism to the wholesale advent of neoliberalism in the 1990s.

CR I T I CAL RECE P T I ON Let us then summarise some of the main themes in Angelopoulos’ filmography, which are: 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. Given the contemporary relevance of these questions, it is somewhat surprising to see the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos’ cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship, particularly in light of the fact that there is a large body of scholarship on the filmmaker in French, German, Spanish and Italian. Thus, with the exception of Andrew Horton’s sustained engagement with Angelopoulos’ cinema, and despite David Bordwell’s polemical claim that against hackneyed postmodernist formulas, Angelopoulos’ cinema shows that ‘cinematic modernism can still open our eyes’ (2005: 185), it seems that Angelopoulos’ work has not received the attention it deserves within the Anglophone Academy.4 There are three main reasons for this lack of critical attention. Firstly, Angelopoulos is a belated modernist and as such he might be thought of as a hard-to-place and seemingly paradoxical filmmaker, since his oeuvre successfully combines the sombre with the poetic, the austere with the stunning, defamiliarisation with pathos and melancholy. Moreover, his visual compositions borrow stylistic elements from European and Japanese art cinema as well as from classical Hollywood, including from Vincente Minnelli’s musicals and Howard Hawks’ and Billy Wilder’s noir films. His films can communicate scepticism towards the image as well as revel in their own visual indulgence. Let us illustrate this using one of Angelopoulos’ many powerful compositions.

8  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven

Figure I.2 The Suspended Step of the Stork

Near the end of The Suspended Step of the Stork a young journalist (Gregory Carr) who has been working on the disappearance of a Greek politician (Marcello Mastroianni) is framed with his back to the camera while gazing onto the lakeside landscape in the border area in the North of Greece. The character’s voiceover cites a lost politician’s book (mentioned earlier in the film) in which that politician addressed the need to invent a new collective dream for the twentyfirst century. ‘Why not assume that today is the 31st of December 1999’. As the camera follows the journalist walking along the embankment, we see a group of repair workers in yellow raincoats climbing a number of telephone poles and trying to connect the wires. The antithesis between the grey landscape and the yellow raincoats generates a contrast in colour composition that produces a visual surplus, while the extra-diegetic music generates a sense of melancholy. Yet this compositional excess invites us to immerse ourselves in the image and enjoy the richly designed audiovisual material, but it also asks us to step out of it and connect it with our historical present. The formal surplus here addresses a concrete historical question – the absence of utopia – by articulating a belief in the image’s capacity to challenge the reality outside the diegesis. It would not be overreaching to suggest that the difficulty in classifying Angelopoulos derives from the fact that, from the beginning until the end of his career, his films communicate a firm belief in cinema as a medium of communication. As most of this volume’s contributors acknowledge, Angelopoulos extenuated the formal experiments that were initially introduced to the medium in the 1960s. It is perhaps because of this belatedness that he did not subscribe to facile and at times repetitive postmodern critiques of the image. When he started making feature films in the 1970s the belatedness of

in troduction   9 his style was more apparent due to the temporal proximity to the 1960s, while by the 1980s and 1990s he appeared as a marginal figure within a postmodern cinematic landscape: a living anachronism. Angelopoulos was a firm believer in art cinema as a specific mode of aesthetic production, and perhaps this is another important reason why he has been ignored by Anglophone film criticism. For many years, the very term ‘art cinema’ has been a dirty word within Anglophone film studies. As Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover observe, the cultural studies turn and the embrace of postclassical film theory are the two main reasons why, following the 1990s, little attention has been paid to rethinking art cinema as an aesthetic category (2010: 5). Furthermore, from the 1990s onwards, formal questions had lost their connection to political issues and there was an assumption that art cinema stood for a dead end formalism, which was not grounded in the nexus between form, politics and history. It was therefore a reflexive action on the part of cultural studies scholars to dismiss art cinema as ‘elitist’ and ‘bourgeois’. This was strengthened by what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as ‘the democratic or levelling fantasy’ (2002: 172), according to which postmodernism has diminished the boundaries between high art and mass culture. The paradox, however, is that this thesis was not inclusive, since on the one hand it led to the legitimisation of objects produced for mass consumption, but on the other hand art cinema was summarily dismissed as a retrograde category. In Angelopoulos’ case, his persistence in the art-cinematic project was directly interrelated with a desire to use cinema as visual testimony to his country’s history. Prior to making his first feature film he stated the need to follow the path laid by the Cinema Novo filmmakers and make films that stand as ‘testimonies on a specific topographical space’ (cited in Rafailidis 2003: 153). It is therefore no accident that, as mentioned in the beginning of this introduction, his work has influenced filmmakers in countries such as China, Iran, Brazil, Bolivia and in Europe, who also wished to address the troubling historical legacy of their countries. This is particularly important since filmmakers such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos5 and Jorge Sanjinés, who have openly acknowledged Angelopoulos’ influence (see Hanlon 2010: 352; Leontis 2005), are part of the Third Cinema tradition, which has been defined in opposition to Eurocentric models of filmmaking. Equally important is to acknowledge that Japan was the largest market for his films. This speaks volumes about their ability to resonate with audiences around the world. It is fair to suggest that Jacque Rivette’s view that Kenji Mizoguchi’s cinema (a filmmaker whom Angelopoulos admired during his youth) speaks the familiar language of mise en scène, equally applies to Angelopoulos’ oeuvre (cited in Bordwell 1997b: 79). The third and perhaps most important reason why Angelopoulos’ films have not received the critical attention they deserve has to do with the fact that they are deeply imbricated in modern Greek history. As Fredric Jameson says

10  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven in his contribution to this book, ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’. While Angelopoulos’ films engage history on a global scale, Greece nonetheless remains his oeuvre’s centre of gravity, and it is also the geopolitical site of historical misunderstanding. What is difficult about these films is to hear their historically specific echoes. For these historical echoes to be audible, a historical overview is required that might help the reader and any prospective viewers of Angelopoulos’ films.6

T HE ECHOES OF MODERN GREEK H ISTORY 1. World War I Wolfram Schütte suggests that Angelopoulos along with Luchino Visconti, Carlos Saura and Andrzej Wajda are the four main European filmmakers whose national history is instrumental in understanding the political, aesthetic and historical consequences of their works (1992: 10). Angelopoulos’ films are preoccupied with the tormented history of Greek modernity, a history of internal political and social conflict, and foreign intervention in the country’s internal affairs. Yet while his films explore historical incidents from the late 1920s to the present, these historical conflicts date back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and the years before World War I, which saw the country split into different political camps. Before entering World War I Greece was divided. On the one hand, the royalist camp supported neutrality while the republicans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, were pro-Entente. In August 1916, the ‘National Defence’ led by the Venizelists staged a coup to challenge the King, Constantine I. By October 1916 the national schism widened, since Venizelos had set up a provisional government based in Thessaloniki and the country was thus divided both geographically and politically. In November 1916, Allied forces and Venizelists fought against the Greek army controlled by the King. By 30 May 1917, the King was dethroned and, on 14 June, Venizelos became the Prime Minister of a reunited Greece. By the end of June, Greece joined the Allied forces against the Central Powers. 2. After the War: the Asia Minor Catastrophe In November 1918 the Socialist Labour Party of Greece (SEKE) was founded and it opposed the approaching war led by the Allies against the declining Ottoman Empire. Venizelos and the Republicans supported the Greek nationalist expansion widely known as Μεγάλη Ιδέα (Great Idea) and, on 15 May 1919, the Greek army (with support from Allied forces) landed in Smyrna,

in troduction   11 which was Ottoman territory at the time. This episode revived Turkish nationalism led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The following year, on 10 August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres was ratified and territories of the former Ottoman Empire were removed by the Allies. The humiliating terms of the treaty intensified an already existing Turkish nationalism. In the Greek elections that took place the same year, the royalists took power after an electorate campaign that supported the withdrawal of troops from Asia Minor. Ignoring their election promises, the royalists continued the Greek offensive in Turkish territories, while they also restored, with a dubious plebiscite, King Constantine I who was not regarded favourably by the Allies. By the end of August 1922, the Turkish nationalists had defeated the demoralised Greek army. Large numbers of the Greek and Armenian populations were slaughtered and a wave of refugees flooded the country (Agamemnon’s five-minute monologue in The Travelling Players refers to these events). Following a peace treaty between Greece and Turkey, which was signed in 1923 in Lausanne, the two countries agreed to exchange populations so as to prevent future territorial conflicts. An estimated number of 1,220,000 Greeks and 45,000 Armenians left Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace to be placed in Greece, and 519,000 Muslims evacuated from Greece were relocated in Turkey. 3. The Years After the Asia Minor Catastrophe and Metaxas Dictatorship The majority of refugees joined either the Socialist Labour Party of Greece (in 1924 it changed its name to the Communist Party) or republican anti-royalist parties, and they also played an important role in trade unionist activities. These refugees suffered long-term discrimination while providing cheap labour during the country’s industrialisation in the early 1920s. Following the Asia Minor debacle, Venizelist officers led by Nikolaos Plastiras staged a military coup. King Constantine resigned and was succeeded by King George II. In October 1922, five former government officials and a General Officer were executed for their role in the Asia Minor catastrophe. In 1924, the institution of monarchy was abolished. The 1920s comprised a period of political instability that included Theodoros Pangalos’ dictatorship from 1925 to 26 while they were also marked by fierce political opposition between the Venizelists and the Populist Party. In the 1928 elections, the Communist Party managed to elect 10 MPs. After the Great Depression in 1929 there was growing industrial arrest between 1924 and 1934; this led to the increase of Communist Party membership. In 1929 Venizelos’ government, with the support of the rightwing anti-Venizelists, voted in the Idionym Law, which penalised those who instigated industrial disputes. Thousands of Communist Party sympathisers were deported to islands, hundreds were imprisoned and tortured and many

12  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven were murdered. On 25 November 1935, King George II was restored and he then called elections on 26 January 1936. None of the parties managed to form a majority and the previous Prime Minister, Konstantinos Demertzis, continued to run the government until 13 April 1936, when he died suddenly and was succeeded by Ioannis Metaxas. Metaxas took advantage of the political crisis and by 4 August 1936 had formed a dictatorship with the blessing of the two main political parties. Angelopoulos’ second feature, Days of ’36 takes place within this period. Metaxas was an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler and his regime persecuted brutally any form of political opposition including ­communists, trade-unionists and moderate republicans. 3. World War II and Civil War Despite his fascist sympathies, Metaxas rejected an ultimatum on 28 October 1940 to allow the Italian army to enter Greek territories and so Greece entered the war against the Axis forces. The Greek army successfully pushed the Italians back into Albania and this was hailed as one of the first military triumphs against the fascist alliance. On 6 April 1941 the German army invaded Greece, which was now supported by British, Australian and New Zealand forces. On 27 April, Athens fell and Greece was officially under occupation. The Axis forces plundered the country’s resources and one of the consequences was a major famine in the winter of 1941–2 during which more than 100,000 people died. On 27 September 1941 the National Liberation Front (EAM) was founded mainly by members of the Communist Party. This was the political wing of a mass resistance movement; its military division was the National People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), which inflicted important blows on the occupying forces. EAM was enthusiastically joined by young people and women who were attracted to its campaigns of solidarity across the country as well as by the way it linked the fight against the Axis forces to a fight for social justice. The British collaborated with EAM and ELAS to fight the Germans but they were simultaneously apprehensive of the communists’ popularity. This was the reason why they took steps during the war to enforce a government of national unity, which would come to power by the end of the warfare and enfeeble the communist influence. During the war there was already tension between the EAM/ELAS and Nazi collaborators, such as Organisation X led by Georgios Grivas. These tensions intensified following the end of the war, when the British proceeded to collaborate with their former enemies against EAM/ELAS. One of the major incidents of the time was τα Δεκεμβριανά – the December–January 1944–5 battle of Athens that started when British soldiers and former Greek Hitler sympathisers opened fire against the pro-partisan crowd (this is shown in The Travelling Players) killing twenty-eight people. The Guardian has recently

in troduction   13 published an article describing this as ‘Britain’s Dirty Secret’ (Smith,Vulliamy 2014). The battle between the Greek partisans and the British and Greek Nazi collaborationists lasted until 6 January 1945. On 12 February 1945, EAM signed the Varkiza agreement and committed to disarm in exchange for amnesty, an ambiguous decision that still preoccupies historians (there is a scene of ELAS’ disarmament in The Travelling Players). In the following elections that took place on 31 March the Communist Party abstained. Meanwhile the People’s Party government, led by Dino Tsaldaris, restored the monarchy. The years of 1945–6 are now known as the years of the White Terror, since the promises of political amnesty were not kept and the EAM/ELAS partisans were brutally persecuted by former Nazi collaborators. In October 1946, the communists announced the foundation of the Democratic Army and from December 1947 the Communist Party was made illegal. The Democratic Army took to the mountains and the third phase of the Greek Civil War started (The Travelling Players and The Weeping Meadow dedicate significant screen time to the traumas of the Civil War). In March 1947, Harry Truman convinced the US congress to provide military and economic aid to Greece so as to prevent communist expansion. Britain was nearly bankrupt and decided to withdraw. The Truman doctrine was thus decisive for the outcome of the Civil War, which ended by 1949 with the defeat of the Democratic Army. Some Communists managed to escape to the countries of the Eastern Bloc (such as Spyros [Manos Katrakis] in Voyage to Cythera and Heleni [Irène Jacob] in The Dust of Time) and were only given amnesty during the 1980s after the election of PASOK (a Greek Socialist Democratic Party) to government. However, following the end of the Civil War, most of the communists, left-wing sympathisers and resistance fighters were prosecuted. Many were deported to concentration camps on islands such as Makronisos and Gyaros, where they were tortured and forced to sign declarations of repentance (there are references to these concentration camps in The Travelling Players and in The Hunters).7 Greece was thus one of the few European countries that not only failed to acknowledge the antifascist struggle of its people but it also had post-war e­xperience of concentration camps, which were funded by its Western allies. 4. After the Civil War and the Military Junta of 1967 The end of the Civil War found Greece divided. After the warfare, the post-civil war government’s reliance on American economic and military aid turned Greece into a US-client state. In 1952 Greece joined NATO and the American influence was consolidated. In the elections of 1958, EDA (United Democratic Left), which was the political front for the banned Communist Party, secured 28 per cent of the vote and became the leading party of the opposition. This result caused scepticism in the army and among the

14  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven political elites who responded by strengthening the so-called shadow-state (παρακράτος), a network of policemen, army officers and gangs of lumpen thugs who suppressed civil rights so as to reduce the leftist influence on the political landscape. One of their most notorious activities was the assassination of the left-wing politician, Grigorios Lambrakis, on 22 May 1963 (Lambrakis’ assassination is represented in The Hunters). By the mid-1960s the main actors in parliament were the right-wing Populist Party (ERE) led by Konstantinos Karamanlis and the Centrist Party led by George Papandreou. In 1965, a political crisis between the Prime Minister, George Papandreou and King Constantine II led to political instability that lasted for two years (in The Hunters there are references to this period in a scene that shows shadow-state thugs attacking members of the EDA in an election rally). The fact that some members of the Centrist Party considered a post-electoral coalition with the Left caused alarm in the army, which under US support staged a coup d’état on 21 April 1967. For seven years the country experienced heavy political repression while imprisonment, torture and deportation of political dissidents were part of the regime’s tactics. On 14 November 1973 students at the Athens Polytechnic, influenced by the 1960s’ movements and the May of 1968, staged a massive demonstration against the regime, which was suppressed, with bloodshed, by the army three days later. In 1974, the colonels tried to stage another coup d’état in Cyprus and overthrow the democratically elected President Makarios. This gave Turkey the pretext for invading the island, which as a result of that invasion was eventually divided into two. The political crisis that ensued forced the colonels to resign and parliamentary democracy was thus restored. 5. After the Junta and into the Twenty-first Century After a plebiscite held on 8 December 1975 the voting populace rejected the restoration of the monarchy. The right-wing party, New Democracy, led by Konstantinos Karamanlis, won the first two elections held in 1974 and  1977 respectively. Karamanlis’ government legalised the Communist Party, which participated in the elections from 1974 onwards. In 1981 the Socialist Democratic Party PASOK led by Andreas Papandreou won the elections and worked to alleviate the Civil War traumas. In 17 August 1982 the government recognised the national resistance led by EAM and ELAS. A year earlier Greece had joined the European Communities (the precursor to the European Union). PASOK ruled the country until 1989 pushing reforms that would restore the social fabric. Yet these years were marked by a depoliticisation that was intensified by the population’s turn towards consumerism as well as by political scandals, favouritism and political corruption. The second period in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre and particularly films like Voyage to Cythera and The Beekeeper echo this political stag-

in troduction   15 nancy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent to the Third Balkan War, Greece was overwhelmed with refugees from the former  socialist states and from states devastated by civil war. The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses’ Gaze dwell on these geopolitical changes, while in Eternity and a Day the question of borders becomes an existentialist metaphor for the historical disillusionments within the temporal structures of late modernity. In 2009, fears of a sovereign debt crisis and, one year later, a conditional loan of €110 billion from the Eurozone and IMF lead to the imposition of severe  austerity measures, which were met with civil unrest. This situation and its political backlash were to have been the focus of Angelopoulos’ unfinished film, The Other Sea. From this brief overview of Greece’s modern history we can understand that it is a country variously marked by the trauma of foreign intervention, military coups, class struggle, civil war and migration. We can thus appreciate Angelopoulos’ formal interrogation of Greece’s history as a cinematic and historiographic project. Another aspect that invites further attention is that, despite recent developments in the field that tend to concentrate on discussions of world or global cinema, one cannot completely disregard the nation. We do not intend to return to questions of national cinemas, but to point out that film scholarship needs to engage with concrete historical facts instead of treating history as an abstract theoretical concept. This relates intrinsically to Willemen’s argument that it is not sufficient to study World Cinema applying the official Euro-American theory and ‘ignore the specific knowledges that may be at work in a text’ (2006: 35).

SYNO PS I S This book is divided into four sections, each comprising multiple chapters that deploy a specific critical approach to various aspects of Angelopoulos’ cinema: these sections are concerned respectively with authorship, with politics, with poetics, and with time. Before summarising the individual chapters, it will be important to emphasise that the critical approaches taken up in these sections are not exhaustive and that the thematic categories are far from exclusive. Rather, these sections have been designed to emphasise points of continuity between the chapters, so that each section might convey a specific narrative about Angelopoulos and his cinema. These separate narratives overlap significantly, not least because their areas of focus are all layered within a cumulative object of study, the director’s oeuvre, from which it is impossible to completely separate any one element. The first section, on authorship, is interested in the formation of Angelopoulos as an auteur, and its chapters demonstrate the formative relationships between his evolving aesthetic and the work of other artists.

16  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven Maria Chalkou provides a detailed survey of Angelopoulos’ work as a film critic, demonstrating the various ways in which the director was personally, professionally, intellectually and aesthetically invested in cinema even before stepping into the role of filmmaker. Chalkou’s essay ‘attempts to throw light upon unknown aspects of his cinéphile background; to trace critical attitudes, emerging ideas, early tastes, and unexplored influences; and to consider how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices’. She not only shows how wide-ranging Angelopoulos’ taste in film really was, she also demonstrates how several of the features that would define Angelopoulos’ own aesthetic output emerged from his cinéphilic predilections and critical style. The late Nagisa Oshima provides a unique perspective on Angelopoulos, approaching his work from the standpoint of a contemporary auteur and directorial colleague. The first of his two short essays reflects upon several meetings with Angelopoulos, and the second provides a filmmaker’s appraisal of Angelopoulos’ technical accomplishments. Oshima tentatively attributes their friendship ‘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’. Hamish Ford then situates Angelopoulos within the compositional context of post-war cinematic modernism. He finds it productive to think about Angelopoulos in relation to Michelangelo Antonioni because, he insists, ‘through their work we can chart the complex development of European feature film modernism itself’. If Antonioni is one of Angelopoulos’ major inspirations, then another source of formative energy is found in the work of Bertolt Brecht. Angelos Koutsourakis ‘aims to clarify the often hinted at but not theoretically qualified Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos’ cinema’, and he does so by reading Angelopoulos’ 1970s films with an eye for Brechtian forms and tropes, focusing specifically on the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the filmic medium. Closing this first section, Robert Sinnerbrink explores how, in Ulysses’ Gaze, Angelopoulos strives to ‘combine history, myth, and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory, and ethical responsiveness’. For Sinnerbrink, who emphasises a critical thought that underwrites the chapters by Ford and Koutsourakis, Angelopoulos’ methods here are paradigmatically modernist. The second section, on politics, is interested in the various ways that Angelopoulos’ cinema evolved in relation to his political commitments and in response to the vicissitudes of modern history. Fredric Jameson’s chapter explores the role of collective narrative in Angelopoulos’ films from the 1970s. It begins from 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’. According to Jameson, ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’, and

in troduction   17 his essay explores some of the ways that Angelopoulos depicts this experience as a kind of modern epic. Also looking at films from the 1970s, Vrasidas Karalis discusses the various ways that Angelopoulos forged a cinema of ‘demystification’, whose individual films, argues Karalis, ‘contested history  as  the justifying discourse of power and authority, and critically recentred crucial elements of historical knowledge in order to offer a new critical language of how power functions in the public sphere and on the mental construction of contemporary subjectivity’. Dan Georgakas then focuses on Megalexandros, which was released in 1980 and which is generally considered to emblematise a moment of political disenchantment for the director. Alternatively, Georgakas views the film as an expression of political transition, in which Angelopoulos’ sympathies shifted from state socialism and party politics to anarchism or anarchocommunism. ‘Megalexandros’, he argues, ‘rather than simply being abstractly anti-­ authoritarian or anti-Stalinist, affirms a non-coercive pathway to the socialist future’. The final chapter in the second section, by Mark Steven, leaps forward to the very end of Angelopoulos’ career. This chapter argues that the director’s late style mediates a political response to the ascent of neoliberalism in Europe and especially in Greece. For Steven, Angelopoulos’ ‘late style is equally a response to its unresolvable material conditions as it is to the oeuvre from which it evolved’. The third section, on poetics, is interested in the evolution of particular forms and how they are deployed narratively. Julian Murphet accounts for one of the director’s technical signatures, ‘the long-take circular or semi-circular pan in long shot, stretching from between 180° and 720°’, which he describes ‘as the great auteur’s most distinctive device for dynamic group framing.’ According to Murphet, when Angelopoulos uses the panning shot he is deploying ‘cinema’s most trenchant shorthand for the totality as such: a camera movement whose logic is not self-regarding but self-effacing, committed to opening up the space that surrounds the frame, dismantling the fourth wall, and disintegrating the privileged position of the spectator’. Caroline Eades charts the development of what she calls the ‘narrative imperative’ through Angelopoulos’ films. In her argument, this imperative manifests structurally when the director submits ‘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’. Locally, however, Eades also finds the narrative imperative as a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Dany Nobus and Nektaria Pouli write exclusively on Voyage to Cythera, from 1984, arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos’ career’, whereby an individuating and ultimately humanising ‘re-calibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films’ characters’. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald analyses another crucial aspect

18  a ng e l o s ko uts o urakis and m ark steven of Angelopoulos’ characterology as it plays out in Landscape in the Mist, from 1988: namely, his depiction of children. In Donald’s view, children express a unique vitality within the filmic apparatus: ‘The adult world is dangerous to them, possibly fatally so. Nevertheless it has no capacity to progress without their energy and their will’. Helping us segue into the book’s final section, Sylvie Rollet charts a formal dialectic as it plays out through Angelopoulos’ later films, arguing that here ‘the historical stage is treated as a psychic scene. The “liberal democratic consensus” rests upon the repression of conflict, so the mourning of combat and revolutionary dreams are forbidden. What is repressed can only return in a spectral form’. While Rollet’s argument is tonally philosophical, it nonetheless directs its questions at what she calls a ‘poetics of form’, probing the way that these spectral returns emerge ‘through the images, the sounds, and the narrative’. The fourth and final section, on time, is interested in the temporal thematic that Angelopoulos pursued for the duration of his career, usually in relation to memory and memorialisation. Richard Rushton uses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to chart the transition between the ‘politics’ of Angelopoulos’ early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work, a distinction that several other chapters also discuss. For Rushton, however, Deleuze’s concept of the ‘timeimage’ provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. ‘The key distinction,’ he argues, ‘is between what Deleuze calls a recollection-image, and that which he terms pure recollection. While the early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, the later films offer what Deleuze calls pure recollection.’ Taking up the idea of recollection, for Smaro Kamboureli cultural memory creates virtual spaces in which ‘different temporalities’ are brought together and ‘experienced simultaneously’. Kamboureli takes up Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘archive fever’ to explore this aspect of cultural memory in Ulysses Gaze. In her view, the film compulsively returns to its historical antecedents, but in doing so it confronts the countervailing logic, that ‘the archive never fully yields its secrets’. Asbjørn Grønstad accounts for the final film Angelopoulos made, The Dust of Time, as an apotheosis to the director’s visual investment in duration. ‘It would seem,’ argues Grønstad, ‘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.’ For Angelopoulos, he argues, this sense of memory is to be thought of in relation to a decisively visual imagination: ‘Images,’ writes Grønstad, ‘play a pivotal role in this memory work . . .’ Concluding this book is an afterward by Andrew Horton, who in addition to being a recognised expert on Angelopoulos could also consider the director as both a friend and colleague. Horton’s afterward presents the first critical account of Angelopoulos’ final, unfinished film, The Other Sea. Horton was

in troduction   19 on the film’s set only a week before Angelopoulos was fatally struck down by a motorcycle, and had been following closely the development of this project, providing suggestions for the final version of the script. Here he considers this unrealised film as the capstone to a long career, arguing that it would have synthesised many of the lifelong concerns and stylistic singularities that defined Angelopoulos’ oeuvre.

NOTES 1. Kaige was a member of the jury at the 1998 Cannes film festival that awarded Angelopoulos the Palme d’Or for Eternity and a Day. He confessed to Angelopoulos that he managed to watch special screenings of a smuggled copy of The Travelling Players in China during the late 1970s. The film exercised a fundamental influence on his career. 2. Bertolucci has acknowledged Angelopoulos’ influence in his epic 1900 (1976) and he maintained that despite their similarities, The Travelling Players was a better film, see (Horton 1980: 15). 3. Let us here state that we accept David Bordwell’s periodisation (Bordwell 2005: 143) and we consider Megalexandros to be the logical extension of the three films that preceded it (Days of ’36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters). The reason for this is that despite the film’s pessimistic tenor, history is still treated as a learning process (albeit ex negativo) and as Angelopoulos has stated it is after this film that he abandoned the view of ‘ “History” with capital “H” ’ (cited in Horton 1997b: 109). Let us state that not all the scholars in this book share this viewpoint. 4. Of course there are a number of important articles and book chapters on his early films (Tarr, Proppe 1976; Wilson 1975; Samardzija 2006), as well as numerous book chapters focusing on the late period of his oeuvre (Everett 2004; Rutherford 2002; Eleftheriotis 2010; Calotychos 2013; Stathi 2013), but overall the critical interest does not justify Angelopoulos’ importance in the history of World Cinema. 5. This is also noteworthy given that dos Santos started making films twenty years before Angelopoulos, but he has acknowledged the latter’s influence upon his later films. 6. To summarise the historical facts, we have consulted the following books: David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War; Vasilis Rafailidis, Ιστορία (κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Kράτους; Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece; John S. Koliopoulos, Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History Since 1821. 7. Few people outside Greece know about the existence of these post-war concentration camps and it is surprising that the Anglophone resources on the History of Greece we have consulted do not mention anything about them.

C H APTER 1

Theo Angelopoulos as Film Critic Maria Chalkou

M

ost of the prominent filmmakers of New Greek Cinema – a politicised, auterist and art-oriented trend which dominated the Greek filmscape of the 1970s and 1980s – started their careers as assistant directors and film practitioners in the studios of the Greek commercial film industry of the 1950s and 1960s. Theo Angelopoulos, one of New Greek Cinema’s leading directors, followed, however, a different path and entered the field professionally as a film intellectual. After studying filmmaking in Paris, he returned to Athens and, from 1964 to 1967, worked as a film critic for the newspaper Δημοκρατική Αλλαγή (Democratic Change), while between 1969 and 1971 he c­ontributed occasionally to the journal Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος (Contemporary Cinema). The time frame of Angelopoulos’ critical activity is particularly intriguing since the 1960s were the formative years of New Greek Cinema. It was also a period of political upheaval and instability in Greece, of exceptional vitality in the arts and, in terms of production and attendance, unparalleled growth of the domestic film culture. This chapter focuses on the most intensive period of Angelopoulos’ critical writing – his criticism for Democratic Change – during the turbulent but creative pre-dictatorship 1960s. It attempts to throw light upon unknown aspects of his cinéphile background; to trace critical a­ ttitudes, emerging ideas, early tastes and unexplored influences; and to c­ onsider how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices.

DEMOCRATIC CHANGE AND ANGELOP OU LOS’ CR I T I CAL ST YLE Democratic Change, the evening newspaper of the left-wing party EDA,1 was founded in February 1964, after the liberal Ένωση Κέντρου (Centre Union Party) came to power, and it was closed down by the military Junta in April

24  m a r i a c halko u 1967. In the 1960s, cultural life was hugely significant to the Greek Left as it was a vehicle for resisting the political establishment and promoting oppositional ideas. In line with Lenin’s statement about cinema being the most important of the arts and acknowledging film’s enlightening potential, the Greek Left was decidedly open to film culture in general (Rafailidis 1966: 124–8). Like other leftist newspapers and journals of the time (such as Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης [Art Review]), Democratic Change gave preference to cinema, and created a prominent space for writing on film. One of the most compelling elements of film criticism in Democratic Change was that it attracted a group of young, leftist, militant and mostly first-time writers who were soon to become leading figures of New Greek Cinema either as filmmakers or critics. They included the film director Fotos Lambrinos (February 1964–August 1964); the major female figure of New Greek Cinema, Tonia Marketaki (March 1964–September 1965); the cinematographer Alexis Grivas who, under the pseudonym Fotis Alexiou, corresponded from Paris (November 1964–August 1966); and from September 1965 to April 1967, the most emblematic and influential critic of New Greek Cinema, Vassilis Rafailidis.2 Angelopoulos first joined on 8 December 1964 and contributed regularly until the closure of Democratic Change. He served exclusively as a film reviewer and was the paper’s most enduring film critic, although also the most laconic. He kept a relatively low profile, never covering film festivals or writing informative or opinion pieces and he played a secondary role to Marketaki and later Rafailidis who functioned as the dominant critical voices. The film section of Democratic Change was impressively rich and showed that its content and practice were influenced by contemporary French film journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma (notably Marketaki, Angelopoulos and Grivas had studied or were still studying in Paris and all the critics experimented with filmmaking).3 It comprised tributes to and interviews with exceptional filmmakers and actors (including interviews with Carl Theodor Dreyer, Agnès Varda and Masaki Kobayashi as well as tributes ranging from Robert Aldrich to Luis Buñuel), international film festival coverage (such as Cannes, Venice, Karlovy Vary and Moscow), translated articles (for example, by Georges Sadoul), best film listings and weekly film reviews. Attention was also given to domestic film and the annual Week of Greek Cinema, state policies and censorship issues, film societies and seminars, alongside new movements and Eastern European cinemas. Led by the critics, Democratic Change also played an active role in instigating debates on Greek cinema4 and holding events such as the First Athens’ Greek Cinema Week (24–30 October 1966). In almost two and a half years, Angelopoulos wrote 221 mostly short reviews, which were representative of the wide spectrum of films on offer at the time in Greece (Chalkou 2008: 64–86). The huge majority were about European films (French, Italian, British, German, Nordic, Spanish, Eastern

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  25 European and co-productions), around sixty concerned American movies, a handful were on Japanese cinema and only a few covered domestic films. 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 little relation to Marxist ideas. While Angelopoulos’ criticism revealed a loose intellectual engagement with the Left, it nonetheless confirmed a passionate commitment to cinema. His overall approach resembled Truffaut’s statement when leaving the editorial team of the then highly politicised Cahiers: ‘We spoke of films only from the angle of their relative beauty’ (cited in Turim 2002: 398). Apart from a significantly different point of view, he also brought to the newspaper a refreshingly playful style of writing, often characterised by an elliptical presentation of the storyline, witty and humorous remarks, and at times poetic language. Occasionally he eschewed plot summaries entirely, either discussing the motifs and traditions of a genre, or contemplating rather than describing a film’s story. His writing was rich in background information on film history, literature and theatre, with references to music, painting, and comics and comparative discussions of the films. Furthermore, revealing his professional training as a filmmaker with a directorial eye, he was the first from the newspaper’s critics to use technical cinematic vocabulary, employing French terminology, such as ‘travelling’ (tracking shot), cadrage (framing), decoupage, sequence, raccord (link), and so on, which were later broadly adopted by film criticism in Greece.

ANGELOP O U LOS’ P ASS I ON FOR GENRE FILMS To those who are familiar with Angelopoulos’ interviews, it is not surprising that he had a taste for popular and genre cinema, and specifically for crime films and film noirs, thrillers, adventures, comedies, westerns and musicals. He reviewed a huge number of popular movies, both American and European, often treating cinema as a matter of genuine visual pleasure and entertainment. While his colleague Rafailidis drew a clear demarcation between quality and commercial cinema and encouraged the audience to watch ‘difficult’ and ‘disquieting’ films, emphasising that cinema is not escapism (DC 20 June 1966)5, Angelopoulos, by contrast, did not hesitate to recommend films in terms of pure enjoyment and visual spectacle, often concluding his pieces with the statement ‘the two most enjoyable hours of the week’ (DC 16 March 1965). In this respect he enjoyed action scenes (fighting [DC 8 December 1964] judo and karate displays [DC 29 December 1964]), which he found ‘enthralling’

26  m a r i a c halko u (DC 23 February 1966), for him the politically charged battles between whites and Indians were ‘always visually full of flavour’ (DC 11 October 1966), he was a fan of Eddie Constantine (DC 16 February 1965), and he even recommended The Masque of the Red Death (1964) as an ideal film of its genre (DC 12 October 1965). Perhaps one of the most striking issues in the context of a leftist newspaper was Angelopoulos’ infatuation with James Bond films. In contrast to Rafailidis who spoke of ‘the shame of James-Bond-ism’ and saw in Bond the symbol of ‘the modern superman who hardly distances himself from the Nazi ideals’(DC 28 July 1966), for Angelopoulos Bond was ‘elegant, irresistible, cynical, and necessary’(DC 21 December 1965). He gave an assertive review of Thunderball (1965) and repeatedly returned to the subject when discussing spy films and adventures, which he saw as imitative, praising the original. What attracted Angelopoulos about Bond was ‘the balanced architecture of the story’, ‘the use of the setting as an aesthetic event’ (DC 23 March 1965), ‘the elegant irony of Sean Connery, the humour of the dialogues, the realism of the effects’, ‘Ian Fleming’s orgy of fantasy’ (DC 24 February 1965). As far as Thunderball was concerned, the ‘purely spectacular aspect’ was of ‘important interest’, ‘photographic compositions [were] more tenacious’ and underwater scenes, where ‘plasticity is combined with narrative harmoniously’, were most beautiful. And although he observed a hint of flaccidity, ‘this did not mean that the film is viewed without pleasure and without succeeding in offering almost the same thing with the previous ones: an adventurous narrative, a “popular” hero, a cocktail of colours full of flavour, two enjoyable hours, regardless of suspect views’ (DC 21 December 1965). In his interviews Angelopoulos spoke of his fascination with detective stories, both novels and films, which stemmed from his childhood and adolescence (Fainaru [1999] 2001:125) and was reflected in his work. His first lost short film, for example, was a ‘nod to film noir’ (Horton 1997: 20), Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) is a crime story and Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972) allude to gangster movies (Gregor [1973] 2001: 15). In Democratic Change he reviewed many crime-related movies and displayed a thorough knowledge of the relevant genres and literature. He praised American B-movies (DC 15 February 1967) and singled out ‘the unparalleled period of American crime 1941–8 that historians call “golden” and the nostalgics call “unique”’ (DC 12 October 1965) for having ‘a taste for complaint and criticism, which occasionally has led to a sort of modern tragedy with unexpected symbolical implications’ (DC 4 January 1966). He considered the best features of American noir to be its narrative departure from complex social reality, surprising authenticity, narrative density, formal austerity, ‘asthmatic pace’ (DC 2 October 1965), ‘spoken word reduced to the absolutely necessary for the development of the narrative’, emphasis on sound and the

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  27 realistic treatment of décor (DC 4 January 1966). He also paid attention to contemporary crime (he gave an extensive and assertive review of The Killers [1964] as a sincere adaptation of Hemingway’s fictional world [DC 3 January 1965] and particularly liked French film noir, which he saw as drawing from the American tradition (DC 12 October 1965). He was enthusiastic about Le deuxième soufflé (Second Breath, 1966) by Jean-Pierre Melville, finding exceptional density, plasticity and pictorial beauty in its narrative and deeming it one of the most important crime films ever made (DC 24 January 1967). Angelopoulos considered the Western to be a genre in decline. He thought its thematic core – ‘the ballad of the lonely man’ with ‘­ambiguous origins,  [. . .] a suitcase in his hand, a few cigars and a pistol’ (DC 22 January 1964) – had been ‘consumed long ago’ (DC 11 October 1966). His disappointment in the genre is expressed most eloquently when discussing Nevada Smith (1966), in his remark that ‘Hollywood is ageing badly’ (DC 15 November 1966). ‘Convention is always lurking at the edge of the story’ destroying any attempted progress. Hollywood needs a radical overhaul although its current circumstances make that impossible (DC 11 October 1966). Similarly, although he was sometimes nostalgic for Ford (DC 25 January 1967), he gave Cheyenne Autumn (1964) a negative review as a film of loose tension that missed its targets (DC 16 February 1965). He was disdainful of Spaghetti Westerns as imitative (DC 18 January 1966), although he thought that the ‘competent craftsman’ Sergio Leone had achieved something new: ‘transposing James Bond to a Western’ (DC 4 February 1967). In his view, ‘tired elitists’ were attracted by the new genre but ‘the cinema-opium has closed its cycle’ and it is time, for regaining lost ground, to get rid of hopeless experiments such as ‘Italian Westerns’ (DC 10 January 1967). What seemed to escape his contempt was The Appaloosa (1966) for being influenced by modernist cinema and renewing some of the expressive manners of the genre (DC 17 January 1967) or The Professionals (1966), for its thematic potential and the nostalgic presence of the aged but still attractive protagonists (DC 14 February 1967). Angelopoulos also displayed considerable knowledge of cinematic and theatrical comedy and was particularly fond of burlesque, visual gags, Jerry Lewis (‘the spark of madness that permeates the best tradition of burlesque, driven to the extremes by Lewis, produces euphoria’ (DC 23 March 1965), and Frank Tashlin (one of the rare representatives of American comedy ‘deserving’ of “classical” burlesque’ [DC 11 October 1966]). Angelopoulos considered The Nutty Professor (1963), directed by Lewis, a real success and in his review of The Disorderly Orderly (1964), which he found weaker than previous collaborations between Lewis and Tashlin, he questioned the necessity of Tashlin’s presence (DC 23 March 1965). Later, however, he emphasised his absence (DC 26 October 1965) and mourned the ‘fall’

28  m a r i a c halko u of Lewis: ‘In  times when the tradition of burlesque vanishes from the American cinema, the talent of Lewis is eulogy. Do we have to believe that this last spring has run dry?’ (DC 25 October 1966) Yet Tashlin’s comedies were noticed by  Angelopoulos irrespective of Lewis. He believed that The Glass Bottom  Boat (1966) includes  some of the best moments of Tashlin’s career, while the gags ‘amassed in a manner reminiscent of the golden era of American comedy  result in unconstrained redemptive laughter’ (DC 11 October 1966). He also paid attention to Vincente Minnelli (who although self-imitative ‘treats comedy as a ballet’ [DC 22 December 1964]), Billy Wilder (who ‘is renewing our belief in his talent’ with Kiss Me, Stupid (DC 16 March 1965) and William Wyler (whose How to Steal a Million [1966] was ‘transfixed by irony’ [DC 13 December 1966]). He also made interesting remarks about European comedies: that Italian comedy was simultaneously ethography (DC 7 March 1967) or that modern European comedy, which was characterised by realism (DC 28 February 1967), had distanced itself from burlesque with gags based on triviality and everydayness rather than exaggeration (DC 26 April 1966). Angelopoulos’ fascination with musicals, evident also in films such as Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), has been widely discussed (Horton 1997: 86). Yet as it becomes apparent from his critical output (he actually reviewed very few musicals), his interest was not merely in the genre but in the use of music in cinema in general. He was mesmerised by Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) ‘the first attempt at a cinema-opera’ and produced a poetically written piece about the film, which managed not to estrange viewers with the use of singing actors (DC 16 February 1965). He exhibited a wide knowledge of classical and modern music and occasionally used musical terms to describe films, for example Cousteau’s Le Monde du silence (The Silent World, 1956) was a minuetto (DC 29 December 1964) or Campanile’s Una Vergine per il Principe (A Maiden for a Prince, 1966) was a divertimento (DC 15 March 1966). He also praised the use of Bach by Bergman in Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961) for ‘making evident the cinematic properties of the emotionally unconsumed pre-classical music’ (DC 11 January 1966). Furthermore, while he was working for Democratic Change, Angelopoulos was preparing an eventually abandoned film about a contemporary Greek rock music band named Forminx, with the intention of ‘do[ing] something in the spirit of Richard Lester’s films with the Beatles’ (Fainaru [1999] 2001: 133). In his celebratory account of The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965) by Lester he referred to the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to explain that spirit and perhaps his own intentions: it ‘surprised one with the novel sense of gag, the audacity of raccord, and the freedom in movement that flirted with improvisation’6 (DC 26 October 1965).

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  29 auteur

T HEOR Y AND GODARD

Angelopoulos’ serious interest in American and genre films (especially film noirs), his taste for ‘crazy comedy’ and Tashlin, as well as his disenchantment with the Hollywood of the 1960s, clearly indicate the influence of current French film criticism. More particularly they reflect the impact of Cahiers du Cinéma and the cinéphile culture developed around the French Cinémathèque (Hillier 1985: 3; 1986: 14–15) with whom he came in close contact during his time in Paris (1960–4). This influence is further confirmed by Angelopoulos’ devotion to the concept of authorship and the auteur criticism he applied throughout his critical texts, a practice he shared with his fellow critics in the newspaper. He introduced auteur theory in his very first review, on A Distant Trumpet (1964) by Raoul Walsh (DC 8 December 1964), and he constantly signposted signs of authorship, ‘obsessive concerns’, in his own words, both in theme and style, identifying several thematic and stylistic motifs as defining features of prominent auteurs. Thus Kurosawa was inclined towards ‘great themes, unusual dramatic situations and psychological paroxysm’ (DC 10 December 1964); Antonioni’s core themes were ‘the crisis in a couple’s relationship, alienation and failure’ (DC 17 May 1966), while his style was defined by ‘long shots without action, melancholic wanderings, slightly stylized décor and evocative jazz music’ (DC 16 March 1965); Walsh’s work dealt with human dignity and was marked by an ‘almost animalistic joy of movement’ (DC 8 December 1964), and so on. Although he highly valorised the subject matter of a film, he also believed that authorship went beyond thematics. Thus the distinguishing contribution of Melville in Second Breath, for example, ‘was not the theme but basically and essentially the ability of the film director to mark the most trivial events with a unique quality and authenticity’ (DC 24 January 1967), while Mario Bava could present the most worn conventions ‘with ­disarming elegance and knowledge of movement’ (DC 17 May 1966). Angelopoulos cited a wide range of great masters including Hawks, Lang, Welles, Bergman, and Kurosawa. However, the director he admired most was Godard, whom he regarded as one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema (DC 18 April 1967). On 31 August 1964 Democratic Change published an anonymous article – probably expressing the Party line – in which Godard appeared as a pretentious intellectual, his films as ‘miracles of stupidity and banality’, and was even accused of being a fascist (DC 31 August 1964). Along with his fellow critics Angelopoulos rejected this fanatical view. He wrote all the reviews of Godard’s films for the newspaper (except Pierrot le Fou [1965] by Rafaelidis), namely Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), Alphaville (1965), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), and Masculin Féminin (1966) (‘one of the most positive, most radical films ever made’ [DC 18 April

30  m a r i a c halko u 1967]), all of them celebrations of his work, and returned to Godard often as a point of reference to illustrate the parochialism or inferiority of other films. What intrigued Angelopoulos in the work of Godard was the way he ‘writes and rewrites, with equal anguished despair, the same story. Variations on the same theme, every time [. . .] sharpening, however, his quest’ (DC 18 April 1967). Remarkable consistency in his understanding of film authorship is revealed by the near reiteration of this comment, in a much later interview: ‘We are condemned to function with our obsessions. We make only one film  [. . .] It’s all variations and fugues on the same theme’ (Fainaru 2001: xiv). Moreover, Angelopoulos was amazed by Godard’s reflections upon the very nature of cinema-life relationship: ‘the spectacle of life was often blended into the spectacle of cinema [. . .] for there were moments when the myth stopped and a direct dialogue of the characters and Godard himself with life begun’ (DC 1 March 1966). The relationship between cinema and life, in Angelopoulos’ view, was linked to the quest for authenticity and the ‘purity of consciousness’ that led Godard to free narrative from explanations and shift from the ‘supposed’ to the ‘lived’, with new forms of narration (DC 1 March 1966). The cinema–life relationship, ‘the game of reality and fiction’ (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 51), as he said in an interview, and the importance of the concept of the ‘lived’ – the ‘experienced’ – often resurfaced in Angelopoulos’ criticism. For example, it was one of the qualities he saw and appreciated in American film noir (DC 4 January 1966) and in Second Breath (DC 24 January 1967) and it seems that he later embodied these perspectives in his own work which so often includes real, ‘lived’, experiences from his life, such as the biscuit scene in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) (Horton 1997: 98) or the opening scene of Reconstruction (Fainaru [1999] 2001: 125). Angelopoulos also admired Godard’s use of ellipsis (DC 8 February 1966), a concept of great significance for him that showed up often in his writing. He connects Godard’s ellipsis with the sparse narrative and the suggestive cinematic language that demand that the viewer actively reconstructs the narrative flow and deciphers the narrative procedure (DC 18 April 1967). Ellipsis and suggestion, however, are basic ingredients of Angelopoulos’ own modernist work, as he acknowledges: ‘The ellipse is a tremendous option for the spectator to become the filmmaker’s partner in the creative process’ (cited in Gregor [1973] 2001: 12). Likewise ‘the power of suggestion is exercised dynamically in order to free the imagination of the audience [. . .] [that] exists dynamically and not passively, when they add their imagination to that of the director’ (cited in O’Grady [1990] 2001: 74). Part of Godard’s suggestive language, as Angelopoulos explains with reference to Masculin Féminin, is his use of quotation, namely the frequent borrowings of ‘given elements’ such as posters and extracts from well-known writers or from magazines, a technique that recalls, in his view, Paul Klee, Rauschenberg and pop art (DC 18 April 1967). This

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  31 conceptualisation, however, is strikingly similar to Angelopoulos’ practice of quoting in his films from poems and writers’ words and including fragments of ‘given’ cultural material, as for example in The Travelling Players which includes diverse borrowings, such as Golfo’s verses, excerpts from pamphlets, newspapers and books, songs, demonstration slogans and so on. Another important element that attracted Angelopoulos’ attention in Godard’s films was ‘dedramatisation’, ‘the constant draining of all sentiment’ in the quest perhaps for ‘another kind of sentiment’ (DC 19 April 1966). According to Angelopoulos ‘Godard plays down the dramatic texture of events in order to give them an ordinariness, which sidesteps conflict and drama – although they are still its raw material – [. . .] in order to stress the universality of the human adventure’ (DC 5 January 1965). The plethora of expressive novelties in Godard’s films, Angelopoulos concluded, ‘is not the game of an insolent stylist but the result of an approach towards life and art, which Godard himself thought moral. It is the extension of an aphorism that once seemed paradoxical: every tracking shot is a moral act’ (DC 19 April 1966). It is not surprising that later as an established auteur Angelopoulos openly acknowledged Godard’s influence on his work: ‘If you are looking for an affinity, it is more in the direction of Godard you should look. He had a certain influence on me [. . .] and on the other filmmakers of my generation’ (cited in Gregor [1973] 2001: 13).

FORM AND TEM P ORAL I T Y As his film criticism reveals, Angelopoulos was deeply interested in issues of narrative, style and technique (including cinematography, acting, sound, colour, camera movement, editing and so on) and discussed them with the confidence of an accomplished filmmaker, who identified positive aspects or defects and suggested alternatives and solutions. He used the words ‘architecture’ and ‘vertebration’ to stress the importance of a film’s structure and he celebrated originality, as well as the ‘art of the minimal’ (DC 3 January 1965) and the ‘expressive economy that refers back to silent cinema’ (DC 18 January 1966). His ideal was ‘absolute harmony between content and style’ (DC 3 January 1965), a coherent, homogeneous and united whole (DC 4 October 1966), conceptions that owed much to the Cahiers critical discourse (Hillier 1985: 78). While praising World Without Sun (1964), he observed: ‘Shooting involves such knowledge of the subject [. . .] that there is no question of form. There is no question of editing or angles of view. The content merges with the form, suggesting and almost imposing the way of shooting’ (DC 29 December 1964). Moreover, the concept of ‘poetry’ was fundamental to his critical perception of film and was employed as an act of transformation, of turning the

32  m a r i a c halko u trivial, ‘the everyday into the unique’ (DC 29 December 1964). When he later stated that ‘[t]here is no such thing as a dichotomy between content and form’ (cited in Alifragkis 2006: 14) and that ‘a film must be [. . .] a poetic event, otherwise it does not exist’ (cited in O’Grady [1990] 2001: 70) he exhibited considerable consistency and continuity in his perspectives on cinema. Angelopoulos the critic placed particular emphasis on the visual and the pictorial, which would later be central to his film work. Terms such as ‘visual evocation’ (DC 24 May 1966), ‘visual euphoria’ (DC 15 March 1966), ‘a celebration of the gaze’ (DC 29 December 1964) and especially ‘visual stimulation’ appeared repeatedly in his criticism to stress his belief in the ‘reigning of the image’ that has its origins in silent film7 and ‘to which the entire cinema of the new generation is devoted with religious care’ (DC 18 January 1966). In his critical writing we can already find well-formed ideas about cinematography. Angelopoulos often expressed his disapproval of beautiful images (DC 4 May 1965) and expressionistic photography (DC 11 May 1965) as easy practices, and made interesting points that were consistent later with his own work. For example, while discussing Zorba the Greek (1964) he praised Walter Lassaly’s image for softening the interplay between black and white for a more refined and ‘gray’ photography which captures grades (DC 15 March 1965). In his review of the Greek musical Οι Θαλασσιές oι Χάντρες (The Blue Beads, 1967) he was impressed by the ‘balanced’ and ‘homogeneous’ photography of Arvanitis, who worked in the mainstream industry: ‘For the first time, from a Greek cinematographer, we saw such a quality of colour, like the pastel grades of the location image, shot under cloudy sky’ (DC 21 February 1967), stylistic choices which as we retrospectively know dominate his film aesthetics. The concepts of time and temporality, as well as the acts of recalling and representing the past, became core issues in his later work from as early as Reconstruction, although his views on them seemed to shift. In his review of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962), Angelopoulos argued that the important element in the film was the treatment of the subject through ‘the problem of temporality’: ‘Two hours of narrative time are identified with two hours of real time’, but in this ‘objective time intervene moments of subjectivity’ that help Varda – who was influenced by Faulkner and interwar ­literature  – to avoid temps mort (DC 8 March 1966). Commenting also on Darling (1965), which particularly impressed him, he noticed that the film uses ‘punctuation that dispenses with descriptive temporality for the sake of a visual one, and also editing that refutes Eisenstein to rework the lessons of the interwar novels of Joyce and Dos Passos’8 (DC 18 December 1966). When it comes to the recollection of the past, he generally criticised the conventional use of flashbacks and when he discussed Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957) he prefigured his own idiosyncratic mixing of different temporalities in a single shot, widely used in films such as Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players,

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  33 1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977): ‘In one of the masterpieces of Swedish cinema, Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg makes an interesting invasion of the past in the present. The heroine narrates the years of her youth [. . .] and without cut, in the same setting, the past comes alive’9 (DC 16 November 1965). Bergman in Wild Strawberries ‘reworked this idea in order to analyse a character’ and by projecting in the same space two temporalities without the usual clear demarcation the film emanates bitterness and pessimism (DC 16 November 1965). However in his scathing piece on the Greek film Εκείνος και Eκείνη (Him and Her, 1967), a commercially produced film with artistic aspirations, Angelopoulos asserted that such a film ‘in which time has no continuity in classical terms of narrative but the fragmentation of memory’ was neither innovative in Greek cinema nor a positive development, and he deemed the ‘mixture of the past with the present [to be] no longer a topic of interest for novels or European cinema’ (DC 31 January 1967). Moreover Angelopoulos made interesting comments relevant to his future films on the representation and interpretation of history. Political correctness, the condemnation, for example, of the massacre in Zulu (1964), is not ­sufficient without historical explanation of the motivation behind the events (DC 8 December 1964). When the story is seen through ‘the social and economic contradictions of the era, it takes on unexpected facets’ and uncovers ‘underground streams’ (DC 5 January 1965). ‘Respect for the external elements of the historical frame’ (4 May 1965) and lack of sentimentality in representing history are positive qualities of a film (DC 2 June 1965). René Clément’s Paris brûle-t-il (Is Paris Burning?, 1966) does not succeed in ­becoming a chronicle of the Liberation except when it achieves an abstract and epic character (DC 10 January 1967). In Contempt also he was especially interested in the use of the myth of odyssey, a core preoccupation of his future work: ‘The affinity with the story of Ulysses’ – the film inside the film – ‘that has a parallel dialectical development brings to the subject an additional dimension: it becomes a dialogue between life and History’ (DC 5 January 1965).

ON F I LM PERFORMANCE AND SOU ND Although in his films the actors are mostly figures and part of a wider composition, in the 1960s Angelopoulos was profoundly interested in actors’ performances. He always discussed casting and acting-related issues, with particular focus on the male stars. Among his favourite actors were Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau (who played a part in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού [The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991]), Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Marcello Mastroianni (the protagonist of Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of

34  m a r i a c halko u the Stork). His comments on Belmondo’s ‘astonishing’ performance in Tendre voyou (Tender Scoundrel, 1966) are illustrative of his tastes: ‘It could be said that the camera exists only to capture this rare phenomenon of an actor, whose equivalent can be found only in the dynamic cinema of Bogart and Mitchum’ (DC 8 February 1966). Similarly, discussing Casanova 70 (1965), he asserts: ‘But, of course, there is Mastroianni, who is delightful, and for whom only the film deserves to be seen’ (DC 30 November 1965). Angelopoulos often dismissed the ‘tics’ and ‘negative aspects’ of the Actors Studio tradition of acting (DC 5 April 1966) and when, in Ulysses’ Gaze, he collaborated with Harvey Keitel, who was ‘the Method personified’ (cited in Fainaru [1996] 2001: 99), he found the actor unable to adapt to alternative techniques of preparing his role (cited in Fainaru 1996: 98–9). Moreover he championed dedramatised (DC 3 January 1965) and reserved acting (‘Mifune is extravagant [. . .] but Isuzu Yamada [. . .] acts the entire spectrum of drama with her eyes’ [DC 10 December 1964]) as well as mimic performances, which refer to silent cinema (DC 21 February 1967). Finally, he celebrated the externalised and natural acting in Contempt, where Bardot and Fritz Lang ‘do not play, but repeat [. . .] themselves: the way they exist in their everyday life, their ideas, their gestures, their minor routines that make up externally their personality’ (DC 5 January 1965). Angelopoulos’ criticism exhibits an acute interest in sound and especially aural background, the use of which he particularly admired in American film noir (DC 4 January 1966). Fundamental to his understanding of sound was the concept of ‘counterpoint’, which betrays the influence of Eisenstein, believing that narrative density (DC 10 December 1964) and dramatic intensity (DC 29 December 1964) can be produced by ‘contrapuntal’ use of music, voices, and aural background10 (DC 16 November 1965). His attention to sound is well illustrated in his analysis of Tokyo Olympiad (1965): ‘Often the acoustic background is excluded, and the athlete, isolated by the camera, is enclosed in the centre of a strange silence to further emphasise his deepest loneliness’ (DC 13 April 1965). Yet the film that had had a profound impact on him was Sidney Lumet’s The Hill (1965): ‘a great theme, an astonishing mise en scène, a great movie!’ He praised the significance placed on the aural background, pointing out that the role of music accompaniment in the film was performed by ‘an endless sequence of military orders that sharpens the harshness of the image’ (DC 9 November 1965). The importance of sound in Angelopoulos’ work has largely escaped scholarly attention. Angelopoulos, however, made films not simply to be seen, but equally to be heard. Days of ’36, for example, a film with sparse dialogue – a feature widely admired in Angelopoulos’ criticism11 – maximises the role of the aural background, revealing lessons learned from The Hill. The clarity, volume and repetitiveness of the background sounds, as well as the way the long and empty shots

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  35 are filled with steps, galloping hooves, car engines or abstract human voices, and even the noisy protest of prisoners hitting tin dishes against the prison bars, refer to Lumet’s narrative and elaboration on soundtrack. One could even dare to say that the construction of the long shots and the choreography of the long takes, and particularly the scenes of the prison yard in Days of ’36, were notably influenced by The Hill.

ON GREEK NAT I ONAL C I NEMA Angelopoulos’ writing in Democratic Change reveals his leaning towards contemporary French and British films and the Czech New Wave. He had a particular dislike of German cinema, regarding it as parochial, and was unafraid to give Soviet films scathing reviews (DC 13 December 1966), despite their promotion by the official Left. Moreover he rarely wrote on Greek cinema. Only nineteen of his pieces were about Greek films, mostly short and disdainful notes. Yet some of the Greek films he reviewed are of great significance either because they were the subject of debate at the time, such as Zorba the Greek (1964) and Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος (Eleftherios Venizelos, 1965), or because they were later acknowledged as exceptional works such as Ο Φόβος (The Fear, 1966) and Η Έβδομη Ημέρα της Δημιουργίας (The Seventh Day of Creation, 1966). It is important to keep in mind that as cinema became increasingly influential through the 1960s, a widespread public debate developed around the need for a ‘quality’ Greek national cinema and the paths it ought to follow. It was partly out of this debate that New Greek Cinema emerged (Chalkou 2008: 34–63) and it is precisely in this context – as part of a wider and formative discourse – that Angelopoulos’ views on domestic film are of particular interest. Angelopoulos articulated a discourse on Greek film that was prominent among intellectuals of the time. He spoke of ‘horrific stupidity’, ‘bad taste’ and films ‘made by the mentally retarded for the mentally retarded’ (DC 20 January 1965). Greek cinema was at ‘the zero year’ (DC 31 January 1967) and suffered from a ‘permanent illness’ (DC 23 February 1966) arising from two different sources: bad scripts (DC 19 October 1965), plagued by trivial subjects, melodramatic plots and crude farce, and film directors who ignored cinematic language (DC 29 July 1965) and – echoing Cahiers’ criticism of the cinéma de papa – reduced themselves to craftsmanship and the role of an illustrator (DC 21 March 1967). He also believed that ‘although among the one hundred or so worthless projects produced annually there were occasionally a few distinctive films’ – Ο Δράκος (Ogre of Athens, 1956) by Nikos Koundouros being the most important Greek film ever (DC 1 March 1966) – they were isolated cases and did not open a path. Angelopoulos argued that Koundouros and Cacoyannis had failed to create a national school. There was a wide gap

36  m a r i a c halko u between their exceptional work and the vast majority of domestic films, which left Greek cinema highly polarised (DC 1 March 1966). In his review of Zorba the Greek, a film that provoked much domestic controversy (Agathos 2007: 105–40), Angelopoulos distanced himself from accusations of misrepresenting the Greeks, focusing instead on the film’s strategies of literary adaptation and the inconsistency of the narrative in dramatic terms. The widow’s murder and the death of Madame Hortense were ‘astonishing scenes where the indisputable talent of Cacoyannis [. . .] enlarged triviality to pathos’ through the atmosphere of ancient tragedy. The film was a failure, ‘but a fall from the heights’ (DC 15 March 1965). Moreover Angelopoulos revealed his interest in Greek history by reviewing Eleftherios Venizelos (1965), one of the first Greek historical feature-length documentaries and a portrait of Greece’s foremost liberal politician. The prohibition of the film by the new government of Αποστασία (Defection), which condemned it as an artless work that insulted the audience, was motivated by the film’s antimonarchy content. Angelopoulos wrote on Venizelos when it was screened privately for journalists and vehemently rejected the official line by making a political statement against censorship in the arts (DC 29 July 1965). Angelopoulos also reviewed two Greek musicals, Διπλοπενιές (Dancing the Sirtaki, 1966) and Οι Θαλασσιές οι Χάντρες (The Blue Beads, 1967), confirming his interest in the genre and questioning Greek cultural authenticity in relation to foreign cinematic traditions and European receptivity. In his view, thanks to its director, Dancing the Sirtaki was the first authentic attempt at a Greek musical which departed from domestic cultural specificities to successfully join the American and European tradition. Skalenakis displayed ‘an undeniable visual sensibility, an enviable sense of rhythm, imagination, elegance (DC 15 March 1966).12 Dalianidis’s film, by contrast, was neither true to the genre nor authentically Greek and could not be considered musical. The film failed to adapt the elegant conventions of the genre and invested heavily in national stereotypes – from a western European viewpoint – to increase exportability (DC 21 February 1967). The Fear by Manousakis is one of the most artful, dark, critically sharp and powerful films made by the commercial industry in an attempt to bridge the gap between popular and art film (Chalkou 2008: 100–65) and restore what Angelopoulos had identified as the polarisation of Greek cinema. Angelopoulos acknowledged positive features in the film: the accomplished cinematic language, modernist idiom, dedramatised acting and dialogue which does not ‘paraphrase’ the image but suggests. However, surprisingly perhaps, he accused the film of formalism, of being aesthetically overloaded while neglecting its subject matter (DC 1 March 1966). The Seventh Day of Creation was another attempt by the mainstream industry at artistic and socially-engaged films,  which was a major demand of the era in relation to domestic cinema (Chalkou

the o ange lo po ulos as film critic  37 2008: 34–63). Nevertheless Angelopoulos was particularly severe:  although Georgiades moved the camera skilfully and the setting was authentic, the script, written by the acclaimed playwright Kambanellis, was nonsensical, featuring fake and almost psychopathological characters, who did not represent the Greek youth. And although the ‘generation gap’ was a core topic of ‘New Cinema’ in general, its treatment by the film was frivolous and entirely fictitious (DC 13 December 1966). By rejecting the industry’s attempts to follow the European film canon and be progressive, Angelopoulos made clear that the rejuvenation of Greek cinema – the ‘New’ – would come from creative forces beyond the ­establishment.

CONCL U S I ON Angelopoulos’ critical writing in Democratic Change has escaped public and scholarly attention for decades. This chapter has attempted a close reading of Angelopoulos’ unexplored critical work to reveal his remarkably rich cultural and cinéphile background. It focuses on genre and auteur criticism, his relationship with Godard, important issues in relation to form, content and narrative, his ideas on Greek cinema, as well as how his writing is reflected in his filmmaking practices. It also traces interesting critical attitudes (such as his independence from the Party line), unexpected tastes (such as his love of James Bond films), and possible unnoticed influences (such as Lumet’s The Hill). As his critical writing suggests, Angelopoulos possessed the charisma of a free-spirited, well-informed, cultivated and imaginative mind with exceptional critical and analytical skills. It is not accidental that discussing his ‘keen grasp of the director’s role in shaping critical appropriation of his films’, David Bordwell points out that when assisting the interpretation of his work, ‘[h]e can come up with a lapidary formula that many critics would envy’ (1997: 11). As Bordwell suggests, Angelopoulos, a self-conscious auteur, spoke as a critic. And he was a critic who spoke as a filmmaker: he considered and discussed the questions that most interested him, expressing the concerns and evolving, or already wellformed, ideas of a future film director. We cannot deny the possibility that critical activity might have helped him to sharpen his gaze and systematise his ideas and vision of cinema. In light of his eventual films and the rhetoric he developed on cinema, we can identify a self-reflective auteur and a self-reflective critic whose opinions on cinema indicate remarkable consistency and continuity.

NOTES   1. United Democratic Left, the political and parliamentary front of the banned Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

38  m a r i a c halko u   2. There were also a few appearances by Ninos Fenek Mikelides and Dimitris Stavrakas, while Dimitris Gionis and Fontas Ladis occasionally contributed film reportages and interviews.   3. There was a blurring of the lines between film writing and filmmaking. All the critics of Democratic Change, including Rafailidis, made attempts at short films in the 1960s (Chalkou 2008: 98 and 233–306).   4. For example Democratic Change organised and published over six issues (24 March–1 April 1967) an open discussion about Greek cinema under the title ‘Young filmmakers and their problems: Greek cinema has reached a stalemate’.   5. DC is an abbreviation for Democratic Change.   6. His review of Lester’s second film with Beatles Help! (1965), however, was dismissive. (DC 7 December 1965).   7. Silent cinema was a recurrent point of reference in Angelopoulos’ criticism. David Bordwell made a connection between Angelopoulos’ aesthetics and early cinema when stating that his ‘more distant framings [are] reminiscent of the cinema prior to 1915’. (1997: 20)   8. It is noteworthy that Angelopoulos was enthusiastic about Darling and a connection between his short H Eκπομπή (The Broadcast, 1968) – the shooting of which started in 1966 (Themelis 1998: 28) – and Schlesinger’s film can be clearly traced. The opening long-lasting scene of Darling shows a huge poster of the ‘ideal woman’ being put up, while Angelopoulos’ short is structured around the quest by the media for the ‘ideal man’. Both films deal with alienation and illusionism in media and advertising scenes, while street interviews, studio work and cityscapes play a key role in the narrative.  9. Miss Julie (1951) has often been mentioned by Angelopoulos in his interviews on the same topic. (O’Grady 1990: 71) 10. It is important to note that the notion of ‘counterpoint’ was central in Angelopoulos’ rhetoric on film irrespective of sound. 11. For example: ‘In the advantages of the film we should add the sparse dialogue. The camera holds the narrative and the few spoken words are sounds among other sounds’ (DC 26 April 1966). 12. This, however, was forgotten one year later when Angelopoulos, reviewing The Blue Beads, argued that in the Greek context – as with Westerns and crime films – musicals were ‘unthinkable’ and that the only noteworthy attempt at adapting the genre was Καλημέρα Αθήνα (Good Morning Athens, 1960) by Gregoriou (DC 21 February 1967).

C H APTER 2

Two Short Essays on Angelopoulos’ Early Films Nagisa Oshima Translated by Julian Ross

I. T HE HA P P I NESS OF THE HUNTERS

P

eople come up with all sorts of ideas. Some even think it might be interesting to make a film director meet another film director. How nice would it be for two people to meet who have such a thing in common! In fact, it would be quite burdensome for a filmmaker. This is because we have nothing to talk about. All filmmakers have their minds filled with their own thoughts. We are left with nothing else to talk about. Although we would speak to critics and newspaper journalists whose job it is to lend us an ear, talking to other film directors would be something else. For us, talking about another director’s film also poses a difficulty. This is because we all know how it is going to go. We will either be thinking ‘hmm, you are pretty impressive’ while underneath an expression of interest our hearts are filled with scorn, or, we’re completely uninterested. In other words, it is impossible for us to speak about films. Even so, it is not like we can start talking about the restaurant we discovered yesterday that serves quite delicious food. If we are both Japanese, we could kill time by discussing cinemas that only attract small audiences or complain about film sets where it is a difficult task even to gather crew members with little experience. With film directors from abroad, however, reporting on our individual situations would be a futile process, a bit like the world socialist movement.1 Although I cannot guarantee whether this is true or not as it is only something I was told, apparently there was once someone who came up with the tremendous idea of arranging a meeting between Ingmar Bergman and Alain Resnais. Arrangements were made for a dinner that, of course, not only involved the two of them but also some others who joined them. As the dinner proceeded, however, no word was exchanged between the two of them. The guests were kept in suspense. When they had become convinced the dinner

40  na g i s a os hi m a would end without a conversation between the directors, one of the two looked over to the other when the coffee was served and asked, ‘What lens did you use in that shot in the film, xxx’? The other responded, ‘It was a xxx-mm lens’. Although everybody’s hearts leapt with excitement about the ensuing ­conversation, apparently it ended there. To that degree, it is very difficult for film directors to converse, chat or even exchange words with one another. In that way, I suppose I am somewhat of an exception. I think I am able to call Wim Wenders and Bertolucci my friends and I find it easy to talk to the Germans, such as Volker Schlöndorff and Reinhard Hauff. I also got along with the South Americans Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Victor Faccinto and Glauber Rocha, who is no longer with us. Although I do not get many opportunities to meet American directors, Coppola once invited me to his winery. Bob Rafelson was a nice guy and Stanley Donen, whom I met at the Munich Film Festival earlier this year where we both had a retrospective, was a graceful person. As for Lee Jang-ho, Hou Hsiao-Hsien or Jim Jarmusch, we talk when we bump into each other but I feel a bit of reservation on their part probably due to our age difference. Theo Angelopoulos, on the other hand, knows of no reservation. The number of times we’ve conversed exceeds by far the time that I have spent with others. This could be due 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. Back in 1976 at Cannes, we had just started drinking at the café Le Petit Carlton or some other place in the evening. Or was it that we had just sat down at a restaurant and ordered an aperitif? In any case, we had not yet started eating. ‘Mr Angelopoulos, what sort of films do you make?’ My wife Akiko Koyama, who had unusually joined me on this occasion, asked him. Perhaps the question was, ‘what was the reason you started filmmaking?’ In any case, it was just one of those hospitable questions an actress asks a director. However, Theo, who took it dead seriously, started to talk about everything, from his student life studying law, his short films, the meaning of Greek contemporary history in Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972) and all the way up to Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), endlessly, all in sequential order. Even after we finished dinner he still had not finished. Even after we went back to Le Petit Carlton, or somewhere else, and the day had moved into the next, he kept on going. In his book Eiga e no tabi (Journey to Cinema), Yasushi Kawarabata of the newspaper, Yomiuri referred to this incident and mentioned that it lasted an hour. Anyway, it was much more than that. At any rate, Theo is left feeling unsatisfied unless he talks about things in the right order. Although all my wife had to do after igniting this fire was nod, it was quite something else for Hayao Shibata of France Film Company to translate. But then, Mr Shibata himself likes to put things into order. In that sense, I

ange lo po ulos’ early films  41 think it is appropriate for Mr Shibata to be the one to be distributing Theo’s films in Japan. The following year was the year of The Hunters. My presence at Cannes was ostensibly for meetings about The Empire of Passion (1978) but, in fact, I did not have much to do. As I was walking aimlessly down the Croisette, Mr Shibata came up close to me from behind and said, ‘Mr Oshima, last year you heated the place up with In the Realm of the Senses (1976) but this year, without a film, you are just another person’. After offering such painful words he rushed off, as he was himself, of course, extremely busy. Thinking back to it now, I basically went to Cannes that year just to see Theo’s The Hunters (1977). On the day of its official screening, I saw the film at the press screening in the morning and was impressed. When I shared my thoughts with Theo, he invited me to attend the screening in the evening when his cast and crew were to be present. And in addition to that, he asked me to sit with them as if I was part of the crew. Considering the film is around three hours long, it was typical of Theo to ask me to watch the film twice in a day, but I guessed it could not be helped, and I put on my tuxedo and joined them. When I got up with Theo at the end of the film amid the applause, however, I was as pleased as if I had made it myself. Fifteen years later, I have been forced into watching the three-hour film, once again. Although I had felt it was a bit late for Mr Shibata to release this film in Japan now, I was nonetheless deeply moved for the third time. I recently met up with Theo in Tokyo, which he was visiting to coincide with the release of The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). But our meeting last autumn during an evening in Toronto, where I had gone for the preparation of Hollywood Zen2 has left a stronger impression. Together with Mr Kawabata, we went down Lake Ontario on board a boat owned by a Greek friend of Theo’s. The fleet of boats carrying red flags did not appear from beneath the dark surface of the lake. Eventually, it started raining. Theo muttered, ‘the times are bad for us all’, a number of times.

II. T HE TRAVELL I NG P LAYERS : T HE FILM ING OF  HO P E How on earth would you give a name to the camerawork in the following scene? On the eve of 1944 during the Second World War, a chorus of cheers can be heard celebrating the liberation from the German army that has begun retreating from their occupation of Greece. The camera shoots from behind the people that have gathered to sing at a plaza in Athens. As a symbol of liberation, the people are raising the flags of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union. Suddenly, gunshots interrupt the singing and

42  na g i s a os hi m a

Figure 2.1 The Travelling Players

the people run about in total confusion. The camera pans to the left following the people as they run round every street corner. Even after everybody has disappeared, the camera continues to pan and, after turning 360°, returns to the plaza. There are three or four dead bodies. Even in masterfully made films, things would normally end here. However, Theo Angelopoulos does not. The camera’s gaze onto the plaza, where dead bodies lie, continues for so long, almost too long. Eventually, a boy playing a bagpipe makes an appearance and passes by the dead bodies. And suddenly, one of the bodies gets up and runs. He is an elderly man who plays an accordion, one of the travelling players. Following the elderly man, the camera once again begins its pan to the left. After the elderly man disappears, demonstrators come marching down the main street facing the plaza. This time, all flags are red. It is a Communist Party demonstration voicing their opposition to the British liberation army that has taken control of Greece. The camera follows them and continues to pan, filming the demonstrators who have taken over the plaza from behind. And we are back to where we began. How long did it take for the demonstrators to mobilise against the occupation army after the people, who had gathered in celebration mistaking the occupation army for the liberation army, were gunned down with bullets of disillusionment? Of course, the physical time would have far exceeded the time a camera takes to pan 360°. Despite this, Theo Angelopoulos brought together the two events as he saw them to have happened in one inextricably connected time. What we are dealing with here is Theo’s powerful belief in the camera’s ability to capture history.

ange lo po ulos’ early films  43 The secret behind the conviction lies in the time the camera takes, after rotating once and returning to its place, to stare at the plaza where three or four bodies lie on the ground. Theo’s filmmaking and camerawork is not only a characteristic of The Travelling Players but can also be seen in The Hunters. A scene in a certain space finishes, and the people disperse, but the camera maintains its stare on the uninhabited space. As a method of filmmaking, this is a break in convention. Most film directors strongly believe their audiences come to see their films for their characters and are in fear of using a scene with nobody in it. The uninhabited space shown before the arrival or after the departure of a person is referred to as an empty stage and, although some may insert their favourite landscape shot into a scene, such shots are usually reserved for only when it is necessary. This is because a scene is designed with the presence of a person as a given, and it feels disorganised when you take the person out. Theo ignores this convention and gives meaningful importance to the empty stage. Moreover, Theo’s empty stage draws us into it. Perhaps even more than when a person inhabits it. I wonder why that is. Of course, its strengths are partly due to the sounds and voices that can be heard off-screen, but that is surely not the only reason. The strengths of Theo’s empty stage derive from Theo’s all-too powerful concentration on the people who have just left it. This is why I would like to call it the camerawork of lingering affection. At the same time, the camerawork also shows Theo’s belief that the empty stage will one day be inhabited and, once again, turn back into a stage. In that way, perhaps it would be better to call it the camerawork of hope. But then, lingering affection and hope are synonymous to me. For Theo Angelopoulos, the entire nation of Greece is his stage. Therefore, in a film that attempts to portray the contemporary history of Greece with a camera, it is inevitable that the main characters are the actors themselves. With the entire nation of Greece as their stage, the actors synthesise their stage roles with their own lives, and live, or die, as Greeks. The father, who symbolises the pride and weakness of Greece, is betrayed by his adulterous wife and is shot dead. The mother, representing the land of Greece, liaises with a man whom is an informer, traitor and usurper, and is shot dead by her son on the stage. The younger brother Orestes, who has thrown himself into the resistance movement, succeeds in enacting revenge on his mother and her lover but, refusing to give in until the very end, is executed during the Civil War. Facing his dead body, his elder sister Electra screams, ‘Good morning, Tasos!’ That is the name of her beloved in the play. Electra is a person who experienced as well as witnessed the tragedy that had descended onto her family and her people; Electra must continue to live shouldering the tragedy of Greece. She mobilises a new group and opens the curtains of the stage once again, with her elder sister’s son as the new Tasos. Finishing her

44  na g i s a os hi m a make-up, Electra whispers into his ear, ‘Orestes!’ Her call speaks to us. No, it has to speak to us. It is the heartbeat of the soul of the people of Greece. It is the heartbeat of the soul of the people all over the world who know not to lose hope despite being struck by tyranny, occupation, defeat and humiliation. Can you hear it? What are you saying? You cannot hear it? Since when have Japanese people lost sight of the taste of defeat and disgrace that is part of their own history? Even the Americans have given birth to excellent works out of their defeat in Vietnam. What has happened to the Japanese? August 15th is not yet a distant past.3

NOTES 1. The wording used here by Oshima is most likely a reference to the Japanese title for William Z. Foster’s book, History of the three Internationals; the World Socialist and Communist Movements from 1848 to the Present, translated into Japanese by Kazuji Nagasu and Masao Tajima and published by Otsuki Shoten in 1957. 2. Oshima’s plan to make a biopic about the Japanese American movie star Sessue Hayakawa materialised. 3. August 1945: the longest day in the history of Japan. Hirohito announced defeat and the end of the war. The people of Japan suffered a terrible shock, not only at the news (war had been declared in the name of the emperor and Japan had never been defeated until then), but also because it was the first time that the emperor, considered a God and symbol until then, had to address his people. The army wanted to continue the war and tried to seize the recording of the emperor’s announcement before it was played ‘on air’.

.

C H APTER 3

Generative Apogee and Elegiac Expansion: European Film Modernism from Antonioni to Angelopoulos Hamish Ford

M

ichelangelo Antonioni’s early 1960s cinema has long been recognised as one of the key influences on Theo Angelopoulos’ filmmaking. The director himself has often been quoted as describing Antonioni’s epochal L’avventura (1960) as a seminal moment in his development, reportedly watching it thirteen times while a student in Paris during the early 1960s (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 26). What exactly is it about Antonioni’s work that was so formative for Angelopoulos, and how can we see its effects play out in his own subsequent films? More than simply illustrating authorial influence, by examining the connections between these two filmmakers as well as some important differences, this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which, through their work, we can chart the complex development of European feature film modernism itself.

CH ART I NG POST-WAR MODERN I ST CINEMA Scholars such as John Orr (1993: 1), András Bálint Kovács (2007: 2, 156), David Bordwell (2005: 144), Fredric Jameson (1997: 80), and Andrew Horton (1997a: 1–10) have often painted post-war modernist cinema’s development, and frequently Angelopoulos’ role within it, as largely comprised of post-war innovation and apogee followed by ‘late’ extension, closure and death.1 I will explore ahead how, where the films seek to retain some fidelity to contemporary history, post-war European – not to mention global – modernism remains intimately bound up with such a dialectical narrative of generativity and loss. Yet in the process, this cinema (itself building on earlier innovations by filmmakers such as Carl Theodor Dryer and F. W. Murnau in Europe, not to mention Kenji Mizoguchi in Japan) also emerges as ultimately telling a less linear, more complicated story than such accounts can sometimes suggest.

46  h a m i s h fo rd

Figure 3.1 The Broadcast

This is due to the paradoxical but fully explainable and historically embedded fusion in both Antonioni’s and Angelopoulos’ work between modernism and a realist commitment to engaging with the contemporary world in all its multilayered challenge, its horror and lingering sense of possibility. In this chapter, I present the development from one filmmaker to the other as both logical but also requiring sustained interrogation for what it reveals: both about European film modernism’s complex trajectory but also the particular regional, national and global realities such films seek to essay and interrogate. Angelopoulos’ very first credited film, the short Η Εκπομπή (Broadcast, 1968), features overt references to Antonioni’s work, most notably in its treatment of the urban environment.2 More broadly, however, while there remain important and revealing differences, Angelopoulos’ mature cinema takes up and expands particular tenets of Antonioni’s influential style, even further enlarging the role of both time and space at the expense of narrative and character development, while leaving others aside. My focus is the extension yet at the same time paradoxically also reduction of Antonioni’s modernism in Angelopoulos’ work, at the heart of which lies the effects of a particular, and subsequently very familiar, foregrounded temporality. The resulting aesthetic and formal ‘language’ is a pan-European and increasingly global modernism defined increasingly by the long take, which seems to have mounted a creeping takeover of the more varied formalism exemplified by Antonioni’s peak early 1960s work. In his important 2007 book, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980, Kovács defines this type of cinema as loosely narrative and character-based – as opposed to the avant-garde itself – but which nonetheless

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   47 substantially overturns the would-be ‘transparent’ and movement-defined regime of classical Hollywood narrative cinema.3 It is perhaps not coincidental that the date range proposed by Kovács is precisely bookended by Antonioni’s first feature film, Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of a Love Story, 1950), and the ultimate work of what is often seen as Angelopoulos’ ‘political’  – and, I suggest, modernist – period, Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980). Alongside crucial communist bloc developments in the 1960s and 1970s exemplified in the work of such pivotal figures as Miklós Jancsó in Hungary and Andrei Tarkovsky in the USSR, as well as in a very different sense with Chantal Akerman’s transnational cinema from the same decade, through his 1970s work Angelopoulos contributes a distinct chapter to the story of film modernism in many respects centrally laid out by Antonioni. In fact, this story continues to be taken up around the world, notably via the long-take aesthetic in Asian cinema (concurrently invoking an older, regional time-based formalism exemplified by Mizoguchi) in the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Mingliang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in addition to Abbas Kiarostami and much other Iranian cinema since the late 1980s, and continued within Europe by filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Roy Andersson, and Ulrich Seidl. Antonioni and Angelopoulos give us instructively different accounts of then-recent modern history as played out in often contrasting national contexts marked by fascism, war, genocidal violence, and capitalism’s victory in defining the West’s post-war political contract. The latter director – crucially beginning his feature film career two decades later – comes across as far more openly pessimistic and elegiac in his portrayal of both Greek and European modernity. His very ‘personal’ cinema is on the one hand radical and idealist when it comes both to form and aesthetics but also shows vestiges of real political investment, although increasingly pessimistic and mournful, less ambiguous and generative than the Italian filmmaker’s peak work. In a general sense, Angelopoulos’ 1970s cinema maintains a loose Marxist commitment, analytical approach, and formal application. More specifically still, the first five films offer a ghosted yet somehow still tangible ‘alternative’ vision of post-war Greek and European modernity offered by unachieved communism. Such clear political investment is never strongly felt in Antonioni’s cinema. By the time of Megalexandros, however, neither dominant (conservativecapitalist) nor alternative (radical-communist) modernity appear quite real. Leftist Greek identity and its unfulfilled dream, emboldened by the end of World War Two then subsequently battered and banished by the late 1940s Civil War, here remains as a mythic ideal but alongside its potential outcome in the distinctly pre-modern village form of a dictatorial, cult-like commune. Present-day Athens, glimpsed just once (after nearly four hours of film time) in Megalexandros’ concluding panoramic night-time shot, looks imposing and

48  h a m i s h fo rd implacable. It remains for the viewer to determine whether the dreams of the modern nation’s winners are haunted by its post-war others as represented by the vanquished leftists.

H I STORY AND CONTEXT , FORM AND P OL ITICS Both Antonioni and Angelopoulos started their feature film careers with projects more connected to familiar genre elements than would later be the case. Antonioni’s Chronicle of a Love Story and Angelopoulos’ Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) actually use the same overall atmosphere and basic narrative tradition of the film noir murder-mystery to explore broader socio-historical themes, rendered via very distinctive formalism, in both cases using relatively extreme (for the period) long takes. From such beginnings, each director’s work has long been read as offering chronicles of modern Italy and modern Greece, even as the films’ concerns and production contexts were frequently also transnational.4 While, unlike Antonioni, Angelopoulos never made a fully English-language Hollywood-funded film, starting with  Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1984) he began using big European stars  (here  Marcello Mastroianni), then in the 1990s and 2000s Hollywood figures (Harvey Keitel and Willem Dafoe). In the 1970s, the director was already procuring European funding from diverse sources (as did Antonioni from 1953). For the viewer of Antonioni’s work, contextual knowledge and background is certainly helpful, adding historical and cultural detail to the films’ subtle presentations of life in the different cities and regions of Italy during its remarkable post-war boom. But lack of such background is not a significant barrier to appreciating the films, thanks to extreme narrative simplicity or even minimalism and heavily foregrounded formal and aesthetic development, such that every image (and cut) can be admired and investigated as its own ‘micro-work’. Angelopoulos’ idiosyncratic visual style also results in images that can be appreciated in and of themselves. However, particularly in the 1970s films, some basic knowledge of European and Greek history and politics helps immeasurably if the viewer is to maintain patience with a cinema that can otherwise come across as either wilfully obscure or rather turgid. In Antonioni and Angelopoulos, these differences taken on board, we have two charters of nation and associated culture as buffeted and fundamentally redefined by post-war history in all its radically transformational and violent aspects, set against both genuinely ancient and mythic Mediterranean histories – twin ‘origins’ of the West – and more modern ones, in both cases fundamentally marked by fascism, war, occupation, resistance and thwarted revolutionary possibility.

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   49 ‘Antonioni introduced his radical alienated minimalism within the form of the modern melodrama,’ Kovács writes, ‘which was further developed by Jancsó, Angelopoulos, and Wenders’. (2007: 292) Seeking to summarise its myriad effects, he writes earlier that the ‘Antonioni style’ was built upon ‘and radicalized in two ways. One is what I will call ornamental continuity, initiated by Jancsó and followed by Theo Angelopoulos’. The other, Kovács suggests, is the quieter but no less radical minimalism exemplified by the work of Akerman (2007: 156). Kovács treats Angelopoulos – with much acknowledged thanks to David Bordwell’s 1985 book Narration in the Fiction Film – as expanding the slowness and the dedramatisation of Antonioni, and the radically enlarged importance of landscape. These connections and select extensions taken on board, new compositional aspects also enter the frame. In Bordwell’s chapter devoted to Angelopoulos (one of only four filmmakers treated in detail) in his 2005 book Figures Trace in Light, he suggests the director’s trademark technique is a ‘planimetric’ style of framing (Bordwell 2005: 172-6). Typically concluding sequences or sometimes comprising entire scenes, Bordwell describes these as ‘clothes-line’ front-on compositions featuring multiple objects or bodies often turned away from the camera, strung across the frame, de-emphasising depth and stressing horizonality, despite the use of a 1.37:1 frame (2005: 172-6). This style of staging and composition is almost never seen in Antonioni’s work. The frame itself for Angelopoulos is concurrently less foregrounded and cluttered, the image emphasising the precise arrangements of bodies, human or otherwise, in the form of often ‘painterly’ tableaux. For Antonioni, the frame remains an absolutely key means of compositional effect in itself, played off against often complex graphic and textural details of the mise en scène, comprising a wide range of angles and material layers. This results in a reflexively foregrounded frame, again especially in the films from the early 1960s, defining an image marked by concurrent undermining and opportunity – one heavily characterised by epistemological disempowerment when it comes to the gaze and perspective, be it of the camera, filmmaker, on-screen subject or viewer. Sam Rohdie exhaustively argues throughout his book on the director that the result of Antonioni’s distinct aesthetic formulation is that ‘figure-ground’ relations in the films thereby become frequently clouded and sometimes entirely subverted to the point of abstraction (1990). Such effects fully come into their own with the shift to widescreen starting with L’avventura, following which the filmmaker uses the image’s increased lateral dimension to further undermine anthropocentric and dramatic principles in favour of more purely compositional ones enabled by the substantial opening up of space. In stark contrast, right up until his belated initial use of widescreen in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), Angelopoulos retained the long ‘old-fashioned’, nearly square 1.37:1

50  h a m i s h fo rd ‘Academy’ frame. This enabled him to perfect what Bordwell calls a trademark ‘aperture’ framing (2005: 160–2, 170–4), whereby the viewer’s attention is focused on the image’s central components and choreography much more than its frame, a far simpler, less cluttered and perceptually confusing mise en scène than we see in Antonioni’s work. To what end, then, are these select extensions and reductions of Antonioni’s innovations put? Unlike the Italian director’s work, in which politics remains mainly implicit, Angelopoulos’ first five features show a distinctly, if certainly highly personal, ‘political modernism’ playing out. Here is a politically invested analysis of history rendered through demanding and reflexive cinematic form that insists on the very active, intellectually and critically alert viewer. Following the influential historical argument provided by David Rodowick (1988) and subsequent scholarship on the topic, Angelo Restivo suggests that ‘the project of political modernism is fundamentally linguistic to discursive in relation to the image’ (2010: 171). Yet Angelopoulos’ films, even at their most radical, do not share in much political modernism’s distrust of the image and concurrent emphasis on language. The image here is, if anything, even more central and affective than ever, continuing to do its work by increasingly undermining the word.5 In addition to a privileging of language, cinema characterised as political modernism is often presented as seeking to subvert or reconfigure the corrupted image through extreme reflexivity – in some respects thereby redeeming or appropriating it – through intense fragmentation, treating film itself as an inherited language needing to be deconstructed. Angelopoulos’ 1970s films seek to extol the image’s potential, as largely preserved from the intervention of rapid montage, for thematic suggestiveness and trenchant mystery, ultimately prevailing above everything else while always nonetheless retaining its link to a political rendering of recent history. Angelopoulos is not alone in pursuing a political modernism in which the image prevails over language. Kovács argues that while Godard and Straub/ Huillet represent an anti-symbolic, ‘antinarrative, reductionist’ trajectory marked by strong emphasis on the analytical and critical potential of the written and spoken word, an important ‘second’ category of political modernists comprises Angelopoulos, Jancsó, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Dušan Makavejev. This latter group, he suggests, are representatives of a symbolic or parabolic political modernism. Neither of these two trends built their films in realistic time-space relationships. While the reductionist version suppressed virtually all kinds of coherent universes behind the ideological discourse (which is why they had to rely on written or verbal texts), the symbolist version created a parabolic or mythical universe to convey the ideological message (which is why so

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   51 many of them could eliminate verbal manifestations to a considerable degree). (Kovács 2007: 376) The risks of this second, and perhaps less commonly recognised brand of political modernism are, arguably, far greater. The threat of symbolism, parable and myth entirely eclipsing the political analysis they are supposed to serve in such films is forever at hand, especially as delivered via frequently trance-inducing, oneiric images. The central formal-aesthetic component of Angelopoulos’ idiosyncratic, even risky, but ultimately very influential brand of image-invested political modernism is his use of the long take, commonly (as opposed to montage) associated with realism. Yet asked about his attitude towards realism, the director has proclaimed in interview: ‘Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me’ (cited in Durgnat 1990: 44). This apparent atheistic, materialist dismissal of realism as requiring unacceptable ‘faith’ – in the world, or in cinema – may seem at first surprising for a director whose films can at times comes across as both heavily invested in Greece’s physical (particularly regional, semi-rural) environment but also as emanating a ‘mystical’ intonation. Yet, again especially in the 1970s work, and in light of ‘excessive’ compositional principles at the heart of which lies a rather theatrical and painterly approach to the placement of bodies in landscapes as rendered via long, carefully staged shots, this becomes more logical. Perhaps surprisingly for a director who has shown a preference for the long take throughout his entire career, in a 1984 interview Angelopoulos downplayed his affection for the form and its importance, suggesting that such a filmmaking style existed for many decades prior to his career, suggesting it doesn’t guarantee anything. ‘Plan sequence (sequence shot),’ he stresses, ‘has existed throughout the history of cinema – in Murnau’s films, for example’ (Bachmann 2001: 31). The long take isn’t necessarily an automatic means of mounting a modernist cinema with significant political dimensions. Stating with remarkable insistence that, despite appearances, he has not been influenced by Jancsó (whose long takes certainly feel much less lengthy and ‘slow’ due to almost constant rhythmic tracking movement and spectacular, if also often highly abstract, large-scale choreography rendered via different widescreen frames), the director insists that rather than other recent or earlier masters of the long take – notably Dreyer – it is Godard to whom he has most frequently looked for inspiration (Bachmann 2001: 31). It appears, then, that Angelopoulos’ attraction for the long take is less connected to the form itself and the rich recent back-history of its execution, but instead what he can achieve through such an image. The long take, he argues, needs to retain ‘inherent dialectical counterpoints’ so as properly to complete a ‘finished

52  h a m i s h fo rd scene’ (Bachmann 2001: 31), helping generate for viewers the socio-political history presented by a given film. After having partially and influentially ushered its principles into narrative cinema, fundamentally remaking our conception of the feature film, the initial move away from modernist form enacted by Antonioni starting with Blow-Up (1966) – at the very moment of its European peak – occurs at a comparable moment in Angelopoulos’ work two decades later. This gradual ‘retreat’ – which plays out quite differently to Antonioni’s – in the Greek director’s case by the mid-1980s comes to invoke the past much more than the future (becoming in many respects a disillusioned ‘old man cinema’ in which youth culture, often represented by women, is effectively simplified to personify regressive capitalism and thereby denounced) as part of a commensurable de-emphasising of leftist historical analysis and investment. Megalexandros represents the remarkable, in many respects apocalyptic conclusion to his cinema as marked by a genuine, and highly individual, political modernism. Investments in both political and formal-aesthetic radicalism remain intermittently apparent in the subsequent films but in a rather washed-out, even romantic-nostalgic way. Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) represents a kind of Janus face moment, both a quiet epilogue or coda to Angelopoulos’ political modernism and ushering in the filmmaker’s next phase.6

T HE Q U EST I ON OF T I ME Describing the impact of regularly watching Antonioni’s cinema upon first arriving in Paris, Angelopoulos notes ‘the considerable length of the shots, which went on just a little bit longer than expected to allow for a deep breath before going on’ (cited in Bordwell, 2005: 155). The Greek director would turn this ‘breath’ into an overarching principle of his cinema, now enormously distended at the risk of sucking recognisable life from the films. In Antonioni time plays a varied role, always felt but not (in fact, decreasingly) limited to long shots. His films feature a striking combination of carefully metered out stretching, combined with both disorienting and insidious ellipses between shots and scenes but also within a single image, by way of compositional and framing techniques that undermine perceptual and epistemological transparency despite, or in part due to, the emphasising of clear lines and textures and the consistent use of deep focus. In Angelopoulos’ work, temporality makes itself felt at every turn, most obviously by way of a massive extending of the long take as delivered by an often slowly moving camera. Ellipses are frequently both foregrounded between shots and scenes but also, most notably perhaps, within them. The latter phenomenon, a

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   53 distinction that seems ­absolutely crucial in understanding the Antonioni – Angelopoulos development, occurs not through cluttered and perceptually confusing mise en scène as in Antonioni, but rather the regular threat of large temporal-historical shifts. With Antonioni’s cinema we may be unsure as to whether a cut elides seconds, minutes, hours or days (rarely more). His films remain resolutely  contemporary, with no flashbacks or flashforwards, rendering the mystery of the present as it passes while denying the satisfaction of linear development and gasping time so as to bring about effective and meaningful action. With Angelopoulos, the film can easily shunt forward or back in history within, as well as between, single shots, sometimes by a matter of decades. While not unprecedented elsewhere – most familiar perhaps in the especially ‘artful’ Hollywood flashback, usually associated with a central protagonist’s memory, whereby shifts in image texture or mise en scène clearly signify a specific passage of time – such lurches backwards or forwards in history, here most powerfully carried out during an unbroken tracking shot, are notable both for not being clearly signposted (at least not immediately) or ‘representing’ a single character’s recollection. The filmmaker has suggested this latter distinction is his contribution to such a filmic tradition (cited in Bordwell 2005: 148). Of this trademark time-travelling divorced from psychology (and sometimes clear historical markers), most elaborately choreographed throughout Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), Raymond Durgnat suggests that Angelopoulos is reminding us of a fundamental truth about cinema: Such time-shifts, and other ‘impossible’ segues, aren’t new, unique, or even difficult; for film has no tense; only context + scenic components suggest period. But ‘impossible’ time-shifts, unexpected because rarely required, here collide with the strong local space-time of long-take style. (1990: 44) Despite, yet ultimately in large part because of, his use of long takes, Angelopoulos’ films problematise not only privileged individual subjectivity and transparent realism but also the very notion of a present, instead presenting time and history in the form of a co-present or multi-layered textuality. This formal-conceptual element of the films is given great political content through the charting of Greece’s ‘lost’ communist history. In his and Antonioni’s work, time is both immanent and imminent to the local and national context and world charted on screen, while at the same time always threatening to ‘intervene’ and scatter human sureties. In this sense, his and Antonioni’s films’ different orchestration of time remain loosely ‘realistic’, while also becoming decidedly ‘virtual’ in the extent to which it is allowed

54  h a m i s h fo rd to dominate, flooding not only the image and the film’s formal construction at large, but also in different ways the experience of subjects on both sides of the screen.7 Through aesthetic forms often emphasising and making use of the non-­ linear impact of fragments combined, Antonioni enables a destructionenforcing openness through materially forged conceptual violence (both that of film itself and what it presents, the myriad surfaces of the world), resulting in cinematic experiences relatively subdued one moment and subtly lacerating the next – and in the final minutes of L’eclisse and Zabriskie Point (1969) rather more violently so. While the Italian director’s treatment of both time and space – inextricably linked in his work – remains uniquely extreme and complex, enormously influential yet immediately recognisable and fresh, a more direct line connects Angelopoulos’ work to the present-day global film modernism so often defined as ‘slow cinema’. Kovács writes: ‘Jancsó and Angelopoulos followed a symbolized and radicalized variant of the Antonioni long-take style.’ (2007: 372) But what ‘radicalized’ means here remains somewhat ambiguous. Angelopoulos makes the long shot – in still and moving incarnations – quite literally an article of faith. The jolting shifts between time periods within and across single shots, usually accompanied by elaborate tracking movement, remain the most notable ‘politicising’ device of this longtake cinema. Such moments – not always immediately decipherable – are like spectacular yet shrouded gateways opening onto history in all its multi-planed, politically charged perspectival complexity. Writing about Angelopoulos’ frequent combination of the long take with incremental tracking shots, Durgnat suggests: ‘The camera movements subserve the general scene, subordinating to it any calligraphic or camera-­ conscious side-effect; they pick out details less than they change or vary its aspects and general configuration’ (1990: 43). Describing the long, moving shots in which we see Spyros (Manos Katrakis), the old man and one-time guerrilla in Voyage to Cythera, first introduced like a ghost returning from the dead communist past as he disembarks from the Soviet ocean liner, then his adult children later gazing off-screen at him and his wife later standing on a barge slowly drifting out to sea, Durgnat concludes: ‘Alongside their unity, long takes can fragment space as incisively as bold cuts’ (1990: 43). This is the dialectical function played by the long take and slowness per se in Angelopoulos’ work, while for Antonioni insidiously overwhelming ellipses and fragmentation constantly work within and across a much more diverse array of images. Angelopoulos and Antonioni ultimately offer two very different heavily elliptical styles, with the latter employing a much wider array of techniques and entirely different mise en scène. Angelopoulos’ ellipses involve far less cutting and shot type variation, overlaid with a much heavier sense of thematic

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   55 and historical significance. With Antonioni the viewer may be frequently unsure as to ‘when’ and ‘where’ we are, due to the film’s quietly non-linear narrative trajectory, editing style, and lack of establishing shots (or as replaced by a new kind of establishing shot in the form of a decontextualised, abstract surface denuded of perspective). But the ‘answer’ remains both uncertain and ultimately not too important. With Angelopoulos, the above questions, as asked by the film’s elliptical style (within or between shots and scenes), are much more urgently felt, and ultimately important to resolve. In this sense he is both a more demanding director when it comes to audience knowledge and intellectual ‘work’, yet at the same time paradoxically also closer to the deductive demands made by classical Hollywood narrative cinema in requiring the viewer to become something of a detective, pulling the film’s pieces together. The ‘mystery’ to be solved is here a historical and political portrait of Greece rather than the fleshing out of clearly fictional narratives and characters. The Travelling Players in particular, thereby, feels, to some extent, ‘difficult’ in a way that (while its particular demands are far less familiar) exercises the viewer’s intellectual, cognitive processes arguably closer to Hollywood at its most sophisticated than Antonioni’s cinema. With the latter, the audience is left adrift, face to face with exponential ambiguity – both an ‘easier’ yet also more vertiginous and troubling position. For all these two filmmaker’s important differences, their impact on our understanding of cinema characterised by temporal foregrounding cannot be underestimated. If modernity in its dominant political and technological iterations is built on speed, challenging ‘art cinema’ both within and beyond Europe in recent decades seems to offer time rendered in the form of slowness as a possible means of resisting the former’s more regressive elements, prompting a more reflective and possibly critical mode of engagement. The global significance and challenge of Zhangke Jia’s mainland China masterpiece Shijie (The World, 2004), for example, is arguably enabled through its presenting a fast and inherently virtual modernity marked by endless simulation by means of a stretched, meditative temporality, itself also very much connoting virtuality. Angelopoulos and before him Antonioni are key originators of this style, and the suggestion of slowness as offering possible resistance to modernity’s regressive tenets and effects. ‘Add together all the shots in Angelopoulos’ thirteen features’, Bordwell writes in a blog entry reflecting on the dual 2012 deaths of the Greek director and antithetical Hollywood filmmaker Tony Scott, ‘and you have less than a third of the shots in, say, Scott’s Enemy of the State’ (Bordwell 2013). Here entirely contra the purportedly sacred principles of classical cinema (still effectively enforced through the process of Hollywood test screenings to make certain spectators don’t ‘notice’ time), Durgnat suggests of Angelopoulos’ slowness: ‘The takes, visually varied, impregnated with lingering meanings, seem longer than they are.  (. . .) Angelopoulos’

56  h a m i s h fo rd f­ ull-sequence shots are rare, but even his shorter long takes generate a kindred Gestalt’ (1990: 43). This now global slowness, and its effects, needs some scrutiny to see if such images are anything more than individual and accumulative symptoms of an absolute resignation in the face of, and as inextricably scarred by, history. Is such an aesthetic of slowness radical, or is it simply oppositional – at least equally reactive, or even reactionary? Durgnat concludes with a point resonating across the ‘failures’ of history in light of lingering and still compelling – if also cautious and anachronistic – left-wing idealism: Thus Angelopoulos’ Theatre-Reality dialectic, like those Time-changes, expresses an inconsolable, real sadness. History never took the Marxist way. . . . Brechtian irony assumed that History was Marxist; here History’s ironies at Marxism’s expense include sadness, perplexity, ‘dreaming awake.’ Or ‘theatrical’ degradation, like the [Voyage to Cythera] Dockworkers’ Festival’. (1990: 45) If the heavily time-based modernism exemplified by Angelopoulos’ cinema becomes gradually threadbare as his career progresses, the only markers of hope increasingly elderly, pathetic or even risible (and always male) figures, or entirely spectral and mythic, if we take seriously the political ­analysis and investments powering his 1970s work, the filmmaker’s development (or ­devolution) of modernist cinema is indeed a textbook symptom of history.

REFLEXI V I T Y, COM P OSI T I ON AND TH E GA ZE One of the central ways in which Angelopoulos’ 1970s films partake of and partially ‘update’ European modernist cinema’s story as adapted to his committed charting of modern Greek history is a very particular reflexivity. Overall, Antonioni’s work remains in a closer dialogue with realism, no matter how stylised the early-60s films become, peaking with the at times near-abstract expressionism of Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964). Modernism becomes here the most appropriate way to render reality in its historically appropriate form, effectively fusing or collapsing two traditions often, simplistically or falsely, assumed to be oppositional.8 Angelopoulos’ reflexive compositional style is much more overtly and consistently ‘presentationalist’, undermining the representational appeal that the moving image can seem to offer in its long-take form. Angelopoulos’ presentationalist images are frequently accompanied by a theatricality of both compositional-gestural style and trope most overt in The Travelling Players and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), again utterly lacking

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   57 in Antonioni. The former film’s unifying motif is a theatrical troupe touring northern Greece across periods of great political crisis and literally gazing at or witnessing history. Its often very elaborate set piece-style scenes are frequently rendered by extravagant long shots culminating in regular tableaux whereby the camera/audience is directly invoked through the self-conscious positioning of the ‘players’ before us as carefully arranged groupings of bodies as they look upon picturesque, frequently rural and village locales or decaying regional town centres. The Hunters, by comparison, mainly plays out within the large central room of a winter lodge. This interior space set against snowy wilderness becomes a multi-directional stage upon which is performed the neurotic fantasies of a victorious political and economic class seemingly haunted by the ‘other Greece’ personified by Civil War-era guerrillas long vanquished (killed, imprisoned, or fleeing into internal and external exile in Greece’s mountain villages or communist bloc countries) yet three decades later magically coming back to life in ghostly form. An overtly theatrical reflexivity pervades both films, in seeking to express – and educate viewers about – the history of a radically different national heritage and identity violently evicted from the postWorld War II political contract as enforced by Britain and the USA, despite the communists having been the primary force responsible for effectively fighting Hitler’s army. If many present-day global ‘art cinema’ and festival circuit viewers are familiar with the long-take aesthetic that Angelopoulos was so central in enshrining, his highly self-conscious staging of bodies into gradually constructed ‘still life’ arrangements is likely more unfamiliar or even jarring. This signature composition type is even further foregrounded to the point of excessive self-consciousness by leaving clues as to the ultimate image’s precise details – when the shot will end, or alternatively when the camera should begin its slow track in the direction indicated by the characters’ communal gaze. Angelopoulos often leaves gaps in the composition until its ultimate culmination, such that when the final character or body at last moves, magnetlike, to their rightful place left or prepared by the careful placement of others and the camera’s exact placement, the resulting picture – and it is something of a ‘painted’ or photographic portrait – becomes at last complete. This can become quite humorous the more we become familiar with the pattern, a level of dogged self-consciousness the intentional nature of which is perhaps unclear, recurring throughout the director’s work with increasing frequency. Both filmmakers provide often-unrivalled compositional effects when it comes to the staging of still and slowly moving images that easily become exquisite. But Antonioni’s trademark shots concluding a scene are entirely contingent. There always remains a chance that something will change within an image or across an indeterminate ellipsis into the next, which may herald a new scene or a further elongation of the present one.

58  h a m i s h fo rd In Antonioni’s work, the very materials comprising the image remain necessarily tied to the modern world both in what it shows – the spaces, objects, and people – and how such reality is visualised in and as the image itself. The conclusion of a sequence or interlude, even if often via a supposed temps mort moment, nonetheless remains unpredictable and inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity, I argue elsewhere (2015), remains the overwhelming characteristic of his work. With Angelopoulos, this is usually much less the case, especially in light of the gap or ‘missing piece’ formula, such that we can often predict a shot or sequence’s point of culmination, and realise when this has finally occurred. With the Greek experience of post-war modernity frequently a force of oppression, violence and corruption, the films often evoke a strong sense of escape – only in part voluntary, and usually as historically embedded – via some movement towards, or situating within, the country’s northern mountains. Such non-urban spaces thereby develop a crucial second, or in the first five or six films arguably primary, meaning as associated with the mythically-intoned guerrillas-in-exile, or the country’s copious picturesque ‘ruins’ – both those of antiquity and a retarded, incomplete modernity – within which a sense of genuine human possibility might just be gleaned from the palimpsestic rubble of history. Hope and life itself seem increasingly encased in the past, including within death and an overall sense of loss. The most powerful articulation of this is found in The Hunters through the figure of the frozen guerrilla, coming to life after being found in the snow with fresh wounds three decades later by representatives of present-day Greece’s ­political masters. Antonioni’s reflexivity is particularly evident in the detailed relationship developed between his camera and the actors on screen, the various – and usually trivial – human dramas which only seem to be of partial interest to the camera and filmmaker, periodically drawing our attention to other details in the shot, as well as the broader world on screen and beyond the frame. Nonetheless, occasional medium shots and close-ups allow a certain, and rather materially felt, proximity to a privileged subject, typically played by Monica Vitti in the early-60s films – a sporadic closeness that only increases, rather than resolves, the film’s overall attitude to the drama it elliptically portrays. Angelopoulos’ treatment of actors is characterised by a more consistently ‘flat’ performance style and the maintaining of a far more consistent and substantial distance between characters and the camera, making them sometimes difficult to make out or differentiate. Horton compares the filmmaker’s theoretically exciting political drama, Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), to the contemporary work of a much more commercially successful left-wing Greek director (based in France), Costa-Gavras. Unlike the latter’s much more Hollywood-informed style as seen in films like Z (1969), Horton suggests, the potentially compelling story of Days of ’36 is denuded of any real drama when

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   59 it comes both to modes of acting and use of the camera. (Horton, 1997a: 65). Certainly Angelopoulos does not have his actors ‘perform’ to build tension, character, or suspense, and the difficult-to-identify officials in the film speak in a deadpan manner, often muttering rather than delivering their lines clearly. The effect, underlined by the long takes rendering these scenes, is to defuse the plot in order to allow us to concentrate on the issue or situation being developed an the frame, scene, sequence and film. Horton suggests this is an entirely appropriate form for presenting such historical content: Thus subject matter and camera technique are well matched, for the lack of action in the film mirrors the lack of direction and action within the Greek government. In one scene as officials argue back and forth that ‘we must have a solution or the government will fall,’ Angelopoulos’s camera circles them in a 360-degree motion, emphasizing the circularity of their positions. (Horton, 1997a: 65) No matter the loose generic expectations, drama and genre are resisted by both Antonioni and Angelopoulos through very different, highly attenuated time-based cinematic renderings of human presence and history.9 For the former, this involves the frequent fragmenting of bodies, making them seem like ­material things, while the latter renders them whole but distant, more like figures than distinct people. An absolutely crucial reflexive gesture for both filmmakers, then, remains the diverse foregrounding of the gaze itself: the intertwined look/s of camera, filmmaker and viewer, but also of various – and in Angelopoulos’ case often multiple – on-screen subjects. One of the trademark shots in Antonioni’s early60s films is when our privileged human figure (typically Vitti) turns her head 90° or 180° away from camera, director and viewer, denying us her primary affective vessel (the face) and leaving the only partially recognisable material surface of clothing, hair and skin. (Alternatively, a shot, sequence or even film will conclude with the complete takeover by entirely non-human matter, objects, lines and textures, as most famously occurs in the final seven minutes of L’eclisse.) Given neither a reverse shot showing us the face as it looks nor the field upon which she now presumably gazes, the viewer is frequently left at best with partial visual access to our protagonist at key moments of her apparent drama, if we can still see her at all. The gesturing towards off-screen space via a multiplicitous gaze is also very important in Angelopoulos’ cinema, but again works very differently, via much more theatrical c­ omposition and reflexivity. For Greek-Australian filmmaker and critic Bill Mousoulis, the foregrounding of the gaze in both its opacity and ongoing fascination lies at the heart of this cinema. ‘What impresses me most about Angelopoulos is his camera, and,

60  h a m i s h fo rd therefore, his gaze,’ Mousoulis writes. ‘Angelopoulos is fascinated by looking: he looks with his camera, which almost always moves, and he loves looking at looking’ (2000). In line with familiar principles of different Marxist cinemas, coincidentally or not, in his 1970s films such a heavily foregrounded gaze frequently at the same time both renders and is ‘led by’ the communal gaze of a group of people who slowly emerge into pre-arranged formations only to look past the camera, beyond it, or to the side, following which the camera frequently follows suit in a glacial tracking shot whose direction is dictated or marshalled by the cluster-gaze on screen. Bordwell writes that ‘front or profiled positions’ held by human bodies ‘often seem as mere transitions to the threequarter resting point,’ forcing the viewer to infer characters’ facial reactions (2005: 162). Again, such shots may often, especially in The Travelling Players, also involve a shift in time irrespective of whether there is a cut, as if the people on screen were affecting the historical shifts of the film through their gaze into past or future. In Megalexandros even these complex distinctions are overcome, with conventional time and past/present/future delineation seeming to have disappeared altogether. Instead the viewer must engage with an almost entirely mythic – and oneiric – dimension that nonetheless continues to play out, now in rather dysfunctional fashion, the dream of radical politics.

LOOK I NG FOR MODERN I T Y How, then, does Angelopoulos’ cinema help us understand the complicated development of post-war European film modernism, the earlier generative apotheosis of which is represented by Antonioni’s work? What sort of image do the Greek director’s 1970s films in particular leave us with, driven by idiosyncratic formalism at the centre of which is a long-take aesthetic and compositional style characterised by theatrical presentationalism, accumulatively performing or rendering the real unfolding tragedy of national, regional and global history? With Angelopoulos, where lies a vision of modernity not marked by either regression or spectrality? Is there any real ambiguity about its ultimate horror and violence, historical and political evacuation of the only hope represented by the once numerous but long vanquished, aged, or mythic leftists? Angelopoulos constructs his mournful critique despite or even sometimes outside of modernity, or paradoxically (considering the films’ overall theme), history itself, operating instead within an increasingly mythic dimension. This is, however, both lamentable yet itself a quite proper – even ‘realistic’ – response to modern history, which in 1970s Greece remained inescapably tainted by collaboration, resurgent (US-backed) dictatorship, crony capitalism, chronic underdevelopment and extreme inequality. In Angelopoulos’

g ene rative apo ge e and elegiac expan sion   61 work from this period, writes Jameson, ‘a remarkable living realism is attained in which, at least for one more long moment, the traditional opposition between the fictive and the real or documentary seems to have been suspended or neutralized’ (1997: 82). As with Antonioni, modernism and realism achieve historically driven fusion or synthesis. Despite the presence of much equivalent historical baggage, however, in Antonioni’s films a forever ambiguous and generative, excessive yet also again multi-temporal and ‘incomplete’ modernity floods every frame, while at the same time given material form as the image itself: the inherently ‘modern’ way the director frames this world and gives it cinematic life. For Angelopoulos, a viable modernity’s only hope already lies in tatters or in spectral form, like The Hunters’ guerrillas. The built environment, meanwhile, remains dominated by decay and the vestiges again of a palimpsestic, crumbling Greece. In this sense the closest Antonioni film to Angelopoulos’ work indeed remains L’avventura, almost all of which is set in ‘backward’ Sicily (although a sometime tourist destination for the upper classes, as in this film, the island and Italy’s south in many ways were largely left out of the nation’s significant post-war recovery). Its background spaces are those that come to dominate Angelopoulos’ films: primordial nature and a largely decaying or partial in-renovation pre-modern regional architecture pock-marked by fascism and war, and an underdevelopment born of a post-war political settlement retarded by extensive Western Cold War interference. For Antonioni’s early-60s films, Italian and European modernity remains open, ambiguous, while his own gradual retreat from aesthetic modernism starting with Blow-Up suggests – at least in hindsight – a muted sense of formal, historical and (subtly) political loss, while effectively rendering contemporary modernity’s early evacuation of often fragile alternatives to its dominant incarnation. Angelopoulos’ much more overtly expressed mourning, his work’s overwhelming elegiac tonality – for Greece, for both local and global communist history, and for cinema’s modernist vision – is overwhelming. This goes equally for his stylistic trademarks. History, form and politics remain crucially connected. Increasingly, a sense of petrification pervades this cinema, especially following the 1970s: a modernism once vibrant, radical and generative now appears stuck in an ever repeating, ‘ontologised’ slow loop. The fetishising of slowness remains these films’ powering, and troubling, heart. That Angelopoulos’ long-take ‘slow’ films have proven so trenchant in exemplifying subsequent challenging World Cinema’s petrified language, tells us a lot both about the true price of history and the possibilities it might just still offer.

62  h a m i s h fo rd

Notes 1. Bordwell argues that Angelopoulos’ ‘lateness’ necessitates a kind of hyper-reflexive meta-modernism due to his coming ‘belatedly to the modernism tradition, one that had already acquired a history, a pantheon of masters, a theoretical program, and rhetoric, and a set of institutions. . . . [H]is historical situation obliged him to sustain the tradition with a new degree of self-consciousness’ (2005: 144). Jameson suggests that the director’s first five features effectively catch the final wave of 1960s European modernism (1997: 80). The title of Horton’s edited volume on Angelopoulos, The Last Modernist (1997b), has also frequently been used in scholarly accounts of Alexander Kluge and Michael Haneke. 2. ‘The representation of the urban landscape (deserted streets, abandoned factory chimneys, scenes in the stock market),’ writes Nikos Kolovos of Broadcast, ‘is evocative of Antonioni’s cinema’. (Kolovos 1990: 32). Thanks to Angelos Koutsourakis for both the Kolovos and preceding Archimandritis references. 3. See Ford (2012: 9–23) for my own brief discussion of the complications inherent in defining modernist cinema and its associated historical periodisation. 4. This appears much more explicitly so in Angelopoulos’ case, however (in keeping with a strong tendency within film studies for many years now) it has become increasingly common to emphasise the cultural and socio-historical context of Antonioni’s films within English-language scholarship. Peter Brunette’s book on the filmmaker is important in this shift (1998) recently taken to something of an extreme in the centenary Palgrave/BFI collection on his work (Rascaroli & Rhodes, eds 2011). 5. While the image remains heavily foregrounded above all else through Angelopoulos’ cinema, in the first five or six features it remains in large part connected to – and grounded by – these films’ political and historical project. In subsequent films such as Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), in which the previous specific leftist essaying of history has receded in favour of a more general and regional presentation, there is even more emphasis on the image per se. It becomes increasingly beautiful for its own sake, in the process either distancing or indirectly aestheticising the violence and horror of history that was more directly rendered in the earlier films. (Thanks to Angelos Koutsourakis for this latter observation.) 6. It is also uncannily connected to Antonioni’s nearly contemporaneous film, Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982). Both works feature ennui-ridden middleaged filmmakers ‘searching’ for particular women who might symbolise a hopeful alternative – and erotically codified – means to engage with the future, historically imbedded meaning, and cinematic purpose. 7. Elsewhere I explore Antonioni’s work in detail for its crucial role within the development of what Gilles Deleuze (1989) famously calls modern cinema’s pre-eminent ‘time-image’ (Ford 2003; 2012: 1–9, 143–254), also suggesting that the early 60s films at least partially escape Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). See Chapter 15 of the present volume for a discussion of Angelopoulos’ cinema in terms of Deleuze’s philosophy by Richard Rushton. 8. As Kovács points out, in his important review of Chronicle of a Love Story André Bazin presciently described the film’s ‘stylised realism’ as a possible indicator of European cinema’s future (cited in Kovács 2007: 256). In a forthcoming article I address in detail Antonioni’s four early-60s films for their historically appropriate conflation of modernism and realism (Ford 2015).

g ene rat i ve a p o ge e and eleg i ac ex p an s i on   63 9. Although this remains generally the case, both directors show an occasional increased interest in genre, particularly the murder-mystery and melodrama. Kovács calls Antonioni’s trademark cinema followed up by Angelopoulos ‘modernist melodrama’ (2007: 292). The latter’s post-’70s films come closest to recognisable melodrama in their treatment of personal relationships.

C HA P TER 4

The Gestus of Showing: Brecht, Tableaux and Early Cinema in Angelopoulos’ Political Period (1970–80) Angelos Koutsourakis

B REC H T AND ANGELO P O U LOS

T

he question of the Brechtian quality of Angelopoulos’ political period might initially appear outmoded and obsolete given that a number of scholars have already acknowledged Brecht’s influence, predominantly in the filmmaker’s historical tetralogy. None of the scholars in question, however, have attempted to approach the Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos with reference to the former’s writings on film, nor from the perspective of the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the film medium. This is the task of the current chapter, which aims to clarify the often hinted at but not ­theoretically qualified Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos’ cinema. Before moving to the main corpus of the chapter, a series of comments with respect to the Brechtian reception of Angelopoulos are in order. Andrew Horton considers Angelopoulos’ valorisation of the reflective spectator as a Brechtian gesture, yet he suggests that the combination of theatricality and reality in Angelopoulos’ films often leads the audience ‘into a deeper fuller emotional bond with the film’ (1997: 14–15). One can retort that Brecht did not argue simply against the employment of emotions; he rather contested the emotional manipulation of the audiences in ways that conceal the social aspect of emotions (Brecht 1963: 30), while simultaneously favouring the production of emotional responses that would politicise representation and divide the audience as per their conflicting political interests. This process of socialising emotional responses so as to create political divisions is a recurring theme throughout Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy and it is not accidental that during the 1970s he experienced a great deal of animosity on the part of the Greek right-wing political establishment. The tendency among other commentators is either to draw attention to the dispassionate acting style in Angelopoulos’ films, which they consider to be Brechtian (Pappas 1977:

t he gestus of s how i n g   65 39; Stathi 1999: 42), or to focus on Angelopoulos’ employment of Brechtian theatrical tropes in certain films (Tarr, Proppe 1976: 6; Kolovos 1990: 20; Kosmidou 2013: 130–131; Rollet 2012: 56). Contra these semantic discussions of Brecht’s position in Angelopoulos’ early work, David Bordwell has succinctly identified some key Brechtian elements in the Greek auteur’s films without necessarily using Brecht as a point of reference. Bordwell’s discussion of Angelopoulos’ strategies of ‘dedramatisation’; his commitment to character typage, according to which individuals stand for larger historical/social forces; his framing techniques, which force the audience to read actions exclusively from corporeal postures; and his manipulation of framing strategies, which date back to the early years of the medium, are illuminating apropos the filmmaker’s Brechtianism (2005:143, 153, 162, 184). One can take Bordwell’s findings a step further and point out that Brecht’s own writings on the medium place emphasis on the autonomy of the shot/ tableau, the employment of early cinema tropes – including typage/lack of psychological depth in character portrayal – and the emphasis on gestural representational strategies that accentuate the process of ‘showing’ an action rather than reproducing it. In 1927, Brecht wrote that film should be seen like a ‘Folgen von Tafeln’ (a series of tableaux), which do not produce ‘wirkenden Handlung’ (plot development), but have a sense of autonomy (1992: 211). The succession of all the semi-autonomous fragments connects each fragment with the whole and, in other words, dialectical unity is produced by means of the very disjointedness of the narrative. Brecht’s aesthetic can be paralleled to a family album, in the sense that within the pages of a photo-album there are numerous pictures and even chronological leaps but the combination of these photos produces a sense of maturation. This evokes Roland Barthes’ famous analogy between the Brechtian and the Eisensteinian aesthetic, which I shall return to later. The stratagem of valorising the autonomy of the tableau and the static quality of the composition is premised upon an aesthetic which privileges the production of gestural relationships that accentuate the social significance of the actions, without employing conventional dramatic flow. There is thus a symbiosis between Brecht’s concept of the social Gestus and the act of showing an action, as Brecht puts it, the ‘Gestus des Zeigens’ (the Gestus of showing) (1963: 156). As Roswitha Mueller observes, this emphasis on Gestus within the frame produces interruptive effects that have a similar function as montage (1989: 88). This also occurs in the cinema of Angelopoulos, in which montage takes place within the shot, despite the filmmaker’s insistence on the sequence shot and the pseudo-sense of unification deriving from it.1 A notable matter is that Brecht’s reflections on the film medium are evocative of his appreciation of early cinema and its aesthetic of showing rather than

66  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s telling. Early cinema narration relied on the autonomy of the tableau and on a presentational model, in which the exposition of the actualities within the frame overlapped with the showing of the medium itself (Gunning 1989: 7–8; Doane 2002: 186). Brecht’s enthusiasm for early cinema derived precisely from these characteristics and he argued for a presentational narrative style which emphasised the exhibitionist aspect of the medium not for the sake of it, but as a means of creating a relative abstraction. The enframed actualities, he suggested, should somehow be overtly highlighted and not totally subordinated to narrative continuity, so as to underline a series of contradictions which should not be flattened in favour of dramatic action. ‘Das Wesen ist das Auflösen des dramatischen Vorgangs in Einzelbilder, wie es sich aus dem Wegfall des Wortes und dem Zusammendrängen auf kurze einzelne Bildszenen ergibt’ (The essence of film lies in the dissolution of the dramatic process in individual images, as it results from the omission of the word and the compression into single autonomous scenes) (1992: 230). Brecht’s diagnosis of film narrative here is in line with Georges Méliès’ contention that the scenario is of secondary importance in film narration and it should only function as a pretext for the production of ‘picturesque tableaux’ (cited in Gaudreault 1987: 114). Méliès’ intention was to produce feelings of astonishment and wonder for his audience by means of the new medium’s ability to captivate the public. Brecht also sought to capitalise on cinema’s ability to astonish. In Brecht’s reckoning, however, the tableau narrative of early cinema offered the opportunity to privilege the production of social Gestus within the frame which would connect the portrayed actions with concrete social situations. His contention that ‘die Gebärdensprache’ (gestural language) needs to be privileged at the expense of words invokes the Soviet debates of the time and in particular Aleksey Tolstoy’s position that cinema should not follow the tradition of psychological prose or American editing; it should instead highlight the ‘primal gesture’ which could make people see ordinary situations from different viewpoints (cited in Yuri 2010: 21). This connection between Gestus and defamiliarisation is similarly implicit in Brecht’s formulation and hinges upon the consideration that the denaturalisation of individual actions by means of the social Gestus can make the audience reflect on everyday situations which are taken for granted. Barthes has made one of the strongest cases on this matter and he has famously paralleled the Brechtian Gestus with Lessing’s model of ‘the pregnant moment’ (1977: 73). In Barthes’ estimation, the social Gestus interrupts the ‘overall totality’ of dramatic actions and turns into a tangible idea which connects the represented material with the extra-textual reality and the historical concerns of the present. Not surprisingly, Barthes finds common elements between the Brechtian aesthetic and Eisenstein’s montage theory. Brecht was a keen enthusiast of the Russian avant-gardism and this is also evidenced in his

t he gestus of s how i n g   67 employment of montage in his theatre plays, as well as in Kuhle Wampe (1932), the film he co-directed with Slatan Dudow and Ernst Ottwalt. Then again, Brecht thought that there is also a potential to produce montage and gestic effects within a static shot or even a picture. This is evidenced in his Kriegsfibel (War Primer), a collection of photo-epigrams. In this collection, Brecht assembled a number of pictures from the popular press and added a four-verse poem at the bottom of each visual. Aiming to counteract the factuality of the pictures and the ways they are used by the media, the poems produce gestic effects, which create an antithesis between the pictures and the written verses. They thus invite new ways of understanding the mediated reality beyond the realms of tautology. There is, therefore, a dialectic between stasis and motion produced by the gestic quality of the verses. One also needs to emphasise the fact that Brecht was an admirer of the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel because his paintings yielded a number of ‘pregnant moments’, which allowed the viewer to develop her or his analytical skills (Kuhn 2013: 101).2 From the above-mentioned observations, it can be deduced that Brecht’s investment in montage, as well as in gestic effects within static images, when applied to film art, can lead to two different types of cinema. The first one relies on an Eisensteinian use of dialectical montage, while the second one is emblematised in the films of Miklós Jancsó and Angelopoulos. These filmmakers make use of the sequence shot and the tableau, taking advantage of the dialectic between the static frame and the movement within the frame, thus challenging the unity of the film’s fabula and syuzhet by means of a pseudo sense of organic realism. Although Angelopoulos has denied that Jancsó has been a source of influence (cited in Mitchell [1980] 2001: 31), one cannot fail to notice the major parallel in their use of the sequence shot which does not produce narrative unity but fragmentation. Commenting on Jancsó’s modus operandi András Bálint Kovács perceptively observes that the ‘radically continuous composition of Jancsó’s films covers a vision of a radically fragmented reality’ (2007: 336) and this is exactly what is at the core of Angelopoulos’ employment of the sequence shot. What is particularly important for us here is that Angelopoulos’ cinema (at least his first period, from 1970 to 1980) is not necessarily antithetical to a cinema of montage sequences as long as the latter is in service of the dialectic and intends to fragment reality instead of serving narrative continuity. In an emblematic scene in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) one of the characters makes a toast to Eisenstein and says: ‘we loved him, we love him, but he never loved us’. When Angelopoulos was asked the meaning of this, he responded that Eisenstein’s cinema was very important for all cinéphiles (cited in Rafailidis 2003: 170); he has also elsewhere declared that he decided to become a filmmaker after seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) a film which relies on discontinuity editing and is radically different from

68  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s his own aesthetic.3 Yet what impressed him in Godard was his ability to ‘turn all cinematic codes upside down’ (cited in Fainaru [1999] 2001: 127). Put simply, along with other different political modernist filmmakers there is a symbiosis between style and politics in the first period of Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, even though he avoids montage, which was the prototypical representational device not only of modern cinema, but of modern art as a whole. Here it is worth clarifying that Angelopoulos’ cinema bridges the early and the late period of cinematic modernism, as framed by Kovács (2007: 53–4), in the sense that his films are equally influenced by the silent film movement as well as by the cultural modernism in theatre (including Brechtian theatre) and literature, which is characteristic of the late modernist cinematic period.4 On the one hand, his films, as Akira Kurosawa proposes, return to ‘the roots of cinema’ (cited in Stathi 1999: 28), and, as Wolfram Schütte says, he is ‘ein Erneuerer des Stumm-Films – der Schönheit des Bildaufbaus, seiner Tiefenschärfe, der Bewegung in und mit seinen Plansequenzen’ (an innovator of the silent film, by the beauty of his composition, its depth of field and the movement inside the frame and through his sequence shots) (Schütte 1992: 12–13). In this instance, the films from his political period can be seen as objects in dialogue with the foundational period of Brecht’s writings on the medium, given that they employ static tableaux and early cinema tropes. But on the other hand, following the late period of cinematic modernism, they are also in dialogue with other art forms including literature, painting and theatre, since they bring in references to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, the Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis, and to Greek Varieté and shadow puppet theatre. It is this particular blending of the two periods of cinematic modernism that differentiates his Brechtianism from that of other filmmakers, such as Godard, who can be firmly placed in the second period of cinematic modernism. Yet despite these formal differences, the objectives are the same: to challenge the unity of the diegetic cosmos so as to forge a dialectical method of understanding the real social and historical conditions which are obfuscated in the empirical reality.

T H EMAT I S I NG T H E ACT OF RE P RESENTAT I ON Angelopoulos has frequently commented on the Brechtian aspect of his early work. In 2010, while preparing his unfinished film Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea), he explained that from the early years of his career he planned to make a film based on The Threepenny Opera, but the producers preferred the script of Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1971) (cited in Georgakopoulou 2010). He also concluded that the present political situation makes Brecht’s play relevant and timely. In an earlier interview in 2009 broadcast by the radio

t he gestus of s how i n g   69 station France Culture he reflected on his Brechtian approach to history as seen in his historical tetralogy. During those years everybody was influenced by Brecht. Take Godard’s example. Godard had said that ‘we should not just make political films, but we should make films politically’. Of course, Brecht employs the Verfremdungseffekt which is expressed in the actors’ acting. But there is pathos too. The difference is that the pathos does not emanate solely from the characters. The carriers of the pathos are not simply the actors, but the situations and the uncertainties too. The Verfremdungseffekt does not intend to view history remotely. Not at all. History is the protagonist, but the dramatis personae play an important role too. They are not shown as autonomous individuals, but as representatives of social, political and human strata. There is, therefore, a dialectical process. (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 42) The dialectical process described by Angelopoulos is grounded in the Marxist idea that individuals are products and agents at the same time of history. Such a dialectical view of the world is made manifestly clear from Angelopoulos’ very first feature film, Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970), which draws on the failure of representation. Unfortunately, the English translation of its title muddies its reference to the art of cinema, since the Greek word Αναπαράσταση literally translates in English to representation. Not unlike filmmakers from the Nouvelle Vague and other new cinemas of the 1960s, Angelopoulos’ first feature film draws on the crime genre. The film is also akin to Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Bertolucci’s La Commare Secca (1962), because it destabilises the crime-film genre and, rather than being preoccupied with the whodunit question, it uses the genre’s formula to point to a series of social and political questions. Reconstruction focuses on the murder of a Greek immigrant (Mihalis Fotopoulos) by his wife (Toula Stathopoulou) and her lover (Yiannis Totsikas), upon their return home from Germany. The film’s first visual draws attention to the deserted village of Temfaia. But the shot is not an establishing shot for the drama, but for the broader social context, something that is emphasised by the voice-over, which communicates a number of facts regarding the reduction of the village’s population from 1,250 inhabitants in 1939 to eighty-six in 1965. Significant screen time is devoted to the landscape and eventually the figure of Costas, the Greek immigrant from Germany, emerges. We see him returning to his house and while the camera captures him dining in the presence of his family, the frame freezes and the credits roll. In the next visual after the credits, we see a man entering Heleni’s house and we assume that he is Costas. Suddenly, a rope is placed around his neck

70  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s and we realise that this is nothing but an attempt to restage Costas’ murder, which has not been shown on screen. This disruption of the film’s sequential ordering emphasises the desire to understand the meaning of the act by representing it rather than to focus on the individual event itself. The formula of attempting to comprehend something by representing it brings us back to Brecht’s idea of the quotable Gestus. In Brecht’s formulation, when the actor shows an event she/he should simultaneously show her/himself so as to interrupt the representational context; in doing so she/he produces a number of Gestus which point to the social significance of the represented event. Walter Benjamin compares this process with the Hegelian dialectic and explains that as in Hegel the core of the dialectic is not the ‘sequence of time’, but solely the vehicle, in Brecht’s aesthetic the dialectic is brought ‘at a standstill’ not by the succession of actions but by the quotability of Gestus (Benjamin [1966] 1998: 12). In Reconstruction, the whole film is premised on the quotability of a murder that has taken place off-screen, but it is precisely through this quotability that a number of social Gestus are produced which comment on the reality of the time in Greece. For instance, after another representation of the murder, the prosecutor (Yiannis Mpalaskas) concludes that ‘the immoral character of the accused woman’ is to be blamed for the crime. Later on, when the police try to remove the culprits a chorus of women attack, exclusively, Heleni; one infers that the last is not simply assaulted for being a ­murderer, but for having destabilised the social order. There are three perspectives from which the puzzle of the murder is shown: the first one is from the perspective of the police who try to understand how the murder took place by asking Heleni and her lover to represent it; the second one is from the perspective of the filmmaker who tries to put all the missing links together. He depicts Costas’ arrival, the crisis experienced by Heleni and her lover after the murder, and he concludes the film with an anachronism showing Costas entering the house, in which we know that he is about to be murdered. The third one is from the perspective of the journalists (one of them played by Angelopoulos) whose research brings to the surface more details regarding the withering of the Greek countryside and the poverty which forces its inhabitants to emigrate abroad. Commenting on this formal complication, Angelopoulos stated that he wanted to create a dialectic between the three different levels and that each representational level has a Brechtian autonomy (cited in Nagel 1992: 86–7). The aesthetic consequence of this method is a dedramatisation, which is not political in itself simply because of the emotional distance produced, but because of the collision between the three representational layers. None of these three different perspectives clarify why the murder took place, while the produced dialectical conflict does not prioritise the isolated dramatic incident of the murder; it rather shifts our

t he gestus of s how i n g   71

Figure 4.1 Reconstruction

attention from the diegetic cosmos to the meta-level, that is, the registered social reality in which the incident took place. There is thus a negation of representation and this is very forcefully exemplified in a scene towards the end when Heleni is repeatedly asked by the prosecutor and the policemen to reproduce the minute details of the murder and show how she used the rope to kill her husband. Within a prolonged medium shot, we get to see Heleni slowly tightening a rope and then throwing it to the policemen in defiance. This is an emblematic Gestus which encapsulates the film’s thematic interests and its refusal to dissociate the particular event from the social environment. Subsequently, in this particular passage there is a representational negation on the part of the filmmaker and on the part of the main character too. In a way, the negation of representation operates as a denial of melodrama, that is, a refusal to valorise the private sphere at the expense of the social one. The anachronism of the film’s ending is also telling in this respect. Within a four-minute fixed shot reminiscent of early cinema’s theatrical quality, the camera registers the landscape and Heleni’s courtyard. For a while all we see is the emptiness of the setting and eventually Heleni and her lover are shown moving towards the house. Costas later appears on frame and also enters the house. The static quality of the shot makes the character’s entry in the frame look like a theatrical entrance. For a few minutes the space remains empty and this choice intensifies the impact of the murder which, as we can infer, takes place off-screen. Ultimately, the two culprits exit the house and appear on frame. But the bareness of the landscape in combination with the theatrical entrances and exits of the characters make the dramatis personae appear like

72  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s figures in space, a stylistic choice that strengthens the dialectic between the individual and the environment.

T H E P ERS I STENCE OF T H E FA B EL : GESTUS W I THI N  TH E FRAME Exemplary in the finale of Reconstruction is the employment of what Kovács identifies as a recurring theme in modernist cinema: the ‘circular trajectory’. Kovács maintains that, as opposed to the linear trajectory, this formal element is characteristic because ‘the ending situation is not significantly different from that of the beginning’ (2007: 79). This is a recurrent motif in Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy which consists of Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1973), The Travelling Players, Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) and Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980). In the first film, Sofianos (Costas Pavlou), a lumpen thug of the Metaxas regime in Greece is betrayed by the state apparatus, which blames him for the murder of a union leader taking place at the beginning of the narrative. When the former takes a politician hostage in his prison cell, he creates a political turmoil which will eventually be terminated with Sofianos’ murder by the state. The film ends with an execution of a group of political dissidents. A group of soldiers are shown placing Sofianos’ body amongst the bodies of the executed civilians. There is no significant change in the film’s finale. It starts with a murder and it ends with several political executions. In The Travelling Players, the action starts in the autumn of 1952 with a fixed shot which captures a group of actors. The voice-over reads: ‘in the fall of 1952 we returned to Aigion. A few veterans, but mainly younger actors. We were tired. We had not slept for days’. In the shots that follow, the diegetic time has shifted back into the past focusing on the turmoil in Greek history during the years from 1939 to 1952, which we get to witness through the travelling players’ ventures. But the film finishes with another fixed shot of the group, again in Aigion but now in 1939. The voice-over repeats the same lines as earlier and the only significant change is the year: ‘In the autumn of 1939 we returned to Aigion. We were tired. We had not slept for days’. Likewise, in The Hunters, the discovery of the frozen body of a communist rebel by a bourgeois group brings back traumatic memories from the past and feelings of collective guilt. In the end, the hunters return to the same place only to rebury the body. Finally, in Megalexandros the film offers an account of an early twentieth-century collective experiment, which subsequently transmutes into an account of one man’s rule. The charismatic leader Alexandros (Omero Antonutti) is eventually killed by the dissatisfied collective, but his young son, also named Alexandros, escapes on a horse. In the last shot, we get to see the young Alexander but in a different temporality: the late twentieth

t he gestus of s how i n g   73 century. The voice-over reads: ‘so Alexandros made his way to the city’. The circular narrative is evident here too but this is the only film in the tetralogy which leaves a vague sign of hope that the historical circularity might not reproduce the recurrent cycles of oppression. Nonetheless, this is simply a suggestion and along the lines of the previous objects, the narrative does not reach a coherent close. It is wholly reasonable to assert that this circular trajectory follows the Benjaminian critique of the historicist assumption of historical progress. In line with Benjamin, Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy (as stated Megalexandros’ finale can be interpreted differently) centres on images ‘of enslaved ancestors rather than liberated grandchildren’ (Osborne 1995: 141). All of which leaves us with a crucial question: does this mean that Angelopoulos adopts what Kosmidou calls ‘a non-Marxist view of the past’ (2013: 134)? We must answer in the categorical negative, because this presumption unequivocally connects Marxism with historical determinism. Secondly, because in Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy it is, as he says, ‘ “History” with a capital “H” ’ (cited in Horton 1997b: 109) that is at the core of the narrative. There is thus an important connection with the Brechtian Fabel and Brecht’s standpoint that the dialectical view of history provides a history lesson.5 A clarification of the term Fabel can elucidate Angelopoulos’ Brechtian view of history. In Theaterarbeit, Brecht defines the Fabel as the narrative content of the drama (Berlau et al. [1952] 1990: 431), while in 1948 he states that ‘die Fabel ist nach Aristoteles – und wir denken da gleich – die Seele des Dramas’ (the Fabel is according to Aristotle – and we agree here – the soul of the drama) (1964: 15). Here, Brecht quotes Aristotle’s Poetics and what merits attention is that he translates μῦθος as Fabel, whose English equivalent is ‘myth’. Given that the Brechtian aesthetic is in opposition with the heroic mythic narrative it is imperative to clarify this point. The Fabel in Brechtian terms implies the collective narrative (and something similar applies to the Greek tragedies which are variations of collective narratives, that is, pre-­existing myths). The collective narrative is at the heart of the Brechtian drama, but unlike the Aristotelian tragedy, it manifests itself in separate parts which showcase the connection between the specific events and the whole, namely the dialectical view of history. Carl Weber brilliantly explains that though Brecht advocated modernist fragmentation he was steadfast in his conviction that the autonomous sequences should interact dialectically with the Fabel (2006: 189). In Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy, the Fabel – the collective narrative – is as per Brecht history. History is segmented in autonomous sequences, which also employ mythic references not to universalise human misfortunes, but to act as a commentary on the historical present. This is given full sway in The Travelling Players, in which the myth of Oresteia and the idyllic popular drama

74  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s of Golfo are used as leitmotifs within the story. Similarly, in Megalexandros the nineteenth-century mythical figure of the Greek bandit and the Byzantine myth of the legend of Megalexandros, who saves the Greeks from Turkish domination, delineate the drama of the failed early twentieth-century socialist experiment taking place in the film’s fabula; still these mythical references are formulas used to comment on the present, and in particular, on the political impasse of the Greek Left and the Eastern Bloc of the period. We can now see how history for Angelopoulos had a ‘scientific’ dimension during his political period, which is precisely communicated by the dialectical connection between the autonomous parts and the collective narrative. In 1977, after the completion of The Hunters, he endorsed this position and suggested that ‘I practice a Marxist approach to cinema. One cannot separate form from content’ (cited in Nagel 1992: 132). In the historical tetralogy, the dialectic between form and content is visualised by structuring the découpage in a way that abolishes the sentence-length shots privileging the production of Gestus. At times these Gestus might communicate a sense of abstraction, but they are always in dialogue with the Fabel. A preliminary example can be taken from Days of ’36, a film which manipulates the detective genre, but its formal texture privileges fragmentation rather than linearity. The film’s central narrative schema is the seizure of a politician from the imprisoned Sofianos. Yet, the shot that comes immediately after this core dramatic incident palpably disregards plot development and does not communicate storytelling information. In a typical static tableau we see the representatives of the state apparatus celebrating the inauguration of the construction of the Olympic stadium, while in another prolonged tableau a young man dressed in a kitsch ancient Greek robe reads a Pindar text. These tableaux serve the role of cinematic attractions and resist diegetic flow, since they provide no storytelling information and have little connection with the preceding scenes and the ones that follow. Obviously, this presentational style acts as an extradiegetic commentary. The kitschiness of the past – that is, the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas – becomes an indictment of the present, namely of the Greek military junta of 1967–74. The Gestus within the tableaux becomes rhetorical and while dramatic development is downplayed, the autonomous parts are in dialogue with the Fabel, the historical past and present. Angelopoulos described this elliptical style as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt which aims at creating an ‘antisuspense’ atmosphere analogous to Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (cited in Gregor [1973] 2001: 12-13). This ‘anti-suspense’ effect is also reinforced by a very important stylistic element in Angelopoulos’ early films, which is the lack of extra-diegetic music and the preference for a Brechtian Trennung der Elemente (separation of elements). Showing contempt for the conventional use of music in narrative cinema, Brecht stated that, ‘man sie im Grund nicht

t he gestus of s how i n g   75 mehr hört’ (ultimately nobody hears it anymore) (1963: 289), implying that music is lost in the emotional clichés it reinforces. He counterproposed that the epic theatre principle of separating the elements of music and action could be politically efficient in film narrative. Music instead of emanating from the atmosphere should openly interrupt the diegetic flow and produce a particular Haltung (attitude). This formula allows music to generalise and to present actions in their social and historical significance. A scene from Days of ’36 is a case in point. At one point in the film Sofianos, while negotiating with the wardens, requests to hear a song. A guard is shown carrying a record player and placing it in the prison’s courtyard. In a fixed shot, we get to hear a typical Athenian bourgeois melody about a woman tired of her former lover, but it is precisely the treatment of diegetic music as an independent element which infuses it with a political significance. The camera starts a travelling arrière which is intercut by a series of panning shots that reveal the prisoners climbing the railings in a ritualistic way. Towards the end of the musical sequence, the prisoners revolt by rattling the prison railings. Again, this segmented scene promotes little dramatic development, but communicates gestic material which is in service of the Fabel, the historical past and the present of the time. Commenting on this use of music in his early films, Angelopoulos stated that a love song placed within a particular context can turn into a political commentary (cited in Nagel 1992: 121). A similar effect is produced in one of the first sequences of The Travelling Players. Within a static frame the camera shows the group of actors while dining and leisurely arranging their tour schedule. Suddenly, the accordionist (Yiannis Furios) starts playing the tune of a bourgeois love song entitled Θα ξανάρθεις (You will come back), which is then hummed by the eldest member of the troupe (Alekos Mpoumpis). An off-screen sound diverts the actors’ attention and the camera slowly pans to the left; using an aperture framing it captures through the restaurant’s window a group of militia members parading and singing a fascist song, popular during the Metaxas’ dictatorship. For a significant amount of time the camera disregards the travelling players, who are the main dramatic characters, and places them off-screen persistently highlighting the military parade. Eventually, it pans to the right only to discover that Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan) has left his seat, is gazing out of the window and humming the fascist song. The camera pans to the left following him back to the table. When he resumes his seat, Pylades (Kuriakos Katrivanos) despises him by knocking his chair to the floor and moving out of frame. Aegisthus follows him and the camera pans to the left again to register the confrontation between the two men. Pylades starts singing the aforementioned love song whose lyrics acquire a new significance:

76  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s You will come back No matter how many years go by You will come back Full of remorse To ask of forgiveness Broken hearted you will come back. The song here comes in contradistinction to the previous fascist tune and serves a revolutionary role. In rebuttal, Aegisthus steps on the table and repeats the right-wing chant, saluting in a fascist manner. This lengthy shot ends and the following one does not linger on the formulated dramatic conflict. It can thus be understood that the musical sequences play a dual role: on the one hand, they introduce us to the political sympathies of some key characters, and on the other hand, they echo the broader collective narrative. Dramatic dialogue is almost absent and the unfolding of the narrative draws on a ­presentational mode of narration, which shows rather than tells. Undoubtedly, the impact of the previous scene is heightened by the semiritualistic manner in which the actors move in space, exiting and re-entering the frame. At times, the camera keeps the dramatis personae off-screen and when it comes back to recapture them, the characters are not in their original positions in the space. All these gestural relationships generated by means of music and performances draw our attention to the characters’ Haltungen (stances/postures) which present them as representatives of historical forces. Their interactions are thus defined by the historical contradictions and conflicts. Commenting on Angelopoulos’ modus operandi, Bordwell maintains that ‘we are obliged to study the body, or more accurately, study the body’s relation to the larger field into which it’s inserted’ (2005: 164). What Bordwell summarises here is the quintessence of the Brechtian aesthetic and its emphasis on segmenting the narrative into Gestus and Haltungen that allow the audience to draw conclusions for the social and historical circumstances. These postural stances do not reduce the characters to static figures à la socialist realism, but emphasise their attitudes towards historical events. Angelopoulos accomplishes this by adopting a quasi-scientific examination of the characters’ movements within the frame and by highlighting patiently all the aspects of performance, instead of subordinating them to action sequences. Again, the parallel with early cinema is remarkable given that the former used, in Noël Burch’s words, a ‘primitive externality’ which downplayed narrativity in favour of highlighting the actualities in the frame (1990: 188). While Angelopoulos does not minimise narrativity tout court, he makes use  of the autonomy of the tableau and underscores the Gestus in frame so as to infuse all the material with the Fabel. Another example from a scene in The Hunters shows this eloquently. After discovering the frozen body of a dead partisan

t he gestus of s how i n g   77 from the years of the Greek Civil War, a group of the ruling elite start a historical recollection which forces them to face their collective guilt regarding collaboration with the Nazis during the war, their violent seizure of power in post-war Greece, and their establishment of a US-client state, which was eventually replaced by a military junta. Within one static tableau, which lasts five and a half minutes and is evocative of Buñuel, Angelopoulos frames the hotel’s corridor and registers the group’s anxiety and collective guilt generated from the partisan’s body, which turns into a spectre of history. Gradually, an industrialist Yiannis Diamantis (Yiorgos Danis), comes out of his room and appears on frame. He opens the door of another room and starts blaming an off-frame military general (Nikos Kouros) for the transition from junta to parliamentary democracy. After delivering his lines, he departs and from then on a series of exits and entrances occur. The military general enters the frame to retort to Diamantis’ comments; he then returns to his room. The austerity of the composition is strengthened by the fact that the camera continues framing the empty space focusing on its materiality. This emptiness is ultimately interrupted by the figure of a politician (Christoforos Nezer) who appears in the corridor ready to run away. An off-screen sound informs us of the advent of another character, a hotel entrepreneur (Vangelis Kazan), whose hostile posture frightens the politician and forces him to return to his room. This is followed by a few more agitated entrances and exits by other members of the group. The sequence finishes with the reappearance of the politician who re-enters the frame tearfully. Within this long tableau, Angelopoulos manages to crystallise the film’s central narrative motor: the partisan’s body produces a Benjaminian violent experience (Erfahrung) and acts as a historical ghost that interrupts the security enjoyed by the victors of history. Yet this destabilisation of historical experience takes place within a static frame that uses silent cinema’s ‘sheer celebration of movement’ (Doane 2002: 177). Benjaminian constellations are not produced by means of montage but by an excessive theatricality which aims to reveal the haunted unconscious of the Greek bourgeoisie. Not unlike Resnais, Fassbinder and Straub/Huillet, Angelopoulos employs theatricality so as to confront the real, and the real here stands for the historical cycles and their effect on the present.6 This does not simply involve dramatising historical incidents; as Robert A.  Rosenstone suggests in his discussion of films by Angelopoulos, the Taviani brothers, and Ousmane Soumbene, placing history into the present implicates a desire to ‘contest and revision history’ (Rosenstone 2006: 118). This process entails offering interpretations which run against the grain of the established historical narrative, but also refusing to represent the past in a closed form hinting at the emergence of alternative historical possibilities. Exemplary in this regard is one of the final tableaux in Megalexandros, the last part of Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy. The film is imbued with historical

78  a ng e l o s ko u ts o u rak i s ­

pessimism regarding the subversion of the socialist vision by the personality cult; nonetheless there is a powerful moment (described by Dan Georgakas and Julian Murphet in their contributions to this book) in which a group of villagers gather around the wounded leader, encircle him and suffocate him to death. It is visualised through a high-angle static shot which frames the villagers as they collectively ‘devour’ the former liberator and current tyrant. The collective’s Gestus within the frame is no longer concerned with the historical past or even the present, but with the future as a historical possibility. This passage epitomises the filmmaker’s desire to visualise and contest the political impasse of the time and, not unlike Brecht, to imply that a solid understanding of the movement of history on the part of the mass is a precondition for the construction of any sustainable political alternative. The common thread throughout Angelopoulos’ career is an interrogative approach to representation, its limits, and its vigorous potential to capture historical contradictions and political conflicts in unexpected ways. This is the reason why he once stated that Reconstruction is his most important film, while his subsequent ones are nothing but variations on themes developed in this object (cited in Fainaru 2001: 124). Importantly, this sustained engagement with the representational capacities of the medium derives its force from the filmmaker’s embracement of a visual language developed in the early days of cinema. Following the completion of his historical tetralogy, Angelopoulos abandoned the Brechtian tropes he developed during the years from 1970 to 1980. The Greek economic crisis and the ensuing reanimation of  historical conflicts, which seemed to have been terminated, led him to revisit Brecht in his unfinished film The Other Sea. Retrospectively, we can see how the Brechtian language and the political questions of his early films can be read anew in light of the current political reality, which also proves that the passage of time can revive theories and debates that were considered obsolete.

NOTES 1. Similarly, Béla Tarr, a filmmaker also committed to the manipulation of the long take, suggests the same about his own films, arguing that montage is to be located ‘in the heart of the sequence’ which produces its own variations within the frame. See Rancière (2013: 67). 2. Eisenstein argued something similar about El Greco’s paintings. He considered El Greco as ‘one of the forefathers of montage’ precisely because of his ability to create montage effects or antitheses within the static painting. See Sergei Eisenstein [1942] (1975: 105). 3. In another interview with Andrew Horton, Angelopoulos commented that: ‘perhaps we are not as far apart as it may seem, but also note that it is possible to speak of my shots as having montage inside the frame, rather than between frames’. See Andrew Horton (1997b: 98).

t he gestus of s how i n g   79 4. Though I accept Kovács’s periodisation, one needs to note that he firmly locates Angelopoulos within the late modernist period. 5. My engagement with Angelopoulos’ early work in this chapter has made me revise my previous reading of his work. See Koutsourakis (2012: 177). 6. Pasolini’s famous statement that the ‘long-take, the schematic and primordial element of cinema, is thus in the present tense’ is pertinent in relationship to Angelopoulos’ employment of long sequences as a means of showing the co-existence between past and present. See Pasolini (1980).

C H APTER 5

Angelopoulos’ Gaze: Modernism, History, Cinematic Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink

The world needs cinema now, more than ever. It may be the last important form of resistance to the deteriorating world in which we live. Theo Angelopoulos

T

he films of the late Theo Angelopoulos have been praised for their historical ambition, political themes and explorations of memory, but also for their commitment to cinematic modernism. For some critics, like David Bordwell, Angelopoulos is a late modernist auteur whose ‘anachronistic’ cinematic style bears the hallmarks of 1960s and ’70s ‘political modernism’ (1997: 106; see also Rodowick 1988). For others, like Fredric Jameson, Angelopoulos’ work is best understood as hybrid or transitional: grounded in an aesthetic and historical sensibility that combines progressive elements, which render collective memory through a materialist aesthetic, and regressive elements, which revert to an individualistic, humanistic framing of the post-historical condition of ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Jameson 1997; see also Benjamin [1931] 1974). How do these overlapping readings of Angelopoulos – as late modernist, as historical mythmaker and as ambiguous innovator – hang together? How does Angelopoulos’ aesthetic style express historical experience and cultural memory? How might this project work in an age that remains sceptical about cinema’s cultural-historical powers of aesthetic resistance? Angelopoulos’ ‘trilogy of borders’ – in particular, his best-known film Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) – offers a way into addressing these questions, though the memorialisation of collective experience through cinema marks all of his work. In what follows, I shall explore how his films combine history, myth and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory and ethical responsiveness. His films offer striking examples of how cinema can be regarded as philosophical, indeed as cases of a ‘cinematic thinking’: films that explore history, European identity and the crit-

ang elopoulos’ gaze  81 ical potential of cinema after the demise of political modernism; films which not only capture historical experience, involuntary memory and duration, but which also articulate thought through images. Angelopoulos’ films reflect upon how this cinematic and historical legacy might be renewed, posing questions concerning the historical and political prospects of the ‘new Europe’. Through the close analysis of selected sequences from Ulysses’ Gaze and Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1976), films from his ‘late’ and ‘early’ periods respectively, I explore how Angelopoulos’ use of what I call ‘­memorial-images’ expresses a cinematic ethic of memorialising historical experience.

TH E LAST MODERN I ST? Although most critics agree that Angelopoulos is a modernist filmmaker, opinions vary over what kind of modernist he might be. David Bordwell, for example, describes him as a ‘synthesising’ modernist (1997: 13), Fredric Jameson calls him a ‘late modernist’ (1997: 78), while Andrew Horton suggests he is the ‘last modernist’ (1997b: 1–10). Angelopoulos certainly belonged to that dwindling band of auteurs grappling with the legacy of ‘political modernism’ in European cinema. As Bordwell notes (1997: 11), Angelopoulos’ historical themes and signature visual style ‘encapsulates the trajectory we might expect from a second-generation post-war Euromodernist’. His films express an auteurist’s concern with temporally extended, highly choreographed sequence shots geared towards the goals of ‘Euromodernism’: ‘dedramatisation; a muted emotional expressivity; a subtle direction of the audience’s attention; a concomitant awareness of the process of film viewing’ (1997: 11). Influenced by Welles and Mizoguchi, as well as Hollywood crime film and the musical, Angelopoulos inherits and extends the style of 1960s Euromodernism exemplified by the later films of Antonioni. At the same time, Angelopoulos adds a rustic Greek/Balkan focus – at once historical, mythical and political – to the existential pathos and social anomie of Antonioni’s urbane world of sophisticates and socialites, intellectuals and drifters. According to Bordwell, Angelopoulos is not an originary ‘modernist’, but rather a gifted ‘synthesiser’ of the various aesthetic possibilities available within European cinema: the long take, the sequence shot, the collective protagonist, the inclusion of temp morts, minimising of drama, blocking of emotional engagement, disruption of linear chronology and eschewal of conventional narrative structure (1997: 12–13).1 Bordwell thus recasts him as an inheritor and extender of that tradition whose ‘systematic expansion of certain stylistic premises’ – notably the ‘recessional’ image combining recessive, perspectival planes of depth, and the ‘planimetric image’ that removes perspective, and avoids full-frontal presentation of characters – has ‘kept post-war modernism alive in the largely

82  r o b e r t sinne rbrink hostile climate of the 1980s and 1990s’ (1997: 13). As Bordwell quips, the later films of Angelopoulos offer an updated version of ‘Antoniennui’ (1997: 24) – that distinctive combination of ‘dedramatised’ formalism and existentialist anomie familiar from Antonioni’s 1960s works – albeit one reprised with a distinctively historical, mythopoetic twist. Fredric Jameson takes this ‘modernist’ approach a step further, characterising Angelopoulos as a ‘late modernist’ – an artist capable of inventing a new style under conditions of stylistic exhaustion – who is also emblematic of an ‘end of modernism’: expressing an aesthetic sense of disillusionment that accompanies the ‘end of styles’ and corresponding ‘end of ideologies’ (1997: 78–95). Angelopoulos’ shift from his earlier Greek ‘political’ phase [films of the 1970s such as Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970), Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), and The Travelling Players] to his later, more personal, moralhumanistic ‘trilogy of silence’ [Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986), Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988)] and the ‘trilogy of borders’ [Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), Ulysses’ Gaze, and Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998)], shows his recasting of modernist style towards an as yet undefined condition ‘after modernism’. In both earlier and later phases, Angelopoulos combines stylistic innovation and historical self-consciousness with an evocative treatment of place and (political) history: twentieth-century Greece in his political phase, and the emerging ‘transnational’ spaces of post-communist Europe in his moral-humanist phase. According to Jameson, this transfiguration of content through cinematic form – reflecting the historical, cultural and political transformations in Eastern Europe during the 1980s and 1990s – points to an emerging ‘geopolitical aesthetic’ in cinema, of which Angelopoulos can be regarded as a cartographer (see Jameson 1992). From this point of view, Angelopoulos is at once the elegiac poet of an exhausted cinematic modernism and the experimental harbinger of a new cultural sensibility concerning time, place and history. Jameson thus focuses on both ‘regressive’ and ‘progressive’ dimensions of his later films, such as The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses’ Gaze, arguing that some of the ‘contradictions’ of the post-communist geopolitical constellation can be read cinematically by tracing the dialectical tensions within them.2 On the one hand, there is the ‘regressive’ retreat from collective to individual narrative protagonists; from political engagement and historical recollection to ‘bourgeois’ narrative ‘themes’ such as ‘betrayal, suffering, violence, homelessness and the like’ (1997: 90). On the other, there is Angelopoulos’ ‘progressive’ reinvention of cinematic form oriented towards the future; a ‘spatial’, materialist aesthetic attuned to the exploration of subjectivity within the Balkan ‘border’ cities emblematic of the trans-European dispersion of identities. This forward-looking reinvention of materialist aesthetics is

ang elopoulos’ gaze  83 coupled, however, with a nostalgic ‘left-wing melancholy’: an Antonionistyle ‘existential’ lament regarding the stalled historical dialectics of present and  past following the collapse of socialism and the spreading wasteland of Western consumerism (Jameson 1997: 91–2; see also Benjamin 1974). Angelopoulos’ late films express this dialectic of regressive and progressive elements, manifest in their anachronistic but sincere attempts to ‘say something new’ after the demise of political modernism and of the ideologies that sustained it. The question of the ‘new’ in cinematic modernism, however, is a vexing one. The dialectic between the ‘new’ and the ‘familiar’, for example, resists simple reduction to an opposition between tradition and ‘the modern’ or between conventional codes of representation and their subversion. As John Orr remarks, ‘the paradox of modern cinema is recurrence as the completion of form’ (1993: 3): a dialectic between inheritance and innovation, repetition and difference, that puts the old and the new into novel configurations of form and content. Drawing on Giddens’ remark that the reflexive culture of modernity is defined by the acceleration of ‘searches for self-discovery’ and the decline of ‘the certainties of absolute knowledge’, Orr observes that the cinema of the ‘neo-moderns’ – filmmakers who have inherited and adapted the traditions and techniques of modernism – testifies ‘to the paradox of that double acceleration, the increasing pace at which the search for self-discovery desperately tries to overcome our increasing sense of its impossibility’ (1993: 11). Angelopoulos is an intriguing auteur to consider in this light. His work came to prominence at the tail end of what Orr identified as the (belated) period of high ‘neomodernism’ in World Cinema (1958 to 1978). It thus required a complex negotiation with the preceding generation of influential neo-modern directors (such as Antonioni) as well as Angelopoulos’ own cultural-historical situation, as a filmmaker from a marginalised tradition within European cinema. Despite these challenges, Angelopoulos can be viewed not only as a ‘gifted synthesiser’ (in Bordwell’s words), but as an artistic innovator who remains faithful to the modernist commitment to ‘the new’, even at the risk of anachronism in deploying an ‘outmoded’ cinematic style.3 Sometimes the way to the ‘new’ can be by reanimating the ‘old’. To elaborate, we could describe Angelopoulos’ films as operating through the dialectic between inheritance and innovation, synthesising elements of inherited traditions adapted to changing cultural-historical and cinematic contexts. His films faithfully reflect these changes, from the MarxistBrechtian milieu of 1970s ‘political modernism’ to the post-socialist milieu of a ‘transnational’ Europe increasingly defined by the policing of borders. Within this changed cultural-historical milieu, we also observe changes in Angelopoulos’ use of modernist themes and techniques: ‘group’ protagonists have given way to individual protagonists; characters displaced from ‘home’

84  r o b e r t sinne rbrink attempt to journey towards unknown destinations; the theme of ‘crossing borders’, rather than recovering historical origins, becomes more prominent; the tragic dramas of post-war political history give way to the localised recrudescence of ethnic conflicts and social exploitation that raise moral-ethical questions and political challenges within an economically harsh environment. This is one way of approaching what it means for Angelopoulos to be a ‘late neo-modernist’ filmmaker, which means thinking through how his work combines formal and aesthetic strategies with the exploration of historically specific cultural and political meaning. Both of these aspects are acknowledged and emphasised, in different ways, by Bordwell and Jameson (Bordwell emphasises the formalist-aesthetic aspect and Jameson the cultural-historical aspect, although both aspects are inextricably intertwined). To these aspects, however, we can add the question of cinema itself, central to any conception of cinematic modernism: its history and possibilities as a medium of cultural memory and historical experience. This dialectic between inheritance and innovation, between modernist style and cultural-historical conditions, can be observed across Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. As remarked, his earlier films focus on the ‘political modernist’ treatment of the history and politics of twentieth-century Greece, whereas his later ‘moral-humanist’ phase engages with traditions of cinematic modernism in responding to the ethical-political challenges of a transnational Europe. In both phases of his work, moreover, the question of cinema – its role in responding to, and transfiguring our historical experience – remains paramount, though it is in his later phase that this question of cinema and modernity becomes most explicit or acute. Consider, for example, the idea that is central to Ulysses’ Gaze: that cinema documented the birth of the twentieth century – hence the filmmaker A.’s (Harvey Keitel) passion to recover the ‘first gaze’ captured by the Manakis brothers’ 1905 silent film, The Weavers – but that cinema was also witness to its revolutions and repressions, its discoveries and disenchantments. Cinema was both an observer and a medium of collective historical experience, of convulsive transformation and violent dissolution. It represents an archive of historical experience that left contemporary Europe suffering from what the emigrant politician in The Suspended Step of the Stork calls a ‘fin-de-siècle melancholy’ (Bordwell 2005: 184). This close linking of historical memory, political history and cinematic presentation is readily apparent in Ulysses’ Gaze. The foregrounding of the cinematic image as a shared source of cultural memory and archive of historical experience is at the centre of the film’s portrayal of the (EuropeanAmerican) filmmaker’s quest at the end of the twentieth century. What is the task of the filmmaker committed to the modernist project in the aftermath of the ‘end of history’? Such is the question posed by, and explored within,

ang elopoulos’ gaze  85 UIysses Gaze, which addresses, through its reanimation of modernist form, the congruent ‘crises’ afflicting political modernism in cinema and the sociopolitical transformations in contemporary Europe. These are questions that Bordwell’s formalist approach tends to overlook. Angelopoulos is concerned not only with the legacy of modernism but with cinema’s role in regard to historical memory and contemporary politics. Here we can list a number of relevant themes: the idea of historical memory as collective experience; the problem of mythic history as a response to the trauma of political repression; the task of reclaiming myth in cinema by aesthetic means; the examination of the idea of borders, the trauma of separation, and the transformations of identity in post-communist Europe; the ‘modernist’ question of cinema’s prospects as a world-creating medium within a post-historical world, and so on. These historical, political and philosophical concerns permeate Angelopoulos’ films; they are articulated through his aesthetic appropriation of political modernism as well as his later shift towards a moral-humanist perspective reflecting the ‘pan-European’ problems of cultural and historical displacement. The question of modernism and its limits, understood in cinematic, political and cultural-historical terms, defines the trajectory of Angelopoulos’ career. ulysses’ gaze

Despite having made important Greek films during the 1970s, including the historico-political epic The Travelling Players, Ulysses’ Gaze is the film that brought Angelopoulos to the attention of an Anglophone ‘arthouse’ audience. It screened in competition at Cannes in 1995, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize (the Palme d’Or went to Emil Kusturica’s controversial surrealist Yugoslavian history/Balkan war allegory, Underground [1995]).4 It is the second film in what has been called his ‘trilogy of borders’, flanked by The Suspended Step of the Stork and Eternity and a Day, which received the Palme d’Or three years later. Of all three films in the trilogy, Ulysses’ Gaze shows most explicitly Angelopoulos’ concern with a cluster of recurrent themes: chronicling Greek history in mythopoetic form, exploring historical memory through cinema, treating film as a medium of collective historical experience, and thematising the history of cinema through cinematic practice. Following his use of arthouse legends Marcello Mastrioanni and Jeanne Moreau (in The Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of the Stork), it features RomanianAmerican actor Harvey Keitel playing a melancholy filmmaker (named ‘A.’), who has returned to Greece after a twenty-five year absence and embarked on a quest – at once historical, personal, and mythic – to locate three lost reels of film made by the Manakis brothers in the early years of the twentieth century.

86  r o b e r t sinne rbrink A.’s quest, recalling Homer’s Odyssey, involves a historical, existential and cinematic journey – from Greece, through Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Bosnia to Sarajevo – crossing borders and historical epochs in an attempt to reach home, to find Ithaca, symbolised by the Manakis brothers’ ‘three lost reels’ of turn-of-the-century film. In doing so, he hopes to rekindle his own cinematic vision, and find a symbol of historical possibility, by recapturing the ‘lost gaze’ of a cultural memory prior to the tragedies of twentieth-century European history. His cinematic quest through historical memory, however, ends tragically, with a brutal denouement in war-torn Sarajevo. Having located the lost films, thanks to a Jewish film archivist, he confronts the brutal violence of ethnic conflict: the sudden off-screen shooting of the film archivist Ivo Levy (Erland Josephson), his daughter, Naomi (Maia Morgenstern), and their entire family as they take a walk together during the unofficial ‘truce’ periods that occur during early morning winter fogs. Shattered by the killings, A. breaks down, wailing over the dead daughter, as fog smothers the tragic scene. This violent destruction of the redemptive hopes that A. had invested in cinema, of restoring a vision of hope to the war-torn Balkans, leaves the viewer drained and disoriented. The film ends on a mythopoetic note, with A. weeping in an abandoned cinema, reciting a parting from Homer’s Odyssey. Here one observes one of the challenges facing a mythopoetic cinema, which attempts to marry historical contingency and political events to a ‘mythic’ presentation of time and place, but thereby presents such events as though they were fated necessities and historical-political forces as though they were interventions by the gods.

P ROLOGU E : T H E B L UE S H I P The Prologue to the film, a four-minute sequence immediately after the credits, is a powerful example of how cinema can serve as a medium of historical memory. The film begins with a personal dedication and a philosophical quotation from Plato’s Alcibiades: ‘And, if the soul is to know itself, it must gaze into the soul’. The opening images are from the Manakis brothers’ twominute silent film, The Weavers (1905), which features the brothers’ 114-yearold grandmother weaving at her loom while glancing furtively towards the camera. As we watch this historical time capsule reveal itself, the sound of a film projector can be heard in the background. Philosophical contemplation and historical recollection frame this cinematic odyssey. A voice-over by the filmmaker A. comments on the footage, in quasi-documentary mode: ‘Weavers, in Avdella, a Greek village, 1905. The first film made by the brothers Miltos and Yannakis Manakis. The first film ever made in Greece and the Balkans. But is that a fact? Is it the first film? The first gaze?’

ang elopoulos’ gaze  87

Figure 5.1 Ulysses’ Gaze

The silent footage dissolves to a greyish black-and-white image of the sea and horizon, merging in the distance. The camera pulls back to reveal an old man operating a photographic camera, as a man’s voice narrates, in Greek, how back in 1954, when he was Manakis’s camera assistant (Thanos Grammenos), Manakis wanted to photograph a beautiful blue ship, here in the port of Thessaloniki. The image slowly turns to colour and we see the narrator, Manakis’s assistant, in modern dress, and the old man, in older costume, manipulating the camera as the ship sails by in the distance. Suddenly, the old man reels backwards, struck by a heart attack, and slumps back onto his chair. The Assistant tends to the dead man, settles him in his chair, then walks slowly back towards the right of screen, the camera following him in long shot. The Assistant, an old man himself, narrates how he had written to A. about Manakis and the blue ship, but also that Manakis had kept ‘rambling on about three undeveloped reels’, a film from the turn of the century. The filmmaker A. now comes into view, also in contemporary dress, and it becomes clear that the Assistant has been telling A. the anecdote about Manakis as they both stand together by the port of Thessaloniki. Forty years ago, on this very spot, he was with Manakis before his death; and now, forty years later, he is with the filmmaker A. explaining how Manakis died after attempting to photograph the mysterious blue ship sailing out of port. The camera then slowly pans back to the left, following A. as he walks back to the spot where we saw the old man die moments before. These camera movements, from left to right and back again, are also temporal movements,

88  r o b e r t sinne rbrink from the present to the past, and from the past to the present, which coexist within the one extended sequence shot. As A. walks, moving across time and entering an inner world of cultural memory, we hear his thoughts, in voiceover, confirming his commitment to a cinematic quest: ‘the three reels; the three reels; the journey . . .’ As A. approaches the same spot where we saw the old Manakis collapse, where there is nothing now to be seen, a musical theme begins to play, a leitmotif that will recur throughout the film. A. pauses and gazes off into the distance, the camera perched behind his shoulder, from which point the ship can be seen sailing serenely from right to left, continuing its mythic journey though time and memory. As the camera zooms slowly towards the ship, its soft blue sails and hull gradually filling the frame, the music swells, expressing a contemplative mood and anticipating the journey to come. The simultaneously ‘Odyssean’5 and romantic image of the blue ship sailing slowly out of frame, accompanied by Eleni Karaindrou’s melancholy score, holds long enough for the vessel to disappear from view. A.’s quest has been defined and his historico-cinematic journey has begun. One of the remarkable features of this sequence is Angelopoulos’ treatment of multiple temporal frames within the same image. A.’s cinematic journey is one through time and memory, an odyssey exploring duration itself. As Vassilis Rafailidis remarks, recalling Deleuze’s reflections on duration in the time-image: In Angelopoulos’ films there is no such a thing as time, there is only duration, which is different from time. We do not know what is time, but we know what duration is; it is a segment of time and within this segment one or one-thousand actions can take place simultaneously. (2003: 113) This paradoxical coexistence of past and present, the capacity of the cinematic image to memorialise temporally distant but intimately related historical events, is masterfully enacted in this opening sequence. The sequence is framed by the Manakis brothers’ silent film, the first film made in the Balkans, and thus the ‘first gaze’ capturing an idyllic everydayness seemingly vanished from contemporary Europe. This gives way to a shot set in the present (in 1994), narrated by the Manakis brothers’ Assistant, recollecting an anecdote from 1954, set in the same place, but where this past experience coexists with the present moment in which A. listens to the Assistant’s tale. The Assistant’s narration condenses past and present, recollecting an event from the past that is simultaneously depicted as happening in the present. As the camera pans right to reveal A. standing by the harbour, listening to the Assistant’s tale, we move back in time as the camera follows him, walking to the spot where Manakis was shown dying. The blue ship continues to sail, from right to left, inhabiting both temporal frames – A.’s present (standing by the harbour in

ang elopoulos’ gaze  89 1994) and the Assistant’s past (witnessing Manakis’s episode in 1954) – as A.’s thoughts concerning the quest defining the film to come are also revealed. A.’s thoughts and impressions, his memories and visions, are presented as coexisting with the temporal and spatial horizons of other characters and places within the diegetic world of the film. These are not conventional flashbacks or narrative recollection-images but rather what we might call historical-memorial images that condense different temporal planes and constitute a shared or collective memory. Although sharing elements with Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, with its coalescing of virtual and actual images, its liberation from the sensory-motor constraints of the action-image, and non-localisable condensation of different temporal planes, the emphasis in Angelopoulos’ historical-memorial images is on the recurring persistence of the past even as it hollows out and haunts the present, presaging an uncertain future that has not yet come to terms with the trauma of its own past. It is less an expression of the metaphysics of duration but a memorial ‘working through’ of past trauma that has arrested the dynamic movement of historical time and enervated its historical subjects. More Benjamin than Bergson, the exploration of historical memory and collective experience demands attention to the historical plane of actions, agents and shared horizons of meaning (rather than their breakdown as in Deleuze’s ‘pure optical and sound situations’). As Bordwell remarks, European art cinema has long dealt with collective protagonists and a disruption of chronology in the use of flashbacks and narrative sequencing. Angelopoulos’ originality, however, ‘lay in freeing such flashbacks from the recollections of a single character and expressing instead ‘collective historical

Figure 5.2 Ulysses’ Gaze

90  r o b e r t sinne rbrink memory’ or even echoes of past events lingering in the shot’s locale’ (Bordwell 2005: 148). Psychological recollection is transformed into historical memorialisation; individual protagonists confronting the challenges of their milieu become collective agents caught up in the vortices of history. The simultaneous depiction and narration of Manakis’s death, and Angelopoulos’ cinematic presentation of it as a collective memory, crystallise the durational and memorial aspects of the cinematic image. The three parallel time frames within this opening sequence – condensing a silent film made in 1905, a filmmaker’s death in 1954 and a kindred filmmaker’s vision in 1994 – coexist within the one sequence shot. It combines these temporal perspectives to capture and communicate the mood of melancholic historical nostalgia that defines A.’s cinematic-historical quest. This is an example of what Angelopoulos describes as temporal montage within the image, or what I am calling a historical memorial-image: an image that presents the coexistence of the present, the recollected past, and present of the past, all of which are framed, captured and communicated, by the apparatus of cinema itself. This is the ‘first gaze’ that the filmmaker A. desires to recover, and in the process to recover his own gaze as a filmmaker attempting to chronicle the past in the present (the beginning of the century, the tragedy and brutality of war, the violent aftermath of the ‘end of ideology’). It is why footage from the Manakis brothers’ film, The Weavers, is woven throughout Ulysses Gaze, taking on the symbolic role of Ithaca, of the possibility of returning home, reappearing as a visual leitmotif punctuating the narrative development. As we shall see, A.’s quest is tragic, for it will be impossible to return to Ithaca. The promise of cinema as a medium with the power to redeem the world, to reanimate Ulysses’ gaze, ends in violence and death, leading to doubt and despair, though cinema’s potential to serve as a medium of historical vision and memorial acknowledgment still remains alive. There are other examples of historical memorial-images scattered throughout Ulysses’ Gaze. When the filmmaker A. is hauled off a train by officials at the border crossing into Bulgaria, he is taken into a dark building where it becomes apparent we are back in the 1940s. He is now being detained, as the filmmaker Yannakis Manakis, on charges relating to resistance activity against the German army and sentenced to death by the Bulgarian military court. In a scene reminiscent of Kafka, he is taken blindfolded to the execution site, crying out in the darkness, ‘I don’t understand,’ as he prepares to be shot. An announcement is then read out from the King of Bulgaria, who has commuted his sentence to a term of exile in the city of Plovdiv. He is escorted outside, now reappearing as A. in the present, where his passport is stamped and he explains that he is going to Phillipipousis (Plovdiv, the guard corrects). He rejoins the young film archivist (Maia Morgenstern), who has been waiting patiently for him so they can cross the border together. The present journey of A. in search

ang elopoulos’ gaze  91 of the ‘three reels’ coalesces with that of the condemned Manakis, both filmmakers now sharing an identity dispersed across time and place. A. becomes Manakis, sharing his historical memory and cinematic quest. Angelopoulos’ long, slow sequence shots comprise historical memorial-images of a shared cinematic and political history, images that synthesise temporal, historical, and subjective planes of experience, unearthing suppressed traumas, occluded memories and unexpected affinities between past and present. In a scene that follows soon after, A. feels impelled to alight from the train in Bucharest, where it is now 1945, and where he, a child though appearing to us as an adult, encounters a younger version of his mother. They travel by train to Constanza and then walk together through the city streets, filled with horse-drawn carriages, protesters and political banners. Mother and child enter the family home, where A. is amazed to meet and greet his relatives, who seem delighted to see him. The whole extended family is gathered for New Year’s Eve celebrations, but also to welcome A.’s father, who has been released from a German prison camp. The father soon enters the room, embraces his wife and child (the adult A.) as the couples begin to dance, celebrating his homecoming, accompanied by the piano (‘Happy 1945!’). The camera frames the couples in a static long shot as they dance, moving together to the music of time, as the frame remains stationary, marking duration and the gathering of historical momentum. A sinister pair of government officials enters the room. They dance mockingly with each other, and take one of the male relatives away (‘Happy 1948,’ he tells them). The shocked family watch him depart and then slowly, defiantly, return to their dancing and begin singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A short time later another group of men appear, the People’s Property Acquisition Committee, who have come to confiscate the family’s piano (‘Happy 1950!’). Finally, as an act of resistance, preserving their memory and identity through an image, the family regroups for a family portrait, with A. reappearing now in the frame, this time as a young boy, as the camera frames them all for their family portrait and zooms slowly in on his face (one of the few close-ups in the whole film). Once again, a sequence shot taking over ten minutes condenses five years of time and a series of traumatic familial and political events, which the young A. experienced as a child and now re-experiences as an adult in the form of a Proustian involuntary memory. His recollection is not simply personal, shared among family members, but also political, chronicling the everydayness of the political repression and social alienation experienced during and after the War. This collective historical memory is actualised through memorial-images that condense coexisting temporal frames within a carefully choreographed scene of familial celebration and loss, personal recollection and political repression – a melancholy rendering of Greek post-war history as a modernist ‘dance to the music of time’.

92  r o b e r t sinne rbrink The collective nature of historical memory, in contrast with the psychological individualism of personal recollection, is a recurring theme in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. As he remarks, referring to The Travelling Players (1975), ‘in this film the past and present is not the individual memory of a person, but the collective memory of a nation’ (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 32). Indeed, memorial-images reflecting the historical experience of a nation can readily be found in The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos’ tragic recounting of twentiethcentury Greek political history from 1939 to 1952. Allegorised through the story of the eponymous acting troupe, who journey through the countryside during and after the War, performing the traditional bucolic play Golfo, the players themselves allegorise the myth of the family of Agamemnon, bearing the same names as its famous mythic characters (Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthos, Orestes, Electra, Pylades and Chrysotheme). The coexistence of past and present, of myth and history, is powerfully rendered in an extended sequence that shifts, within the same shot, from 1952 to 1941. The sequence starts with the players, in early 1950s dress, walking slowly by the sea. As they turn to enter a village a pro-nationalist political rally is being announced in support of former Greek general Marshall Papagos for the upcoming November 1952 elections, ‘the man who led our army to victory against the communist rebels in 1947–49’. As the motorbike carrying the promoters rides off-screen, the shot holds calmly, for several seconds, on the empty village street and railway tracks. The outdoor light, as in most Angelopoulos films, is pale and grey, the atmosphere damp and gloomy. Eventually a car approaches, and it becomes clear from its vintage that we are now back in 1941, with the village under Nazi occupation. The German car drives into the village and stops near an old building, guarded by armed soldiers and ominous officials. A number of Nazi officers emerge from the car and enter the dark theatre, where the travelling players have been preparing for their next performance. The soldiers and officers are in search of an ‘Englishman’ reportedly hiding in the theatre. Shot in a single take, the camera panning slowly around the darkened space, we are shown the armed soldiers and the sleeping players; we come back to the front of the stage, where the curtains are opened and the players present themselves before us and the Nazi authorities. There is a cut to the now fully lit stage, where each of the players comes forward and flatly recites lines from their play, as though to show their Nazi audience the true nature of their occupation, in both senses of the term. The ‘Englishman’, one of the collaborators remarks, had been hiding on stage, dressed as a woman, and has evidently made good his escape since last night’s performance. ‘Traitor!’ yells Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou) on stage, accusing one of her own troupe (Aegisthos, Clytemnestra’s lover) of betrayal – of being a Nazi informer. The action now shifts directly onto the theatrical space, with the collaborator (Vangelis Kazan) jumping on stage, wrestling with

ang elopoulos’ gaze  93 the struggling Electra, the players themselves now acting out the Agamemnon familial tragedy – one that not only replays their own familial strife but alludes to the political struggles between communist and fascist forces during the War and its aftermath. In the next scene, Electra’s father (Stratos Pahis), now captured by the Nazis, is shown being lined up before a firing squad (‘I came across the sea, from Ionia. Where did you come from?’). He is summarily shot, his body slumping on the ground, as the camera approaches his lifeless corpse. The stage is now set for Orestes (Petros Zarkadis), Elektra’s brother, to avenge his father’s death, with the help of Elektra, and to kill the traitorous Clytemnestra (Aliki Georgouli) and her lover Aegisthos. This condensation of tragic myth, historical memory and political violence resonates across time and history, linking individual and collective protagonists through memorial-images that articulate the tragic history of Greek politics through the use of extended sequence shots, self-reflexive cinematic presentation and choreographed group tableaux. Cinema is the archive of such ‘collective historical memory’, an apparatus capable of capturing the temporal and traumatic echoes of past events that still inhabit places and spaces, a ‘memory machine’ reanimating historical, social and personal events through moving images that reveal themselves in and as time. It would be timely here to broach the question of anachronism in Angelopoulos’ work: the deliberate ‘untimeliness’ of his films, their belated modernist gestures, existential pathos and unfashionable seriousness. Despite their apparently ‘anachronistic’ character, they attempt to question the present, unearth its suppressed traumas and reveal its unacknowledged past. His films do so by revealing the dialectical tension between historical past and its coexistence with the present. As Angelopoulos remarks of The Travelling Players, this dialectic between past and present is explicitly rendered by their juxtaposition within one and the same shot: In THIASSOS (sic) even though we refer to the past, we are talking about the present. The approach is not mythical but dialectical. This comes through in the structure of the film where often ‘two historical times’ are dialectically juxtaposed in the same shot creating associations leading directly to historical conclusions . . . Those links do not level the events but bypass the notions of past/present and instead provide a linear developmental interpretation which exists only in the present. (cited in Tarr and Proppe: 1976) Angelopoulos’ remarks recall Benjamin’s conception of the task of the historical materialist, who seizes hold of the past, shows its coexistence with the present, and charges the ‘now-time’ of the present with the historically

94  r o b e r t sinne rbrink explosive power of transformative repetition that would redeem the suffering of past generations: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger . . . In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. (1969 [1947]: 255) Angelopoulos’ films likewise do not attempt to render history ‘the way it really was’, but strive to wrest historical memory from the oblivion of forgetting, the distortions of ideology, and the stultifying effects of aesthetic conformity. From this point of view, Angelopoulos’ untimeliness is a matter of maintaining fidelity to the idea of cinema’s transformative potential: its power to memorialise cultural-historical experience, while acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining this aesthetic faith after the tragedies of twentieth-century history. The question of time is crucial to this neo-modernist sensibility. As Laura Mulvey remarks, reflecting on time and technology in digital cinema, the more cinema’s history bears on our shared historical experience, the more the problem of time and its preservation and communication comes to the fore, and the more cinema’s vocation as both preserving and transforming historical experience comes into view: to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. (2006: 22–3) Angelopoulos’ anachronistic ‘slow cinema’ with its reflection on the conjoined fates of cinema, history and politics, offers a fine example of Mulvey’s point. In Angelopoulos’ often-maligned ‘moral-humanist’ films, we can see the significance of this cultural politics of time and history articulated through cinematic presentation of memory, myth and experience. This insight chimes with Mulvey’s claim that cinema’s recent ‘reversion’ to history and its imbrications with cinema – of which Angelopoulos’ work is an exemplary case – offers the occasion for rethinking the ethical-political possibilities of cinematic experience: The cinema’s recent slide backward into history can, indeed, enable this backward look at the twentieth century. In opposition to a simple

ang elopoulos’ gaze  95 determinism inherent in the image of a void between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of an era that had suddenly ended, the cinema provides material for holding onto and reflecting on the last century’s achievements as well as learning from its catastrophes. To turn to the past through the detour of cinema has a political purpose. (Mulvey 2006: 24) Moving away from the Marxist-Brechtian legacy of political modernism, Angelopoulos’ later films open up another way of exploring historical memory and cultural experience. As the new millennium approached, Angelopoulos moved towards more personal, poetic, contemplative cinema: micronarratives of historically situated experience expressing a mythopoetic cinema (Ravetto 1998: 43)6 that questioned the disappointed hopes of an emancipatory political imagination gripped by historical melancholia. Indeed, they reflect the general cultural disenchantment with Marxism that followed the collapse of the socialist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like many European philosophers who made the journey from 1970s political engagement to the disenchantment of the 1980s, Angelopoulos’ cinematic works also reflect this ‘turning’ towards moral-ethical forms of resistance. At the same time, they remain historico-political films framed within an ethico-aesthetic engagement with the ‘post-historical’ sensibility of a Europe undergoing convulsive transformation (the recrudescence of ethnic conflicts, the resurgence of refugees, the uprooting effects of economic globalisation, and so on). Indeed, Angelopoulos’ later films confront the end of modernism, the collapse of socialism and the ambiguous theme of the ‘end of history’, while also exploring the possibilities of communicating a ‘collective historical memory’ through cinematic images. In this regard, history comes to play a different role in his later films: they no longer refer to ‘History, in the sense of a “grand narrative” of teleological destiny’, but to ‘history’ in a pluralist sense: multiple histories having different sites of cultural unfolding, occurring in non-synchronous, spatially dispersed, ways. As Angelopoulos remarks: In my epic films (listed above), it is ‘History’, with a capital ‘H’, that takes ‘centre-stage’. The opposite is true in the films since Voyage to Cythera, in which history becomes something of a fresco in the background. Put another way, what used to be History becomes an echo of history. (cited in Horton 1997b: 109) His films foreground the role of cultural and historical memory in the formation of identity through historical-memorial images that evoke the traumatic suffering of the past and render it intelligible through time, memory and affect – but also evoke the situation of marginalised subjects (minorities,

96  r o b e r t sinne rbrink wanderers, refugees, those ‘without a place’ in the new social orders) through a cinema of temporal duration, cultural memory and ethical contemplation. One could thus describe his cinema as a neo-modernist attempt at memorialising the history of the present. We could also describe it as a mode of cinematic ethics: creating works that depict historical memory as a collective experience, and which thereby retrieve the fragile possibility of an ethical cinema capable of transforming our horizons of meaning. Cinematic ethics, in this context, means showing, rather than telling, what ethical experience means, exploring what such experience reveals about the complexity of a character’s historical world, where this historical world is disclosed through cinematic composition and dramatic action. It examines how cinema can attune our aesthetic and moral sensibilities to the experience of historical memory, and brings us to a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical background that shapes these characters’ worlds. From this perspective, Angelopoulos’ films, both early and late, serve as ethically and politically significant memorials to the (often tragic) intersection of cinema and history over the previous century.7

NOTES 1. Bordwell (1997: 14 ff.) contrasts Angelopolous’s use of these elements with the films of Hungarian director, Miklós Jancsó, who was also strongly influenced by Antonioni. 2. A position that Jameson has since reconsidered; see Chapter 6 in this volume. 3. Bordwell (2005: 140) puts the point bluntly, noting that Angelopoulos may be the ‘last believer in a cinema of heroic statement’. 4. See Iordanova (2001) for an interesting discussion of the Balkans on film and of Underground and Ulysses’ Gaze in particular. 5. If A. were Odysseus, however, he should have been on the ship rather than merely observing it, as Telemachus did. My thanks to Mark Steven for this observation. 6. Ravetto takes the term ‘mythopoetic cinema’ from the writings of Pasolini, defining it as: ‘an attempt to use familiar myths as a means of revealing certain ambiguities in how myths have been used by moral, ideological and historical discourse to support hegemonic systems. Hence, mytho-poetic cinema is designed to disrupt conventional interpretations of not only myths but, more importantly, the ideologies they support’ (1998: 43). 7. I am grateful to the editors Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven for their insightful comments and excellent suggestions for this chapter.

C H APTER 6

Angelopoulos and Collective Narrative Fredric Jameson For Stathis Kouvelakis

T

he easier way to explain our failure to grant Theo Angelopoulos the ­position he deserves in modern cinema – that he is less theoretically experimental than Godard or less politically ostentatious than Pasolini we can grant, but why we fail to love seeing his films more than those of Antonioni or Fellini remains something of a mystery – clearly lies in the character of modern Greek history, which is far less familiar than that of the western European countries. Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces: revolution, fascism, occupation, civil war, foreign intervention, Western imperialism, exile, parliamentary democracy, military dictatorship and, after the sixties, a ringside seat at the horrendous violence of the new Balkan wars, with their flood of refugees recalling Greece’s own refugee experience after being driven out of Ionia at the end of World War I (I omit the current economic disaster only because there was no time left for it to show up on Angelopoulos’ registering apparatus).1 The political passions generated by this unique experience of history were also, no doubt, foreign to a Western public perfectly willing to accommodate the left-wing sympathies of all the other filmmakers I have mentioned above, who worked in countries in which class struggle did not reach a state of outright civil war, except during the various wartime occupations in which local reactionary ideologies could be somehow masked by the presence of Nazis and their armies. There are, however, other reasons for Angelopoulos’ lack of standing in the West and I will come to them shortly. First we need to sort out the periods of his work, and the cycles into which they can be divided (he himself preferred to refer to them as trilogies, an inexact description which seemed useful mainly for publicity). For the first works – I would count the first six in this category – centre squarely on the internal Greek situation and in particular, the dictatorship, the occupation and civil war, and the exile of the losers, the

100  fr e d r i c j am e s o n communists and the partisans. This period or cycle runs from the Metaxas dictatorship and the occupation to the end of the Civil War (in which we can perhaps include the belated return of the exiles – in Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα [Voyage to Cythera, 1984] – some twenty years later). In the time of their production (rather than that of their content) it corresponds to the radical 1970s (in many countries still part of the 1960s as such) and includes Angelopoulos’ most famous film, Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), which became for a time the most legendary cinematic icon of the Left (until it was replaced, for a non-political age, by his other three and-a-half-hour work, Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze), twenty years later in 1995. After that, it is as though the phenomenon of exile were then by some well-nigh Hegelian logic transformed into a mediation on everything dialectical about the border itself: does something end there? Does it merely divide two distinct spatial and national entities, or does it not slowly under our own obsessive gaze and that of the camera become a phenomenon in its own right, distinct from what it bounds, and a space somehow beyond the world itself even though subject to everything that happens on either side of it? This middle period of the 1980s, oppressive in its melancholy, then culminates in an extraordinary work whose title conveys the peculiarity of this space and this time alike, Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991). Yet this is also the year in which something happens that shifts the centre of historical attention from Greece and even from its frontiers to what lies beyond that border: the Balkan War, the break-up of the ‘former’ Yugoslavia, an immense and bloody internecine conflict which seems virtually to replicate Greece’s earlier history on a larger scale. At that point, we might say that Angelopoulos’ cinema becomes Balkan, and that history narrows into the question of whether Greece is to be counted as a Balkan country or not (and in the process generates a whole new question and controversy as to what being Balkan might mean in the first place).2 Ulysses’ Gaze is the result of this seismic shift, more humanist than historical, I think, and employing international stars to convey metaphysical messages about life and death, time and the past. It is a kind of road movie, a genre which would seem to justify its unabashedly episodic structure, but which will shortly have much to tell us about Angelopoulos’ space and time, and also about his conception of narrative and of filmmaking (even though we will deal no further with this film in its own right). Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) then returns to Greece in a rather retrospective fashion, reprising many of the earlier themes and episodes as though in a kind of anthology of Angelopoulos’ greatest hits or finest moments; while Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) attempts (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to break new ground by transferring the

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  101 ­ aradigm of discontinuous collective temporalities to the drama of individup als, still punctuated by history but more after the fashion of news bulletins and headlines than of qualitatively unique historical situations. It is then on the earlier of these four periods that we will concentrate here. After the unfamiliarity of modern Greek history, it has become customary to speak of these films in two other ways: as somehow motivated by a nostalgia for the classicism endemic in this nation state – something probably more affected by foreigners, from Winckelmann to Lord Byron, from admirers of the polis to those, like Nietzsche, mesmerised by the cruelties of the tragedies; and as an idiosyncratic practice of the long take or ‘sequence shot’, something that immediately classifies him among adepts of a slow cinema from Ozu to Béla Tarr, even though, as David Thomson perceptively remarks, this is a filmmaking which is ‘not slow so much as preoccupied with duration’ (Thomson 2002: 22). One can no doubt enumerate the classical motifs: the first feature film Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970), retells the story of the Orestia, at the same time that it has a family likeness with Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), the ancestor of Italian neo-realism (and one of the many film versions of James M. Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice). The same classical matricidal drama is enacted (as it were ‘in real life’, that is, on the stage) by the actors of The Travelling Players, whose young hero is in fact named Orestes – ‘for me the name Orestes is a concept more than a character’, says Angelopoulos, ‘the concept of the revolution so many dream (sic) of’ – (Demopoulos, Liappas 2001: 18). As for Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980), we are told that the name corresponds not to the classical world-conqueror but to a historical bandit ‘who exists in popular, anonymous legends and fables’, originating ‘in 1453 under Turkish domination’, and ‘has nothing to do with the classical Alexander’ (Mitchell [1980] 2001: 28); yet in a sense the classical hero is also inscribed in this film, in its extraordinary beginning, for its Western audiences and for the unhappy philhellenes who are his victims, as we shall see later. Yet if the classical means epic and the monumental, the cliché certainly has its relevance here, and also affords a way of converting this cultural stereotype into the technical characterisation which so often accompanies it in discussions of these films. What unites epic and the nostalgia of antiquity is in fact the very concept of the episodic on which we have already touched: for the infamous sequence shot (there are only eighty in the whole of The Travelling Players, the experts tell us) is necessarily in and of itself episodic, and so is epic as such. Already, in The Theory of the Novel, Lukács had made a place for the survival of what he calls ‘minor epic forms’ on into a modernity which disables the epic as the privileged genre for expressing life; even though he insists on the subjective contingency of these ‘epic’ enclaves (lyric, the short story, humour), in much

102  fr e d r i c j am e s o n the same way that we tend to attribute analogous possibilities to something distinctive and contingent about Angelopoulos himself and his ‘style’: In the minor epic forms, the subject confronts the object in a more dominant and self-sufficient way. The narrator may (we cannot, nor do we intend to establish even a tentative system of epic forms here) adopt the cool and superior demeanour of the chronicler who observes the strange workings of coincidence as it plays with the destinies of men, meaningless and destructive to them, revealing and instructive to us; or he may see a small corner of the world as an ordered flower-garden in the midst of the boundless, chaotic wastelands of life and, moved by his vision, elevate it to the status of the sole reality; or he may be moved and impressed by the strange, profound experiences of an individual and pour them into the mould of an objectivised destiny; but whatever he does, it is his own subjectivity that singles out a fragment from the immeasurable infinity of the events of life, endows it with independent life and allows the whole from which this fragment has been taken to enter the work only as the thoughts and feelings of his hero, only as an involuntary continuation of a fragmentary causal series, only as the mirroring of a reality having its own separate existence. (Lukács 1971: 50) The notion of enclaves of modern existence which, unlike the surrounding contingency of daily life, have their own immanent form and meaning is one of the great themes of Georg Simmel, who was a fundamental influence on the work of the young Lukács just as he was on Walter Benjamin. What characterises such enclave forms is their contradictory combination of completeness and fragmentariness, their only sporadic emergence as a unity of subject and object, or as Lukács puts it, of essence and life. The fragment as a kind of whole was, to be sure, one of the crucial discoveries of the Romantics themselves, who paired it with their signature notion of Irony; but it was their archenemy, Hegel, who, leaving irony aside, detected this tendency to episodic form within classical epic itself and as such: The epic work has to proceed in a way quite different from lyric and dramatic poetry. The first thing to notice here is the breadth of separated incidents in which the epic is told. This breadth is grounded in both the content and form of the epic. We have already seen what a variety of topics there is in the completely developed epic world, whether these are connected with the inner powers, impulses, and desires of the spirit or with the external situation and environment. Since all these aspects assume the form of objectivity and a real appearance each of them develops an independent shape, whether inner or outer, within which the poet

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  103 may linger in description or portrayal, and the external development of which he may allow; depths of feeling or assembled and evaporated in the universals of reflection. Along with objectivity separation is immediately given, as well as a varied wealth of diverse traits. Even in this respect in no other kind of poetry but epic is an outside given so much right to freedom almost up to the point of a seemingly unfettered independence. (Hegel 1975: 1081) We are, however, perhaps more familiar with Auerbach’s version of the idea in the famous account of the Odyssey that opens Mimesis: ‘Homer . . . knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present and fills the stage and the reader’s mind completely . . . Homer’s goal is “already present in every point of his progress . . . the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present”’ (Auerbach 1953: 4–5). Auerbach here seeks to convey the fundamental syntactic opposition – the paratactic versus the hypotactic, which informs the very structure of Mimesis – in temporal terms; yet this is a time which has become space as such, a present which has the fullness and completeness of the spatial. It is not a bad way to pass from literature to film. For it is precisely in these terms that we can describe what is episodic in Angelopoulos: the temporal continuity of the long take (or the travelling shot or the sequence shot, depending on your terminological preference)3 which however envelops, includes and exhausts, a completed action or episode. Yet this ‘technique’ does not standardise or render homogenous its variety of contents (as Hegel had already suggested with his observation about ‘the variety of topics . . . in the completely developed epic world’) (Hegel 1975: 1081). And this is why we can also sort these out into a variety of, as it were, synoptic categories, and think of them as themes or even obsessions: recurrent types of events and forms which might even be catalogued as such. Most obvious among these set pieces are the dancing and music-making in cafés, almost always interrupted by armed and authoritarian figures; the movement back and forth in the narrow streets leading to the central squares or plazas; demonstrators, sometimes organised, sometimes simply massed, at others in desperate flight from gunfire or police assault, and occasionally intersecting in clash or confrontation (and stylised in one of the most famous episodes of The Travelling Players, in which fascist and communist groups exchange songs with each other in a kind of ‘signifying’ duet which is also a duel). Innumerable variations on water – the beaches as some ultimate limit which is not exactly a border (but becomes one when we have to do with a river instead of the sea); flotillas, fishing boats and large ocean-faring vessels most often redolent of the Black Sea, but also the raft on which the lonely couple of exiles is expelled into the mist (as aged Eskimo parents are said to be retired

104  fr e d r i c j am e s o n from life) – the maritime and the riverine here echo distant mountains and rocky pastoral meadows with villages something like natural outgrowths of both and the more urban streets and squares a wholly distinct kind of space; these construct a materiality too close up for any names or geographical identifications except that of Greece itself and, to play on Auerbach’s language, are far too intertwined with the very quality of the events to be called the mere background. This is the moment, then, to open a parenthesis and to underscore the materialism of Angelopoulos, the passion for the resistance of matter, for the weight and solidity of the village houses and streets, and above all the texture of the walls. Its very emblem might be that from the opening of Reconstruction, in which a bus, whose lumbering movement over the unpatched roads already serves to explore matter itself and to register its unevenness, is found during a stop to have ground to a halt in mud; the efforts to release its tyres are themselves a kind of reverse allegory of the spectators’ longing, faced with these mere filmic images, to experience matter more deeply, to be mired in it as in a Bazinian or Kracauerian transcendental reality itself. The most significant element in this materiality is the self, which, as an agent of absolute desubjectification, is a passive recipient of the contradictions and the energies of subject and object in turn; here its material autonomy becomes a positive rather than a negative or privative feature, and what we are struck by is the intelligence and the tact of the camera itself, as it tactfully pans around a scene, with decent interest returning on its steps, looking again, searching, recording. Nor is this some putative personality trait or subjectivity of Angelopoulos himself: rather, the camera does this on its own, it wishes to delve, to know more; it can also be patient and wait; it knows a temporality which is neither that of author nor characters, a kind of third temporality of its own, capable of sitting out the time of the world until at length events germinate, unexpectedly, slowly, things begin to happen – the time of the ancient φύσις (physis), perhaps, so centrally meditated by Heidegger, a time in which things come into being and go out of being according to their own internal rhythms (‘according to the ordinance of time’). So now this camera patiently lies in wait for a group of people walking down the narrow streets of a small stone town: it knows these streets, these buildings, so tirelessly and well, but is somehow never bored by them. We are told that Angelopoulos spent months travelling around Greece in order to collect the walls and the buildings he would materially house within the images of The Travelling Players. The travelling camera, to be sure, sets this materiality in motion, but within this motion there moves that other fundamental movement which is the frontal approach of the collective characters themselves: most emblematically in The Travelling Players with their phalanx of the cast in its perpetual motion towards us, a procession of traditional women’s black dresses

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  105 and the men’s suits and hats, in various sizes but always with the suitcases in hand and often umbrellas – this is already what I hesitate to call an archetype owing to unwanted psycho-mythical or Jungian overtones – but it is not yet even the event, which marks its absent presence by the sudden awakening of these faces to something beyond the camera and the audience, something unaccommodated by the shot itself. It is subjective and objective all at once: we witness the slow transformation of the collective gaze into a stare as it grows ever more fixed in rapt attention and horror: it is itself the symptom of the approaching yet nameless object: an approaching police patrol, perhaps, or the hanged bodies that greet them on the steep approach to a mountain village in wartime. It is the adaption of reality and of the human gaze to this peculiar ontological focus which is the contemplative dimension of epic (rather than the static or scientific ‘objectivity’ of a later science and its measured mental observations of staged experiments). Nor is this gaze in any way theatrical, although we will have to come to terms with the theatrical and the dramatic in Angelopoulos in a moment. Here, however, it is rather desirable to show how variable these bravura segments can be, sublimated into allusion or drawn down in the crudest violence of the shot that rings out and the body that sinks to the ground. This is the gamut of latency or virtuality, rather than the effects of stylisation; and I take as the very emblem of that variability the swift concentration of group or crowd on some central object, multiplicity rapidly uniting into the one, as when, on the comic level the famished players suddenly converge on a stray chick in the midst of the snowy waste, or on the tragic one, when the disgruntled followers of Megalexandros surround him and blot him out, as though tearing him to pieces like the Bacchae and leaving behind, not bloody limbs, but rather the marble fragments of a classic statue as they once again disperse, like something out of Chirico. So it is that the pure form runs its gamut of possibilities: the border with all its philosophical paradoxicality suddenly swelling into the river across which the archetypal Angelopoulos exilic wedding is staged in The Suspended Step of the Stork (reprised later on in The Weeping Meadow as in a kind of florilegio of the greatest moments). But what I want to stress here is not only the way in which each of these episodes or moments, the old Hegelian/Lukácsian unity of form and content, is achieved (or better still: rediscovered!), but also the way in which, uniquely on the occasion of these films, a kind of unity of critical and theoretical discourses is also achieved. Indeed, film offers a privileged space in which to observe this dilemma of the alternation of the discourse of interpretation or meaning and that of technique or construction: the choice between a reading of the content and an analysis of medium or method. The first ultimately leads us back to history and its convulsions, individual and collective; the second on towards the camera apparatus, to the equipment

106  fr e d r i c j am e s o n and above all its mobility, and the distinctive nature of the sequence shots that follow the action unfolding within them and include everything; in Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) ‘we had some sequence shots of seven to eleven minutes each; consequently there was no room for errors or improvisations. The slightest mistake meant that we had to start the shot all over again’ (cited in Casetti [1977] 2001: 23). Angelopoulos’ ‘method’ is thereby the polar opposite of Eisensteinian montage and of Hollywood editing, cutting the images up and recombining them into a specific narrative sequence. It is far closer to the Bazinian deep shot (exemplified in Welles), save that it is a deep shot in motion and results in a single narrative block to be aligned alongside the others; thus, as has already been observed, there are only eighty such sequence shots which make up the immense three-and-a-half hour film called The Travelling Players. This technical approach to cinema – as paradigmatically described by David Bordwell (Bordwell 1997: 22–4) – then has the added advantage of marginalising the interpretive one and expelling it from film studies into a kind of humanistic and literary no-man’s land, in which endless discussion among dilettantes about meanings are pursued which have no relevance either to producers and their distribution (yet another technical but more sociological ‘objective’ area) or to the filmmakers themselves (just as critics are so often irrelevant for writers). But it is a rift that is not limited to film studies: it dramatises the subject/ object split which has obsessed philosophy at least since Descartes, and which leaves its mark on the materialist/idealist debate in political ideology and is indeed even more deeply inscribed in the daily life of modernity and postmodernity in ‘the question of technology’ and the relationship of capitalism to the individual subject, of determinism to freedom. The subject/object opposition is thereby central to aesthetics and the debate over the autonomy of art and its possible relationship (ideological, subversive, etc.) to the multiple externalities in which it is embedded. What is important about Angelopoulos – and the point of reviving an ancient Hegelian notion of epic through which to examine him – is that here, for one long moment, this opposition is lifted, and to talk about technique is also here to talk about meaning: the temporality of the sequence shot is at one with the question of history, or better still, with the uniqueness of Greek history, which is not modern in the Western sense and which does not necessarily impose a subject/object alternative on us. But we have not yet touched on the deeper source of this supersession, in which form and content are once again, for one last moment, indistinguishable in Angelopoulos. This is, to be sure, the age of new waves; but it is not with the French that the Greek filmmaker has his affinities, despite the film theory he absorbed in Paris, but rather the Mediterranean and Italian auteurs and above all with Antonioni and Fellini. To ask ourselves why he is not just another grand filmmaker of their type is then to penetrate to the very heart of

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  107 the matter and to understand why the frequent thefts and borrowings – such as the great head of Lenin in Ulysses’ Gaze which so insistently recalls the aerial Christ of La Dolce Vita (1960) – are not mere allusions, mere influence or simple intertextuality. Provincialising Europe, someone suggested (Chakrabarty 2007); but it would have been better to talk about provincialising Western Europe, for it is the latter that housed a cultural-imperialist centrality only later taken over by the US. The presence of General Scobie’s occupying army in The Travelling Players (not to mention the GIs who relay them), the unclassifiability of the Balkans in our various Western capitalist-historical schemes, not to speak of the ‘former’ Soviet bloc, ought to be enough to suggest some broader ‘orientalist’ prejudices here, and to alert us to the possibility of some more fundamental differences, which the much-abused word ‘cultural’ already trivialises. For what we want to notice in Angelopoulos’ Antonioni side is the absence of the neuroticism and narcissistic anguish of his heroes, the absence of the obsession with male impotence which has become a figure for the nation itself. None of that is to be found in Angelopoulos (at least in his first two periods), despite the melancholy tone of so many of the images; indeed, it is often difficult in these works to find an individual protagonist to whom to attribute such subjectivities in the first place, and this despite the commonality of political defeat in both countries and the ultimate failure of politics itself and of revolution. The fact is that the Western political despair in these Italians and their characters is not political and reflects the absence of politics rather than its failure. In Angelopoulos even the latter remains political, because it remains collective and only the collective is truly political. This is what distinguishes Angelopoulos’ long takes and the envelopment of the characters and their acts and experiences within them as somehow beyond any traditional subject/ object split: they are not the point-of-view shots of individual subjectivities but rather a collective dimension in which the individuals exist despite their individuality and their individual passions. This collective is the extraordinary lesson that Angelopoulos has to teach us. In this play of forms and categories, then, and despite the male protagonists of La Dolce Vita and 8 ½ as I have said, it would be Fellini to whom we would normally turn for some exemplary instantiation of the object pole of the fateful opposition: his great bravura set pieces, indeed, suggest a triumphant mastery of the image as such which might well account for their euphoria and their joy at enfranchisement from the subjective and its alienated miseries. And it is certain that we rarely find such joyous formal production in Angelopoulos: rather the latter’s monumentality, like much of Eisenstein, lacks the extravagance of the master craftsman’s gestures. For in Angelopoulos the images are icons rather than symptoms: they have not been formed in the excess and exultation of the individual creator, but rather proposed in advance

108  fr e d r i c j am e s o n by reality itself, whose internal forms and unities the camera discovers. So it is that the yellow-clad electricians mounting their poles at the end of The Suspended Step of the Stork like the crucified slaves arrayed along the Appian Way in Spartacus – these extraordinary figures do not make up an image that means something beyond themselves, whether that be hope, or community, or simply communication across the borders. They are not symbols, they do not stand for something else or for concepts, they speak an autonomous and self-immanent, self-sufficient epic language. And this is why the epic is episodic as well, an iconic series, a veritable iconostasis in time authenticating that collective ontology with which Angelopoulos has been able to put us in contact, however briefly and in whatever alien national history and experience has opened it. Still, a final uncertainty remains, and it is that of theatricality as such; for is not the very possibility of self-exhibition in however neutral and collective a form necessarily what we call theatrical? And does not the new medium of film itself, despite the omnipresence of theatre in Angelopoulos’ films, necessarily rebuke that other, older and very different medium? Something like this, indeed, is played out in the opening scene of the Voyage to Cythera, in which the son (Giulio Brogi) seems to be rehearsing a script of some kind. Indeed, he seems to have before him the whole script, as in a film, indeed the film we are watching, of his partisan father’s (Manos Katrakis) return from exile and subsequent disgrace: here a seemingly endless line-up of elderly male extras waits against the wall (as for an execution), in their dark suits and hats, who are called to the podium one by one to try out for their single line in the play: ‘It’s me’! When the director and son leave the building – a wonderful touch and so characteristic of the way in which Angelopoulos never gives up, always deploys all the multiple dimensions inherent in his raw material – he comes out into a crowd of the same extras, each having made his individual try out and now clustered in the back alleyway of the theatre and the street in small groups or individually, smoking their cigarettes, as though in rehearsal and in preparation for the great historical crowds and demonstrations which will be Angelopoulos’ fundamental event, for which these hopeful nonprofessionals are now expectantly waiting, without much hope at all. An unusual, an unexpected episode: but now son and mother (Dora Volanaki) set forth for the main event, the ocean liner arriving from Russia, the lone figure advancing through the waiting room (in the distance), holding the inevitable, the eternal suitcase, a tall gaunt bearded figure who when he has drawn close enough to them, still recognisable, recognisable after thirtyseven years in exile, pronounces the same words, this time definitively (he gets the part!): Εγώ είμαι! (‘It’s me!’). Is this repetition or the fold? Is it reality and illusion, or mimesis and the mimesis of mimesis? It is certainly a minor bravura piece in this film, whose great scene is the aged exile’s dance in the

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  109 empty village, in the graveyard of his dead comrades, the traditional Greek dance, turning on himself with arms outstretched and hands marking these rhythms: a vision of absolute grief and absolute joy, and of the non-place of place, the non-time of time. The other is the image of the raft, on which the expelled exile and his now reconciled and aged spouse are once again sent out to sea, passing into the mist and into invisibility: death, failure, history, all transcended and masked, veiled, blotted out by the eternity of mist they have become.4 Here what is monumental in Angelopoulos – the eidos which needs no commentary or interpretation, and yet which bears the entire narrative situation within itself, motionless – is revealed to us in all its untimely originality. The Travelling Players stages theatre as a different kind of repetition, the popular melodrama the same from village to village, its roles, over identical, yet spoken by ever younger generations as history passes, taking the older ones with it.5 The play, however, is ultimately concluded in the course of the film, the repetition of its well-known opening lines joined by the assassination of the ‘Aegisthus’ figure and ultimately by the death of the protagonist, of the young lover shot in the person of a British soldier who has by virtue of historical repetition momentarily assumed his place. One would do wrong, I think, to insist too strongly on the jig-saw-organisation of chronology in this film (whose action runs from 1939 to 1952): this is not L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), the historical movement is palpable enough, despite a few easily identifiable displacements of episodes out of order; and the famous opening and concluding scenes and lines – in which the players repeat their arrival in Aigion but in 1939 rather than 1952 – do not at all suggest some eternal return, some Viconian or Joycean cycle of history, but rather simply ask us to review the events, to gather them together in one unique memory, beyond pathos or tragedy: they ask us, in other words, to think historically about the nature of this collective destiny by pulling all the episodes together in a continuity the film itself is unwilling to construct for us. In other words, they construct a past. Otherwise it must be said that The Travelling Players is closer to Eisenstein’s montage of attractions than anything the latter himself ever produced (Strike [1925] came closest, perhaps). It is a kind of musical, in which each segment is introduced by the omnipresent accordion and in which there is finally fairly little dialogue, as though dialogue belonged to some other form or medium, namely the stage. The internal drama of the film is secured by the integration of the villain into collectivity itself: ‘Aegisthus’ is necessary for the function of the troupe, indeed later he holds it together, and this professional solidarity stands in structural contrast with the absolute divisions and polarities of the political wars themselves. Yet the περιπέτειες (péripéties) of the family drama are as simple in their conflictual form as those of the external political

110  fr e d r i c j am e s o n history; and the exchange of these simplicities and their play with each other is ­obviously required for the reading and intelligibility of a work that covers so long and complex a period. But that whole period must be dealt with in a radically different way in The Hunters, which takes place after the ‘normalisation’ of 1952, that is to say after the effective victory of the Right and the end of the Civil War. The events of The Travelling Players are now over and indeed long past (the troupe itself being dissolved into the rather sentimental reprise of Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988), which is not to say that there cannot be a return of this repressed. Indeed, if there is anything ‘experimental’ in Angelopoulos besides the occasionally confusing interpolation of different historical epochs in The Travelling Players, it is his solution to this problem here, which it would be truly meretricious to compare to ‘experiments’ like Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). For here there are no genuine flashbacks, but rather moments in which, as on stage, people and events from other moments in history suddenly intrude upon the set and take it over, re-enact their historical roles again and just as inconspicuously withdraw from this present, in which a group of profiteers and counterrevolutionaries celebrate New Year’s Eve 1977, thirty years after the bloody defeat of the Greek left (assisted in that by British and later on American anti-communist forces). These people – lumpen and petty bourgeoisie, Zola’s La Fortune des Rougon (The Fortune of the Rougons, 1871), or the Russian oligarchs, or the racists of the Wilmington uprising, the opportunistic scum who seize the spoils of a victory they have not themselves fought. The fly in this celebration’s ointment is discovered in the bravura opening of the film, in which a group of hunters is glimpsed across an expanse of snow, approaching slowly, and then beginning to run as a mysterious object – a black speck in the white blankness – is sighted. I see a black which is not in nature! cried Cézanne, as his party searched for a lady’s lost umbrella. This particular spot is ‘not in nature’ in a far more decisive and prodigious way: we may not call it embodied guilt, for these characters feel none, but rather the very past itself, and lost opportunities, alternative possibilities, searing memories and (for the others) the experience of defeat, all here rise inexplicably to the surface and rematerialise. Thus we observe a snowy waste, immense across the wide screen: dark figures slowly appear on it, scattered out widely, slowly advancing from over a great distance. They are hunters, and the camera bides its time, as though it knows how laborious it is for boots to disengage themselves in snowfall; but with the certainty that an event is worth waiting for. The viewer has more difficulty isolating the exact moment of transition between a leisurely approach and the quickened pace whereby, unevenly, some sighting it before others, the hunters begin to converge on a dark place on the snow hitherto unidentified.

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  111 This also takes time, but it is now the temporality of excitement, of anticipation, of awakened curiosity: for these people too, an event, something unusual is about to happen. The viewer of The Hunters already knows what it is: the dead body of a partisan in the snow in this pacified Greece where even live partisans have not been sighted for twenty years. ‘But they are extinct,’ cries one of the party-going hunters; and indeed this corpse will lie in the midst of the festivities throughout, a living reproach, one is tempted to say, for which the only feasible answer is to rebury it, to sink it out of sight as deeply as possible, and out of mind. But this conclusion will not pre-empt the inevitable imaginary ‘scène à faire’, in which the partisan returns to life and with his equally long-dead (or exiled) comrades executes the whole lot of these execrable victors. The technique is then a dramatic rather than a filmic one, and perhaps more redolent of O’Neill than of Brecht: as the memory scenes commence, the remembered actors, oppressors and victims alike, slowly reinvade this festive space, whose ‘real’ and current, living inhabitants step quietly back out of the way in order to let the past for a moment revive (in historic moments of revolt or repression whose dates are vividly burned into the memories of the living, if not of the non-Greek audience). The occasion is a police inquest on this peculiar corpus delicti, if it is one, before the pleasure boat bearing the New Year’s Eve guests and notables arrives at the dock below. Yet it is the locale itself which has ominously enough stirred this political and historical visitation of ghosts, inasmuch as it used to be a partisan headquarters, bought for a song after the defeat by one of the more ignominious and active conspirators.

Figure 6.1 Megalexandros

112  fr e d r i c j am e s o n New Year’s Day arrives in another form in Megalexandros, at the very beginning of the new century (this time the twentieth), in which a group of supercilious British hellenophiles, disgusted to find that their Athenian hosts do not even know Homeric Greek, set out to witness the new dawn from a Byronic vantage point. Their toast to History is, alas, singularly mistimed: for in one of the most remarkable emergences in all of cinema – and emergence, apparition, surgissement, was for Adorno one of the crucial categories of art itself – their view out over the bay is abruptly interrupted by an apparition, as though ancient Greece itself rises up from out of the depths of a shallow modernity: the crest and ‘waving feathers’ (Homer) of an antique helmet, then the whole body of the warrior as it is lifted on its heroic steed: Megalexandros himself as he mounts out of History into a present in which the philhellene tourists are to be taken hostage and condemned to a miserable confinement and then to death. This is the eponymous Alexander the Great, a rebel who has collected an entire army of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised around him to stage a powerful and alarming revolt against the legal regime, itself in the meantime idly celebrating the New Year in its palaces in the capital. Angelopoulos seems here to renounce his earlier radicalism, for this false Alexander, this deranged imposter, who has an entire village in his thrall, is by the end of the film denounced as such and in another memorable moment, surrounded by the populace, and metamorphosed into a broken statue; but not before he has resuscitated ancient Greece and modern revolution before our very eyes.

NOTES I am greatly indebted to Andrew Horton’s collection, (ed), The Last Modernist: the Films of Theo Angelopoulos (Trowbridge: Flicks, 1997), as to Horton’s work on the filmmaker in general; and also to Dan Dainaru’s collection of Angelopoulos: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). I should add that a first version of the present essay appeared in Horton’s collection. 1. It would have been central to his unfinished film, H Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea). 2. See, for example, Todorova (1997) and Bjelic, Savic (2002). 3. For a thorough technical discussion of Angelopoulos’ work, see David Bordwell’s essay in Horton’s collection. For a later version of this essay see Bordwell (2005). 4. I do not wish to estimate the role of a different kind of politics in this first of Angelopoulos’ allegedly post-revolutionary films. Despite powerful political moments, such as the refusal of the returned exile of Voyage to surrender his part of the village common lands for a shopping centre, this is now always a politics that confronts international consumerism, the market, universal Americanisation, as its target, and not fascism or anti-communism. The penetration of the market at home, then, its corrosive effect on the immemorial lifeways of the village, make of everyone an exile; yet the category (seemingly archaic in the immense population transfers and multinationality of the new world system) in fact awaits its

a nge lo po ulo s and co llective n arrative  113 genuine content for another ten years, until the upheaval of the Yugoslav civil wars allows Angelopoulos to transfer his new forms onto a fundamentally modified and enlarged dimension which it would be ironic indeed to call ‘post-national’ space, but which is certainly already that of the world system. 5. Nor should we neglect to mention the implicit theatricality of his first film, significantly entitled Reconstruction, a word which is also used for the re-enactment in situ of the crime in many European juridical systems.

C H APTER 7

Theo Angelopoulos’ Early Films and the Demystification of Power Vrasidas Karalis

T HE HI STOR Y ARO UND

T

heo Angelopoulos’ trilogy of History consists of Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977). In Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980), the last film of this period, Angelopoulos adopts the idea of representation not as a reconstruction of things past but as the visualisation of their ability to lose their historicity and be transformed into legends and epic tales. Some scholars (see Bordwell 2005: 143) and the editors of this book consider the film to be the logical offspring of the aforementioned films and they see it as an addition to the trilogy of history, which they have renamed as historical tetralogy. No matter which classification one uses, this trilogy of films 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. Because of this visual testimony, Angelopoulos’ work can be seen as the emblematic turning point from a historic epoch of grand revolutionary projects, as culminating in the 1968 global rebellions, to the new era of diminished expectations and frustrated projects, with the gradual revival and domination of conservativism after 1979. ‘Tout est politique’ was the slogan that inspired a whole generation of filmmakers in France, the USA, the UK, Italy and Greece during that decade; the phrase ‘implied an analysis of the situation presented, while it also altered approaches to the representation of history and even the relation established between spectator and representation in the historical film’ (Smith 2005: 13). Indeed in cinema it led to a series of historical films that re-envisioned the past and

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  115 re-imagined its codes of representation, constructing an oppositional aesthetic of contestation and negation. By contrast, official ‘history’ was seen as ‘a selfjustifying myth’ (Hobsbawm 1997: 36) after its ideological appropriation by the dominant political order. ‘Il faut se penser historiquement’ (you have to think historically) was another singular position of the period after May 1968, ‘originating in the theories of Brecht’ while at the same time searching ‘for a suitable method for rendering a politically relevant account of everyday life’ (Smith 2005: 171). Angelopoulos’ revisionist approach against mythologised history was also part of the general intellectual tendency of the period to use structuralism as the conceptual framework for the reinterpretation of history, historicity and historical agency. Through Althusserian structuralism, the cinematic image itself was understood as encapsulating a ‘collective subject’ since the individual was not simply a person but also a bearer of structures, a conduit of ideological apparatuses, without the legendary freedom attributed to the individual by Jean Paul Sartre’s existential pronouncements. It was also perceived as an ‘ideological apparatus’ that reproduced the existing political order by mirroring the prevailing relations of power and by ‘the interpellating of “individuals” as subjects’ while ‘subjecting them to the Subject’ (Althusser [1995] 2014: 268). For Angelopoulos, history was ‘conquered’ by the official ideology of power, of the ‘fascist state,’ which used ‘old texts that no one understood to justify their positions’ (cited in Gregor [1973] 2001: 14). History belonged to the oppressor, to the dynastic oligarchies, and to the anti-political elites who construct ‘national identity’ by articulating ‘national narratives that restructure the experience of time’ (Liakos 2002: 28). So his films, despite their historical specificity in the context of their production, contested history as the justifying discourse of power and authority, and critically recentred crucial elements of historical knowledge in order to offer a new critical language of how power functions in the public sphere and on the mental construction of contemporary subjectivity. Angelopoulos’ historical trilogy articulated an integrated vision of how structures and institutions work together to deprive contemporary citizens of their agency and self-determination. Released between 1972 and 1977, the trilogy also coincided with a turbulent period in Greece, starting with the dictatorship of 1967, the student uprising of November 1973, the counter-coup of the same year, the Greek intervention in Cyprus which led to the Turkish invasion of the island, the fall of the dictatorship and the restoration of the Republic in 1974. It could be claimed that it encapsulates the profound fluidity, instability and restlessness that dominated Greek politics between 1974 and 1977, the year after which the re-establishment and reconstruction of the state apparatuses were completed as new power elites took over the political institutions and constructed new epistemic discourses about identity and

116  v r a s i d as karalis belonging that were to dominate the political discourse and the national cultural imaginary until today. It also indicated the universal relocation of political allegiances from the right to the left in the country, as the dictatorship ‘led the young people to the left and shook the foundations of the pro-western orientation of the country, marginalising the old ideologies of anti-communism and nationalism’ (Baloukos 2011: 40). The central unfolding theme of the trilogy is the nature of political power  and how it exercises its control, not only on the creation of history but also over the representation and remembrance of historical experience. Angelopoulos dealt with this issue in a deconstructive manner, refocusing the camera to capture ‘history from below’ and depicting social reality as an  episteme based on the mystifying authority of a privileged class, which controls the production of knowledge, the rational definition of subjectivity, the social and cultural imaginary and finally the parameters of meaningful social action. In the films, micro-history is effectively superimposed upon macro-history, foregrounding the narratives of the disenfranchised, the marginalised and the subaltern, the minority within the minority, the politically homeless and the citizen without rights – a citizen who is always an actor on a stage and not an agent of participation and action in the political sphere. ‘I used an existing formula,’ Angelopoulos said talking about The Travelling Players, ‘father, son, mother, lover, their children . . . power . . . murder’ (cited in Demopoulos, Liappas [1974] 2001: 17). The connection between power and murder takes in the trilogy its most powerful and unambiguous representation. Stylistically, the central problematic in the films was focused on a revisionist approach to the dominant codes of representing time, class and power. Angelopoulos articulated a radical interrogation of power, time and history but in a political manner, not as melodrama, thriller, or period film, but as the visual intervention into political awareness, class consciousness and discursive subjectivity. And despite the fact that these films are about Greek history, it is obvious that they are about history in general in its universal significance as the symbolic code that gives identity, sense of belonging and political awareness to spectators. Indeed, the viewer does not have to know much about the particulars of Greek history in order to appreciate what Angelopoulos was doing with these films. If the storyline is about Greek politics, the narrative structures and the visual construction of the films belong to transcultural and transnational codes of representation which can trace their lineage in the French New Wave, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the Italian cinema of the 1960s, the new American Cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, even the older tradition of Soviet cinema, especially of Alexander Dovhzenko and Mikhail Kalatozov. On the other hand, in order to avoid the false perception of naturalism and verisimilitude, the films interfuse narrative strategies and visual formations which

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  117 are ­heterogeneous and somehow in conflict with each other: there is a strange melange of symbolism and hyperrealism. Furthermore, almost forty years later the films still frame a unique experimental phase in World Cinema that followed the events of May 1968 together with the disillusion that most left-wing intellectuals felt after the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. Angelopoulos tried to frame images and signs that resist all forms of oedipal identifications and all patterns of hegemonic structuration. The heterogeneity of their style is located in all levels of filmic articulation: the mise en scène, the spatio-temporal continuum, the narrative plot, the psychological investment, as well as the acting style. Consequently, every film of the trilogy is about a different cinematic concept embodying a distinct conceptualisation of the cinematic medium and its function. The emblematic critical text of the period was John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), which indicated the constructed, almost fabricated, view of reality in the era of technological modernity comprising the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of all works of art. Berger’s idea that what we see is conditioned by the way we see it accounts for the central function of images in the modern world. ‘They mystify rather than clarify’ as Berger points out since ‘a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling class, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies’ (1972: 11). Berger concludes that ‘Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident’ (1972: 15–16). Such ideas were on the semantic horizon when Angelopoulos’ visual projects started taking shape: the rejection of old commercial cinema happened because it mystified the obvious event of a collective murder committed both in the past and re-enacted in the present. Yet, in order to expose this mystification Angelopoulos created new pictorial possibilities in the script, the spatial visualisations, the chromatic scales and the mise en scène. However, if on the one hand, representation itself was under question, the temporality encoded within its narrative faced equal scrutiny. Angelopoulos avoided both linear and non-linear configurations of temporality, the causal narrative of the Hollywood tradition and the dislocated narrative of experimental cinema, and even the plot-less amplitude of documentaries, which he tried hard both to refute and to emulate in his later films. Indeed the central focus of this trilogy was to de-contextualise symbols and signs in order to make them regain their historical specificity and objectivity – to de-ideologise history, memory and politics by re-imagining their potential for visual representation. In his second period, starting with Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), a new critical and rather antithetical style was gradually formed, which replaced his previous experimentation with space and time to foreground colour and mood.

118  v r a s i d as karalis

ELEMENTS OF STYLE If with his first feature film Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) Angelopoulos revisited the possibilities of silent black and white movies, with his next films he explored the pragmatics of pictorial space without the psychological strategies of dramatic realism or the naturalistic excess of historical epics. Vassilis Rafailidis aptly described Reconstruction as ‘an open hole in the walls of myth, through which for the first time in the history of Greek cinema, we can see a specific place, determined by the coordinates of a definite time’ (Rafailidis 2003: 8). Pictorial minimalism was his ultimate choice for this film in which the director avoided any sentimental psychologisation or individualistic points of view in order to foreground the specificity of space and time. The actors are morphological markers, ‘mythemes’ in the unfolding of a narrative that encapsulated collective experiences and identities. Action is choreographed and stylised: the viewer could empathise with the predicament of the murderer but at the same time feel the gravity of the crime. The victim is present through its photographic traces – its social traces left behind and re-enacted by the police, the attorney, and the intrusive journalists. The returning father is an illusion and a reality, an annoying presence from the outer world and an active trace of a lost world that has no place anymore within the ongoing drama of contemporary reality. His ‘story’ is infused with invisible institutions and the flowing signifiers of power. The viewer’s response to this day is ambivalent: instead of empathising, viewers feel compelled to de-empathise and yet they can understand the actions of the character. Angelopoulos does de-psychologise but does not de-dramatise his plots: dramatic tension suffuses images as they depict non-empathic, almost dissociative, states of being. Such structural ambivalence becomes the hallmark of Angelopoulos’ early films. Days of ’36 is probably the most antinomic film in the Angelopoulos canon: it follows a linear pattern and unfolds a classical narrative, enveloped by prologue and epilogue and punctuated by two interludes. Furthermore, an important element observed by Stathis Baloukos is that Sofianos (Costas Pavlou), the character who moves the story onwards, is never seen: he is heard talking and giggling but he is never actually visible (2011: 77). This is a unique feature of the film, as Angelopoulos wants to avoid all forms of character development, psychological intensity and dramatic action. The drama is not in the room: it is the room itself; it is therefore about space and the memories of the past it entails. Space becomes a dramatic presence in the film, as ‘the closed room’ becomes a metaphor for the unspoken secrets, the silent interactions and the absent political freedom. With The Travelling Players, however, the agenda was different again. Drawing from his previous films, Angelopoulos proceeds with his most ambi-

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  119

Figure 7.1 Days of ’36

tious Brechtian project: to represent a collective drama, as a communal creation, as an action beyond the will of the individuals that created it. Narrative was the most important target of his visual strategies. Narrative cinema had created, imposed and propagated illusory identities, which spectators had internalised and accepted as parameters of their own consciousness and social positioning. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first cinematographers to expose the director not being in control of the narrative of the established order, and as the main contributor to the propagation of its latent ideology. If the director wanted to present history from the point of the oppressed then he or she had to extract him or herself from the storyline: the story had to be collective, written by collective action and performed by collective activity. The constant attempt to eliminate the plethoric sentimentalism of traditional Hollywood heroes but also the nihilistic destructiveness of existentialist anti-heroes was the ultimate postulate of Angelopoulos’ camera in his next films. The Travelling Players, despite its anti-Eisensteinian style, is closer to Eisenstein’s cinema of the masses, as in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and his Mexican Fantasy, Que Viva Mexico (1930), as well as to Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (I am Cuba, 1964). No individual heroes are found, actually no heroic or romantic deeds are recorded. The whole film develops its plot by discarding all known conventions that are found in historical epics or other genres involving historical reconstruction, such as individualistic flashbacks or even naturalistic costumes and settings that could give the illusion of authenticity. In a way, although rejecting the plethoric rhetoric of the montage, Angelopoulos still employs the rhythmic visual patterns as produced by the

120  v r a s i d as karalis Kuleshov effect. He further adds the new dimension of the simultaneous coexistence of divergent stimuli within the same frame as seen by incongruous details – something is always ‘wrong’ in the setting or something always goes ‘wrong’ in the story. Angelopoulos is the master of detail, indeed of the asymmetrical detail, which gives the impression of awkwardness, (the Nazi flags in The Travelling Players, for example, are almost always upside down) but these details intentionally stand as an indirect comment on the action; they are visual markers of the defamiliarisation techniques employed to point out the irregularities and the anomalies within the frame. Instead of faithfully reconstructing an era, the spatial arrangement itself indicates that this is another stage, a play within a play within a play, thus creating a multi-layered narrative based on three different levels of existence: the myth of Oresteia which pervades the narrative; the bucolic play Golfo, which is performed by the travelling players; and the historical reality witnessed by the group of actors throughout the film; and finally the contemporary viewer who watches the panorama of events as palimpsestic experience. In Days of ’36 the construction of the frame follows geometrical linearity of uncurving spatial arrangements distinct for their strict symmetry and stark specificity, reminiscent of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (The Conformist, 1970) and indeed of futurist and cubist art which appeared also in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In the film, Angelopoulos depicts the authoritarian structures of an invisible yet omnipresent power through straight lines, rectangular shapes and depthless spaces. The domination over the public sphere is visualised through the surveillance of quantifiable spaces – everything is out to be seen, to be controlled, whereas the crime takes place behind closed doors and nobody can see it. Angelopoulos stated: I inscribed censorship as an aesthetical element in the films, as indirect speech. All important things are not expressed in this film; they are only heard as whispers, low voices on the phone; as glances, conspiratorial silences, this and that. The story of the film seems to be confined within a cell; the whole film seems to be confined within a cell as the theme itself of the film. (cited in Baloukos 2011:75) The film is a complex parable on the permeability of the public sphere by the absent masters – a theme that can be found in the most important films of the period, including Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather (1972) and Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976). Movements of actors take place as parallel lines to the movement of the camera. The camera itself does not reveal the event: it moves away or around the core happening – the abduction of the politician and its seclusion in the isolation of a central

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  121 office and what happens inside that space. The collective silence is about the invisibility of the actual drama, or indeed about the sinister events that take place within the confined corridors of the state prison (recalling the ancient Greek tragedy’s offstage plot device). In a sense the first film of the trilogy paves the way for the second, although with The Travelling Players, the confined room is transformed into a polyphonic stage, out in the open, without confines or isolated locations: horizon becomes one of the most active presences in the cinematic frame. Even when scenes take place in closed private rooms, the camera looks from the outside; what matters however is not the distinction between the inner and outer, private and public space, but the intense energy within spatiality, the open distance which links one form and another. The film is primarily about space and its potentialities, as the locus of public activity and of human encounters. The market place, the ancient agora, is the place of the political and therefore the political is the absolute abode of the collective. This dialectic of the open space dominates the mise en scène, the performable activities, and the dialogue, as the network of communicative activities renders action meaningful. The Travelling Players transforms history into a monumental theatrical performance, in which the actors do not have any agency or selfconsciousness as they are carried away by the incomprehensible torrents of history. In this respect, the film is the tale of the common men and women who are taken adrift by forces beyond their control without perspective and orientation. These common characters live in an eternal now, in the simultaneity of unconscious existence, unable to escape the circular universe of their heteronomous lives. It is therefore about people without qualities, lost amidst monumental events that they don’t understand and cannot make sense of. This can be seen in the unpredictable way that Angelopoulos moves the characters; despite the underlying ancient Greek myth, the film was to a certain degree improvised in its execution (Soldatos 2004: 165), with all cast members and technicians contributing to its creation. Despite the auteur legend about him, this is a collective product about collective subjectivities and unseen structural forces that make them look like puppets without individual conscience. Consequently, the film is about the one-dimensional space of the heteronomous subject. Even the mythic structure of Oresteia functions as another layer of domination: history eternalises the inability of individuals to be active agents. They are governed and over-determined not simply by class and politics but also by the historical discourses defining their position. On the other hand, the family saga is also another tale about crime without retribution; the Freudian background, through the recurring subtexts of incest, which would have offered the cathartic resolution to the psychological entanglements of repressed desires, is totally absent from the narrative. In this work,

122  v r a s i d as karalis Angelopoulos consummated what had been delineated in his previous films: he de-psychologised individual characters. The actors act out metonymies for collective structures, the symbolic orders that have created them. Angelopoulos does not address questions of internalisation or ‘false consciousness’ or indeed of the processes that de-personalise the individual. He takes them for granted, and this is the true tragedy of the individual. The film is the story of the common people, the people without a voice, who struggle to articulate their presence in opposition to the disempowering structures that subjugate them by fighting against their own conditioning. Both films were made during a turbulent period in European history and in the history of the film industry. The collapse of the studio system together with its artificial codes of representation liberated filmmaking from the institutional confines and the self-censorship of its production protocols. With Reconstruction Angelopoulos seemed to have reinvented cinematic filming: amateur (mainly) actors, minimal script, location shooting, lack of montage, almost non-existent editing, minimalistic manipulation of the spectator’s eye; all of these are stylistic elements that simply made the filmic text an open space in which what could not be said or seen became very obvious in its absence. This became possible also because of the gradual collapse of the studio system. The new films of the period were in reality independent productions, funded by friends and associates, without the involvement of the state and its bureaucratic mechanisms of control over the script, distribution or even the choice of actors. In his case also, we must remember the emergence since the late 1960s of an active and robust critical community grouped together around the journal Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος/Contemporary Cinema (1969–73 and 1974–80), which created an intense exchange of ideas and inaugurated multiple cultural conversations that reshaped the critical discourse about films. The journal was probably the first ever truly modernist project in the cultural history of Greece, by politicising the cultural discourse around films and by de-aestheticising all forms of critical evaluation, following the line of the French Cahier du Cinéma, especially during the militant Marxist period which called for ‘cinemas of revolution’ (see Bickerton 2009: 54). Marxism became the ultimate code of interpretation both in its theoretical presuppositions and its political implications. As pointed out by Maria Chalkou in the first chapter of this book, the films produced by the New Greek Cinema of the early 1970s and especially The Travelling Players culminated the intensity and the energy of these conversations (or indeed conflicts) and established the visual analogue of a critical reassessment of the cinematic languages and genres that had prevailed in Greek cinema in this post-war period. The open visuality of this film transformed the screen into a borderless space in which all demarcation lines between genres, visual perceptions and narrative practices collapsed. If one of the central

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  123 postulates of the journal was according to Takis Papagiannidis ‘to employ all means as weapons for the elevation of the cinematic situation in our country,’ (cited in Soldatos 2004: 105) it seems that it found its most accurate ‘didactic analogue’ in Angelopoulos’ ‘people’s epic’. Angelopoulos depicted the stories of persecuted and dispossessed people by turning inside out the techniques of established genres that have been infused by the symbolic content of the dominant political order. As Peter Wollen stated, in another emblematic text of the same period: A text is a material object whose significance is determined not by a code external to it, mechanically, not organically as a symbolic whole, but through its own interrogation of its own code. It is only through such an interrogation, through such an interior dialogue between signal and code, that a text can produce spaces within meaning, within the otherwise rigid straitjacket of the message, to produce a meaning of a new kind, generated within the text itself. (1972: 162) For Angelopoulos, the production of a self-reflexive object was contingent on the avoidance of the generic conventions of the commercial cinema, and on reconfiguring the continuum between space and time. He thus articulated a new cinematic representation of human subjectivity and historical agency in its historical unfolding, which became one of his emblematic contributions to transnational cinema, as it can be seen in films as diverse as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and even Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002). The thrust of historical narrative in the film moves in simultaneous circularity, or as if action takes place in circular patterns superimposed on each other. The camera sees through these circular patterns, finding structural homologies between them that ultimately form collective memory. Time in these films has a tendency to spiral: it moves backwards and forwards simultaneously in a rhythmic pattern of regular alternations. The depiction of a directionless historical movement frames a perception of time almost of Proustian simultaneity and confluence. The temporal perception on the screen is focused on the ‘interminable present’, which cinematically works with ‘open frames’ and ‘complementary layers’ of visual discourses. Ultimately, The Travelling Players is not simply about history or historical narratives; it is a film about filming, whose subject matter is reconfigured in order to bring out the silences of history, the absences in the real and the missing link of historicity, but all of them as cinematic testimonies to the absences, the silences and the omissions of the screen itself. Angelopoulos insisted that it was a film predominately about the ‘common people’ whose collective identity makes the film ‘more than anything else

124  v r a s i d as karalis epic and not a film of critical historical analysis’ (cited in Soldatos 2004: 165). Angelopoulos also insisted that the style was as important as the historical realities referred to, as he stated: Basically the film is constructed around the concept of long take [sequence shot] on interrupted shot with multiple actions inserted between static frames, which are the narratives takes. I was interested in creating a sense of fluidity throughout the whole film, which shouldn’t be always visible. (cited in Soldatos 2004: 165) In reality, despite their apparent discontinuity each scene refers to the previous one, creating a complex narrative, which is self-reflexive and continuous at the same time. In this respect, the film articulates a historical counter-discourse, both negative and positive, on the one hand dismantling an established ­representational schema, and on the other constructing an antirepresentational style. In Pierre Norra’s terms, the film itself becomes one ‘lieux de mémoire’ or site of memory, in which visible history becomes invisible since memory, both collective and individual, confronts the established patterns of understanding, transforming thus the filmic text ‘from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history’ (Nora 1989: 17).

T HEOR Y AS A CONSE Q UENCE Drawing from Robert A. Rosenstone’s suggestion that ‘the directors make the past meaningful in at least three different ways – they create works that vision, contest and revision history’ (Rosenstone 2006: 118), we could claim that Angelopoulos revises historical knowledge by re-centring the cinematic narrative on collective action instead of insisting on the traditional perception of political events as grand drama involving charismatic individuals in conflict with superior historical forces. Andrew Horton is more to the point and states that: Angelopoulos’ concern in this, Greece’s most ambitious, most experimental, and most expensive film made until 1975, is with a journey into ‘the other Greece,’ historically and culturally through time. More accurately, Angelopoulos is at pains to make the viewer aware to what degree history and culture are figments of presentation and enactments of ‘scripts’ written and unwritten, remembered and forgotten, which continually reappear in reconstructions that echo the past yet point toward a future, uncertain as it may be. (1997: 102)

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  125 Indeed Angelopoulos in this film posits the question and the problematic of representability and, if we may borrow a neologism from information theory, of reconstructability of history. The multiple versions of the past form a set of theories that has to be synthesised in order to produce a convincing picture for the contemporary individual. Angelopoulos re-synthesises the given representations by redirecting the viewer’s attention towards the silences of history, the gaps and the lacunae: he uses the theatrical stage as his distinct device in order to produce a non-linear narrative that would contradict the established symbolic hierarchy of perspectives. The theatrical metaphor permeates all three films, especially The Travelling Players and The Hunters, as all action takes place in front of a stage or on the stage itself. In The Hunters, the stage brings together individuals with collective memory. The Brechtian techniques of defamiliarisation and distanciation do not simply indicate that there are invisible mediations between the story-message and the medium-form. Angelopoulos uses Brecht’s distinction between the different functions of dramatic and epic theatre and employs most of the characteristics of the latter in order to re-centre his narrative: he ‘turns spectators into observers’, he constructs a ‘world picture’, he compiles ‘an argument’; and finally he presents human nature as ‘a process’ and the individual as a ‘social being’ whose sociability determines both its thought and existence (Brecht 2014: 65). So in order to depict both the social and the individual as processes, Angelopoulos adopts Brecht’s admonition that ‘all motivation within a character is excluded’ and ‘the person is seen from the outside’ (Brecht [1932] 2001: 162). For this reason, following Brecht again, he insists on the pictorial surface on the screen as ‘what the film really demands is external action and not introspective psychology’; because of such externality films are appropriate for ‘the principles of non-Aristotelian drama’ and the creation of ‘a type of drama not depending on empathy, mimesis’ (Brecht [1932] 2001: 171). In an interview, Angelopoulos stated that ‘what I was trying to achieve is a kind of Brechtian epic, where no psychological interpretation is necessary’ (cited in Demopoulos, Liappas [1974] (2001): 18). By taking the psychological dimension out of each character, their forms and actions visualise what they unconsciously represented: structures and forces within an ideological system of oppression and coercion. The common people were thus the site of historical oblivion, of dark personal memory, without symbolic references. We must not forget that the film was made during the colonels’ junta (1967–74) and Angelopoulos insisted time and again that the film was ‘a popular epic much more than an analysis of recent Greek history’ (cited in Demopoulos, Liappas [1974] (2001): 19). From Brecht Angelopoulos adopts the idea of filmic representation as a plastic visual field, exploring a phenomenological understanding of cinematic form, by avoiding all psychologisation of characters which might have led to

126  v r a s i d as karalis forms of Hollywood individualism. The ‘common people’ had to be represented in their commonness and banality, as being pushed by historical forces and controlled by pernicious mechanisms of power. The common people are the dramatic subjects and the problem of the film: indeed the problematic of the little person who has given up her or his agency in order to conform with the grand narratives of the nation as defined by power, is probably the most subversive element in the film, which led to its tacit rejection by the Greek Communist Party. It is interesting that the film ends with verses of the most important anarchist poet of post-war Greece, Mihalis Katsaros, and this quotation indicated another subtext within the complex layers of invisible ­references (see Karalis 2012: 179). Such new understanding of space foregrounds basic geometries of forms and shapes which find their ultimate consummation in The Hunters. Vassilis Rafailidis thought of this film as the ‘peak of Greek cinema’ that has no relation to the smooth and without sharp edges problematic of The Travelling Players. [. . .] As it doesn’t have an formal relation with it: here Angelopoulos rejects the scholastic beautification (which unfortunately was the main reason why he became so well-known) and the soothing calligraphy of ideology and through a detailed work of abstracting all superfluous decorations, the historical symbol regains its consummate and concrete meaning, which leaves no margins for misinterpretations and multiple readings of the filmic text. (Rafailidis 2003: 20) Rafailidis was one of the most authoritative critics on Angelopoulos’ films, as they worked together since 1965, and one could even claim that they planned together the orientations of the New Greek Cinema. In a conversation between them from 1969, they outlined what they called ‘national expression’ by ‘making movies which constitute testimonies on a specific space’ (Angelopoulos cited in Rafailidis 2003: 153). Dan Georgakas stressed that ‘The Travelling Players may be thought as a meditation with three dimensions: history, myth, and aesthetics. The viewer is constantly invited to alternate between emotional engagement and intellectual analysis’ (1997: 32). In The Hunters, intellectual analysis prevails as the director employs the most Brecthian techniques in the mise en scène in order to create a sense of emotional defamiliarisation, and even negativity towards his subject matter. The film is probably unique in the annals of World Cinema in its attempt to keep its viewers away from any emphatic identification with what happens on the screen. It is all based on a series of awkward moments in which tone prevails over volume and mood over verisimilitude. It is an exceptional example of abstraction in art as all its elements constitute an intense reflection on the ‘urge to seek deliverance from the fortuitousness of human-

ea r l y fi l ms and the de m ys tif ication of power  127 ity as a whole, from the seeming arbitrariness of organic existence in general, in the contemplation of something necessary and irrefragable’ (Worringer [1908] 1997: 24). In order to achieve such inorganic abstraction, Angelopoulos employs ‘the three-quarter view, the come-and-go pan, the deeply perspectival shot, and the planimetric framing’, as David Bordwell so succinctly recapitulated (2005: 185). Bordwell’s formal analysis stresses the ‘compositional schemas’ employed during this period. As he says, ‘his subsequent films employ the planimetric image to combine frontal and profile views or to create muted moments through dorsality. He striates landscapes by spreading ribbons of figures parallel to the horizon’ (2005: 172–3). The planimetric framing shows Angelopoulos’ tendency towards geometric abstraction so that narrative loses its mystifying function and is transformed into ­alternating markers of potentially new interpretations. Angelopoulos also indicated that the subtext of The Hunters was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), a film which also subverted the generic conventions of melodrama. The central element in both films is what Hitchcock called ‘contrast,’ which ‘establishes a counterpoint and elevates the commonplace in life to a higher level’ (cited in Truffaut [1967] 1984: 341). The higher level for Angelopoulos is the exposition of the ruling class as an agent of crime and the demystification of its language by showing its internal panic and anxiety. The dead body of the partisan acts as the counterpoint, the symbolic catalyst for the emergence of the hidden id: the film reverses Sigmund Freud’s dictum ‘where id is, there ego must be’ [1915] (1991): 112). The super-ego withdraws and the id emerges: the criminal past becomes an active conscious reality; it is the reality of a specific ruling class with its own symbolic order, without mythologisations or mystifications. History is present as memory that cannot be eliminated by oblivion or cannot be disguised as venerable myth, as snow becomes the symbol of the unwritten pages of history. Angelopoulos insisted: ‘My intention was to concentrate on the persons inside the hotel, who represent in my eyes the composite conscience of a certain generation and certain social class’ (cited in Casetti [1977] (2001): 27). The geometric abstraction of forms indicates the skeletal structures, the invisible scripts that create specific epistemological regimes of subjection. The demystification of the dominant language in order to present what was always obvious but not seen is what he achieved with this film. For various reasons Angelopoulos changed the orientation of his cinematic project on many occasions after the 1980s. Even the next film Megalexandros, with its intense stylistic formalism and power-mysticism, seemed at odds with the radical political modernism of his previous films. Despite this, there is both continuity and discontinuity in his films, a rejection of the political as a project of radical aesthetics and its substitution by aesthetics as a project of radical politics. One could claim that after this trilogy Angelopoulos came closer

128  v r a s i d as karalis to Friedrich Nieztsche’s suggestion that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’ (Nietzsche [1872] (1999): 33), which raises questions of a completely different kind. In the 1980s, after major projects of political renewal collapsed and the last utopian vision of socialism disappeared, Angelopoulos started exploring what we call elsewhere ‘the anthropogeography of European nihilism’1 caused by his disenchantment with the political aspirations of the previous decade. Only this later period justifies what Horton calls ‘the cinema of contemplation’ and what Bordwell diagnoses as ‘melancholy’; during the first decade of his creative work, following Brecht, he aspired ‘to make films politically’ (Angelopoulos cited in Fainaru [1999] (2001): 131). The transition from ‘political modernism’ to ‘poetic melancholy’ is something that needs further elaboration.

NOTES 1. I elaborate on this in my forthcoming book Greek Cinema from Cacoyannis to the Present.

C H APTER 8

Megalexandros: Authoritarianism and National Identity Dan Georgakas

I

n critical commentaries on the work of Theo Angelopoulos, Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros or Alexander the Great, 1980) is usually omitted from extended discussion. The film does not relate directly to the themes of the historical films that preceded it or to the voyage and border films that followed. In many respects, however, Megalexandros is a template for Angelopoulos’ approach to politics and offers insight into the aesthetic choices that characterised his entire career. Megalexandros seeks to join history, myth and current events seamlessly with a healthy disrespect for all things authoritarian. In that sense, the film, for all its difficulties, holds an important place in the work of Angelopoulos. To analyse his achievements as an auteur or to assess the importance of his work in the development of the national cinema of Greece requires taking its successes and failures into account. Megalexandros must also be examined within the context of the handful of films that examine anti-authoritarian revolutionary strategies. Most notable of these are La Patagonia Rebelde (Rebellion in Patagonia, 1973)1 and Land and Freedom (1997) (see Porton 1996: 30–4). Unlike Megalexandros, these films, like most films dealing with anarchism, focus on actual historical events and have conventional formats.2 The question of what format is best for films with revolutionary aspirations offers an intriguing approach to evaluating Megalexandros. Can films that seek to foster revolutionary thinking use conventional structures, or should such films employ a format that is as challenging as its content? From the onset of his career, Theo Angelopoulos insisted that challenging political content in film must be presented in a challenging form. This perspective is in sharp contrast to that of a filmmaker such as Costas-Gavras who believes that popular formats can be appropriated for revolutionary political content, a proposition he first successfully explored in Z (1969). Angelopoulos believed that such an approach, while offering easy access to a mass audience,

130  d a n g eo rgakas took the risk that conventional formats might neuter revolutionary content. In any case, he contended that stimulating audiences to think new thoughts requires that they also confront new modes of artistic expression (see Horton 1992: 28–31).3

T HE POL I T I CAL Q UARTET Angelopoulos explored revolutionary political thought in a revolutionary aesthetic throughout the course of his political trilogy: Μέρες του’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977). These films offer a basic revision of the official history of Greece during the era of World War II in formats antithetical to popular cinema. Days of ’36, which was greeted by international critics as a new departure for Greek cinema, had a moderate box office reception in Greece and abroad. The Travelling Players, on the other hand, was a domestic and international triumph, setting new domestic attendance records in Greece and putting Greek cinema back on the international map of world-class cinema. It has subsequently been cited by leading critics as one of the most important films of the latter half of the twentieth century and is universally considered the masterwork of what was dubbed the New Greek Cinema, the films made following the fall of the Greek junta (1967–74). The Hunters, while not achieving the acclaim of The Travelling Players, won a substantial domestic and international audience. With the release of Megalexandros, Angelopoulos upped the cinematic and political stakes by shifting from specific historical events to take on national mythology. The film examines the entire pre-modern era with techniques even more demanding than any employed in the trilogy. The films can be best understood as a quartet, with Megalexandros providing the subtext or the backstory to the twentieth-century narratives that comprise the political trilogy of Days of ’36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters. The complexity of Angelopoulos’ conception for Megalexandros begins with its title. The great Alexander to be looked at is not the famed Macedonian conqueror of the then known world. Nevertheless, there will be a long sequence about the selection of his horse that resonates with legends regarding Bucephalus, the historical Alexander’s steed. Here, as so often, Angelopoulos suggests subtle cultural continuities, echoes and memories that span centuries. Nor is the great Alexander of the film the messianic Alexander of Byzantine folklore, an apocalyptic Alexander who was expected to appear when the empire was in mortal danger. The film evokes such lore by using numerous tableaux, colour schemes, and other aesthetics suggestive of the Byzantines. The Alexander of the film is a revolutionary brigand, but we are at the end

a u t ho ritarianis m and nation al iden tity  131 of the century, not its onset. Thus, no actual national revolutionary movement was in process during the time period in which the film is nominally set. Nonetheless, Alexander wears an ancient helmet, to remind his followers of their classic heritage, just as the famed revolutionary Theodoros Kolokotronis, the pre-eminent general in the Greek war of independence, had done for similar reasons.4 Yet another complication of the Alexander myth is that during the film, when we see him re-enter his village, we hear a song normally dedicated to St. George celebrating him as a dragon slayer. Later, a scene with a huge tapestry reinforces that identification. This, then, is to be a tale about a clearly symbolic personality who embodies various religious and secular mythologies. An added irony is that the Alexander of the film is more villainous than heroic. The film begins at the onset of the twentieth century with the lights coming on at a New Year’s Eve ball at the royal palace. Juxtaposed to this scene is the depiction of a prison escape by the bandit/patriot Alexander (Omero Antonutti) and his cohorts. Riding a great white stallion no one else dares to mount, his shoulders draped with a traditional robe, the helmeted Alexander leads his men to Cape Sounion. Here, they find a group of English lords who are sightseeing. The brigands capture the aristocrats and send a message to the palace that their prisoners will not be released until two conditions are met: Alexander and his men must be given amnesty for their crimes, and wealthy landowners in his home district must legally transfer property rights to the resident farmers. While this proposal is being studied, Alexander rides toward his village stronghold in the mountains. The cinematic setting up of the escape and the subsequent movement to the mountains unwind slowly with little explanatory dialogue. Unknown parties in the government have made the escape possible and subsequent events hint at the complex relations between Greek politicians and bandit warlords in the interior. The foreign element references are a reminder of how different Greek political parties had a special relationship with one or another of the Great Powers, Britain being among the most active.5 Many of the early sequences and scenes in Megalexandros are held for long periods of real time with few close-ups. This languid pace and style of exposition suggests leisurely storytelling in the coffee house rather than the fierce pace of modern cinema. Indeed, Alexander and his group move so slowly through the mountains that in a key scene, the film seems to be in freeze frame. Then, one of Alexander’s men directs his gaze to the valley below and the camera ever-so-slowly sweeps down to a faraway bridge where five strangers are vigorously waving black and red flags. The strangers prove to be Italian anarchists who inform Alexander that during his absence, his home village has become a revolutionary commune. The film gathers momentum from this point onward. Arriving at their village, Alexander and his men find that all the old property values have been

132  d a n g eo rgakas abolished peacefully in favour of a totally egalitarian society. The village schoolteacher (Grigoris Evangelatos), the leading ideologue of this revolutionary change, and farmers from the commune explain to Alexander and the anarchists that all decisions are now made through democratic voting and everyone in the village has the franchise. A village woman plays a prominent role in explaining the details of the new social order. To join the commune, the newcomers must swear allegiance to its egalitarian principles. The Italians, four men and a woman, do so with joyous enthusiasm. In the scene that follows, Angelopoulos brilliantly employs music to depict  political conflict. The Greek villagers celebrate the arrival of their new Italian communards with a feast. The Italians respond by singing lively ballads. The colouring of the clothes and the colouring of the music evokes the sight and sounds of an anti-authoritarian society. This gala festive mood is shattered when Alexander’s men enter the hall. Dressed in forbidding black robes and carrying rifles, they dance a menacing warrior dance, stomping their feet and raising their rifles defiantly. The bandits/rebels are not pleased with the new society established in their absence. They demand individual ownership of land and animals. They want to rule their wives as they have always ruled them, and they believe the Italians are little more than alien ­parasites, not unlike the British aristocrats still being held captive. Feeding their self-righteousness is the belief that they have earned the right to set the social agenda by having risked their lives in combat and having served prison terms. Adding considerable credibility to scenes imbued with mythology and abstract politics is the village setting. Rather than a sunny white village set against Mediterranean blue that is the stuff of travel posters, Angelopoulos presents the historic poverty of rural mainland Greece. The specific location, the village of Dotsiko which is some fifty kilometres from the town of Grevena in Macedonia, was carefully chosen by Angelopoulos. He left nothing to chance, arranging to have the village virtually rebuilt by set designer Mikis Karapiperis to simulate the look it would have had at the turn of the century. Its harsh northern environment is beautifully captured by Yorgos Arvanitis, the cinematographer on all of Angelopoulos’ films.6 As the tension between villagers and warriors grows, a royalist army approaches the village. The only factor that holds them back is Alexander’s threat that if they attack, the English prisoners will be killed. The royalist commander draws Alexander into secret negotiations and promises him personal rewards if the crisis works out favourably for the government. In due course, Alexander will order the death of the Italians and the leaders of the commune, including the schoolteacher. The government, however, reneges on its secret pledges and the enraged Alexander responds by killing the English nobles. The royalist army then moves forward to crush what remains of the rebellion.

a u t ho ritarianis m and nation al iden tity  133 As in formal Greek tragedy, the killing is done offstage and the lamenting onstage, often with devices similar to a Greek chorus. Perhaps the most memorable scene of the film, and one that underscores the complex political argument being made, features the death of Alexander. The revolt he once led but now has suppressed has been lost to the royalists. The dream of an anarchist community dedicated to individual liberty developed by the villagers has been lost. The hoofs of the royal cavalry’s horses can be heard pounding the stones at the outskirts of the village. In a sequence shot from directly above the participants, villagers clad in black robes surround Alexander, swirling closer and closer until their robes smother him to death. When they pull back, however, there is only a ceremonial bust, for Alexander, as one has guessed all along, is not separate from the villagers but a part of them. The film is not about political factions but the struggle within the soul of the Greek villager. Thus, when the cavalry unit clatters into the plaza a few minutes later, they need not deal with a flesh and blood corpse. Now safely dead, Alexander’s bust may now grace the plaza as a patriot. The final scene of Megalexandros underscores the mythological nature of the hero. The young Alexander is seen riding a mule into the city, but the lad is not to be viewed as an individual. He personifies the entire nation and all the cultural baggage the Greek villager carries into the city. This is evoked by drawing on Greece’s oral traditions. The suffering Macedonian farmer who opened the film with a direct address to the camera returns now as an offcamera voice that explicitly informs us: ‘And that’s how Alexander got into the city’.

Figure 8.1 Megalexandros

134  d a n g eo rgakas Speaking of the scene, Angelopoulos has stated: This is a modern city – present-day Athens, in fact – in contrast to the rural turn-of-the-century world of the rest of the film. When the little Alexander enters the city, he brings all the experience of the century with him. He has gained a total experience of life, sex, and death, and he comes into the city at sunset, and over it there is a great question mark. How long will the night last, and when will a new day break? (Mitchell [1980] 2001: 29) Greatly complicating this straightforward political scenario is the portrait of Alexander as rendered by Angelopoulos. Details of Alexander’s birth are unknown other than that he was adopted by a village woman (Toula Stathopoulou). Later, he married this woman, which means his step-sister is also his step-daughter (Eva Kotamanidou). Still other sequences show this sister-daughter as his mistress. A small boy, who is the son of the adoptive mother, is sometimes depicted as being the young Alexander (Ilias Zafiropoulos), but other times he appears in the same sequence as the elder Alexander. The bewildering shifting webs of identity and relationships are so complex and ambiguous that the viewer must accept the characters not as individuals but as generations of characters. This attempt to escape the usual constraints of time, matter and space when dealing with the human personality is evident in other films of Angelopoulos. In Το Βλέμμα Του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), for example, he had Maia Morgenstern play several different roles in order to suggest mythological allegories, gender stereotypes and historical continuity. The success of such a schema is primarily intellectual, depending on the repeating patterns of human behaviour rather than the resolution of individual destinies. For most viewers, the shifting allegorical identities, however, only complicated what was already a dense plot. Megalexandros did not fare well with either Greek or foreign audiences (see Horton (1997a): 128–9).7

CR I T I CAL AND P O P ULAR REACT IONS Aside from its aesthetic challenges, one of the reasons Greek audiences may have reacted negatively to the film was that Angelopoulos had gone out of his way to remind them that most Greeks were still only a single generation removed from ‘the village.’ The brutality and poetry of village life, which had not significantly altered for centuries, was just below the surface of the modern Greek personality. This theme also reflects one of the motifs of The Travelling Players. During the course of that film, the travelling players are shown trying

a u t ho ritarianis m and nation al iden tity  135 to perform the play Golfo and never being able to do so, a clear signal from Angelopoulos that the ever popular melodrama refers to a Greece that exists only in myth and can never be physically ‘entered’ (see Pappas (1976): 36–7). Many Greek leftists believed Megalexandros was inappropriate for the times. In his final years as Prime Minister, the conservative Constantine Karamanlis, acting finally to bring the Civil War era to an end, had legalised the Communist Party of Greece, opening the door for the return of exiles. Andreas Papandreou, running on the slogan of Αλλαγή (‘Change’), would soon head the first socialist democratic government in Greek history. Thus, at the very moment when the Greek people had finally won the right to honour the resistance fighters of World War II, Angelopoulos seemed to be resurrecting charges of leftist cruelty. That his Alexander bore a striking physical resemblance to Aris Velouhiotis, the most famous leftist guerrilla leader, seemed a retraction of the views so passionately expressed in The Travelling Players. Moreover, the valorising of anarcho-communism celebrated ideological views unpopular with the traditional Greek Left. Even more troublesome was the depiction of revolutionary leaders just freed from prison ruining a revolution in progress, a theme that echoed the charge raised by some leftists that the revolutionary momentum of the Resistance which was most strongly evident in the mountains had been betrayed by Nikos Zahariadis and other communist leaders when they returned to Greece after being released from Nazi prisons. The murder of the Italian anarchists, in turn, revived memories of the internal conflicts of the Spanish Civil War. What was often missing in these critiques (see Karalis 2012: 190–2) was acknowledgement that Angelopoulos remained committed to a socialist vision. Although his village anarchists did not fit into Marxist-Leninist concepts of how social upheaval takes place, they embodied the revolutionary traditions of Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Nestor Makhnov. In The Hunters, one of the most dramatic images was that of silent revolutionaries floating across the lakes of northern Greece in barges festooned with gorgeous red flags and bunting. These poetic images suggest the enduring ideals of socialist revolution. Megalexandros, rather than simply being abstractly anti-authoritarian or anti-Stalinist, affirms a non-coercive pathway to the socialist future. For conservatives, of course, Angelopoulos’ continued espousal of revolutionary change was sin enough. If Alexander on his white mount looked like Aris to the Left, he looked very much like a mockery of Saint George to the Right. The English lords allied with the palace paralleled the American allies of contemporary conservatives just as the Italian anarchists resembled the extra-parliamentary New Left groups disrupting normal politics in Italy. The  Alexander bust was also uncomfortable for an official history that had turned the lives and deeds of the contentious guerrilla captains of the struggle for independence into hagiography.

136  d a n g eo rgakas As far as Angelopoulos was concerned, Megalexandros deepened the revolutionary analysis of his trilogy. In the aftermath of the Greek junta of 1967–74, it had been a priority of the New Greek Cinema to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Greece. Now, as parliamentary socialism was on the rise, there was room to ask what kind of democracy and what kind of socialism was appropriate for Greece. His reservations about authoritarian revolutionaries seemed most relevant as the guerrillas of the 1940s were being idealised uncritically and the Left was again showing a strong taste for charismatic leaders. Interwoven into all these issues were traditional cultural attitudes that were otherwise rarely questioned. Surely, Alexander the Great had been as cruel as he was visionary, and the guerrilla captains of the war of national independence were not renowned for their sense of mercy. Angelopoulos had given himself the unpopular task of warning Greece that its beloved Alexanders carry a cultural heritage that is capable of crushing the most noble of dreams. While Angelopoulos continued to celebrate the nobility of certain communal dreams, he was not afraid to explore the contradictions in the souls of the dreamers. On the never-ending question of defining Greek identity, Angelopoulos opts for a complex vision of continuous connection with the past. He does not think modern Greeks are Classical Greeks, but he depicts a continuing and evolving continuity through the Byzantines and then the Turkish Occupation to the modern Greek state that fuses Western, Eastern and Balkan elements into a unique amalgam. Megalexandros asserts this identity rather than debating it. In confronting the shortcomings of the contemporary Greek popular movement, Megalexandros stood alone in the New Greek Cinema. Other noted directors in the post-junta period found it difficult to venture much beyond recovering the history that had been denied from the 1950s onward. Pantelis Voulgaris, who had presented the travails of royalist concentration camps in the ironically titled Happy Days (1976), continued to focus only on the story of the persecution of the Left in Τα πέτρινα χρόνια (The Stone Years, 1985), a film made half a decade after Megalexandros. This focus can also be found as late as 1997 in Vangelis Serdaris’s Vassiliki. Nikos Koundouros, who had been on the cutting edge of Greek cinema since the 1950s, took the relatively safe road of dealing with Greek victimisation rather than Greek ambition in his epic 1922 (1978). In short, no other Greek filmmaker was prepared to venture into the territory Megalexandros had pioneered. Also working against popular acceptance of Megalexandros were Angelopoulos’ stylistic peculiarities. After being used in four feature films, they had lost their novelty and had begun to annoy rather than stimulate audiences. In a corollary to the idea that popular formats can subvert radical themes, this film seems to be an example of how esoteric formats can also subvert radical themes. A film celebrating democratic vision was an ideal ideo-

a u t ho ritarianis m and nation al iden tity  137 logical test for the director’s signature style. Angelopoulos had always argued that his manner of pacing, his circular shots, long shots, and the dead spaces he provides in the narrative were designed to liberate the viewer from the tyranny of the director’s gaze (cited in Demopoulos, Liappas [1974] (2001): 21). The viewer could choose what to look at in any given scene and had the time to ponder choices made and even go back to looking or thinking about something that hadn’t seemed important at first. Such a style provides a form of gazing that transcends the director’s vision to some degree, making the viewing ­experience itself a part of the political argument being made. Even more problematic was the development of the major character. Angelopoulos wanted Alexander to be seen from afar as such figures are usually seen in actuality, but that approach was carried out so severely that the lack of a strong individual identity deprived the film of emotional energy. The historical films of Roberto Rossellini, done in a similar style of acute distancing, have also been criticised for this lack. In addition, there is little information provided on the source of the teacher’s anarchist creed or the acceptance by the villagers of that creed. Given this scant psychological information, perhaps more film time was needed for viewers to compose their thoughts on this aspect of the film. In contrast, the opening sequences depicting the prison escape and trip to the mountains feel overly long and stylistically self-indulgent. Even so sympathetic a critic of Angelopoulos as Andrew Horton feels that Megalexandros is one of Angelopoulos’ least successful works. He argues that the film tries to take in too much territory and that the personal relationships are impenetrable (Horton (1997): 61–64). A suggestion has been made that The Travelling Players is like James Joyce’s Ulysses, challenging but accessible to anyone willing to work a bit, and that Megalexandros is like Finnegans Wake, a tome only the most ardent fans can admire.8 Despite these misgivings and the usual observation that whatever its fault the film had unforgettable moments, Megalexandros was recognised by critics as a major work. At the annual Thessaloniki Film Festival, the film won the awards for Best Film, Best Photography, Best Sets and Best Costume. More significantly the film won the Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival. Angelopoulos has stated that he creates various planes of access to his films to engage different kinds of viewers. He doesn’t consider any one of these planes more valuable than any other and doubts anyone but he himself is aware of all the planes. The three most obvious of these portals are the fictional story being told, the mythological elements and the historical references. In regard to Megalexandros all three appear to have failed with the international audience. The saga of Orestes had provided a well-known mythological dimension to The Travelling Players, but audiences either were unfamiliar or uninterested in Alexander lore. The trilogy films had dealt with aspects of the World War II era that were familiar to audiences in the way the making of modern Greek

138  d a n g eo rgakas society is not. Most damaging of all, the specific characters of Megalexandros did not beguile the imagination.

MEGALEXANDROS AND ANARC H IST CINEMA Moving from an auteurist or national cinema focus to that of world-class films dealing with the anarchist tradition, the approach taken by Angelopoulos in Megalexandros must be seen as extremely innovative. Most films supportive of political anarchism deal with individual martyrs such as Joe Hill (1971) and Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) or with terrorists as in Film d’Amore e Anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973) or Nada (1974). These themes had already been established by the pioneers of cinema. Edwin S. Porter told the story of the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley in Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) and D. W. Griffith took on anarchist ­terrorism as a ­phenomenon in The Voice of the Violin (1909). Yet another example of the focus on a personality is Viva Zapata (1953). Competing revolutionary versions are personalised into a conflict between Fernando Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman), an authoritarian, professional revolutionary and Emilia Zapata (Marlon Brando), an anti-authoritarian bred by the injustices of his daily life. Although Zapata makes an emotional statement at the conclusion of the film about the necessity that workers control the means of production, neither director Elia Kazan nor scriptwriter John Steinbeck acknowledged in their comments about the film that the real-life Zapata had anarchist advisers and ran his military in a very decentralised manner. The focus, instead, is on Aguirre’s hunger for political power and Zapata being personally betrayed, martyred and transformed into a legendary leader on a white horse. Closer in spirit to Megalexandros but completely different in format is Rebellion in Patagonia, which uses a melodrama to deal with an anarcho-syndicalist revolt by Argentinean farm workers. The rebels are ultimately betrayed by a duplicitous military and a group of bandits/revolutionaries who call themselves Bolsheviks. The plot focuses on the perspectives of revolutionary  anarchist leaders regarding anarcho-syndicalist forms of governance and organisation. The major dramatic crisis involves the response of the anarchist leaders when they understand their fellow workers have voted a course of action sure to lead to disaster. Should they accept the group decision or act as they think best? If they accept the judgement of their fellow workers, they are likely to be executed. If they flee in order to fight another day, they violate their ideological creed. Megalexandros opts against depicting the anarchist experience as a set of personal histories. Thus, while absolutely rejecting Eisenstein’s use of montage to shape his narratives, Megalexandros is close in spirit to Eisenstein’s

a u t ho ritarianis m and nation al iden tity  139 The Battleship Potemkin (1925). That film attempted to depict a revolutionary moment as the communal experience of an entire crew rather than through the usual means of individual profiles. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Russian navy was one of the strongholds of Russian anarchism. Reaction to films in which anarchists are positively portrayed is often determined by factors outside the film itself. Any film taking on the struggles between the communist and non-communist Left in a complex struggle such as the Spanish Civil War faces this problem. Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995) offers an example. Like George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, it centres on a pro-communist Englishman who goes to fight for the Spanish Republic and is inadvertently assigned to an anarchist unit. He soon comes to support its political perspectives. The plot turns on the communist liquidation of this and other non-communist units in the midst of the mortal struggle with the fascist forces of General Franco. Angelopoulos hoped to avoid shading the larger arguments in the debates within the Left between its libertarian and authoritarian elements by using a political setting that was only metaphorically linked to actual events. Unlike Land and Freedom or Rebellion in Patagonia, Angelopoulos offers no long didactic speeches or scenes with formal debates. Instead, his argument is presented almost exclusively with images and music closely linked to everyday events. What clearly differentiates his approach is that the authoritarian monster is as much an inner demon as an outside villain. The political trilogy that began with Days of ’36 disabused the Greek experience with socialist revolution of all its illusions. Rather than drawing a cynical conclusion, in the film that transforms the trilogy into a quartet, Angelopoulos reaffirms the beauty of the socialist dream. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the global rethinking of the dialectics of revolution, Megalexandros increasingly seems less abstract and narrowly Greek than it once did. Even its technical difficulties have a certain amount of virtue. Megalexandros holds an important place amid a small group of exceptional political films. With the passage of time, it may be recognised as a masterpiece of its kind.

NOTES 1. Available in the United States from The Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 2. The most extensive coverage of anarchism as a theme in film is found in Richard Porton (1999). However, Porton’s comments on Megalexandros are limited as the author was unable to obtain a print. 3. The views attributed to Angelopoulos largely stem from a multi-hour interview with the director by the author in 1992 at the time the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of the films of Angelopoulos. Numerous less formal discussions followed until the director’s death in 2012.

140  d a n g eo rgakas 4. Angelopoulos gathered considerable material regarding Alexander lore from a book published in Greece as The Book of Megalexandros. 5. An ongoing theoretical concern in Greek theoretical writing involves Greek national identity. Some critics virtually ignore the domestic politics in the film to concentrate on the role of foreign powers in the Greek revolution and subsequent governments. See for example Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli (2011). 6. For a discussion of the care Angelopoulos takes to find sites for his various films see Andrew Horton (1997), The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 120–121. The director has boasted that he has been in every village in Greece. His cinematic use of village sites is discussed extensively by Michael Wilmington (1997b). 7. The film did poorly in Europe and even worse in the United States. Although shown at some festivals, it was not commercially released, drew scant critical comment and remains virtually unknown to American audiences. 8. Panel on the work of Angelopoulos, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 1997.

C H APTER 9

Tracks in the Eurozone: Late Style Meets Late Capitalism Mark Steven

PRE HI STORY OF T H E P RESENT CRISIS

M

any of Theo Angelopoulos’ otherwise affectionate critics deride the final film he completed as an artistic failure. In Fredric Jameson’s view, Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) is an unsuccessful attempt ‘to break new ground by transferring the paradigm of discontinuous collective temporalities to the drama of individuals’, doing so in such a way that the historical terrain Angelopoulos once charted so heroically persists only on a distant horizon. The director himself concedes the objective basis of this transformation. He insists that, in his final films, ‘history becomes something of a fresco in the background. Put another way, what used to be History becomes an echo of history’ (Angelopoulos in Horton 1997b: 109). But it is not just the historical content that has diminished into an echo of its earlier soundings. For Angelopoulos, all history is as much a matter of form as it is of content. Leading up to the creation of this final film an extensive mutation took hold of the director’s aesthetic, first making itself known in the films from the late 1980s before gradually engineering the evolutionary supersession of the hitherto favoured techniques. By 2008, the Brechtian accent from the 1970s had been thoroughly suppressed, leaving in its place what appeared as the visual eloquence of a generically art-cinematic aestheticism. The dialectic had given way to narrative continuity. The bravura tracking shots and totalising pans had withdrawn into unobtrusive zooms and gently tilting crane shots. The antiheroic and often bourgeois individual had replaced the embattled collective. And, expediting that replacement, the long or medium shot found itself usurped by the Hollywood close-up. It is because of such changes that a cinema of political commitment has been seen to abjure history and embrace sentimental humanism. These metamorphoses bear all the insignia of what Edward Said once described as ‘late style’, a sensibility that conditions artistic endeavours

142  m a r k s te ve n produced late in one’s career or life, and which is usually recognisable in manifestations of contradiction and disavowal. Glossing Theodor Adorno’s posthumously published reflections on the ‘third period’ of Beethoven’s musical output, Said argues that what we are presented with in those works is ‘a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it’ (2006: 8). Said’s dense prose here mirrors what he recognised to be the signature of Adorno’s own late style, an internal force that took hold of the German philosopher’s sentences, sharpening ‘their incomparable refinement, their programmatically complex internal movement, their way of almost routinely foiling a first or second or third attempt at paraphrasing their content’ (2006: 14). Adorno similarly found Beethoven’s late style in the complicating modification of his aesthetic, hearing it in the ‘decorative trill sequences, cadences and fiorituras’ of that third period (cited in Said [2002] 2006: 9). If the methodological supposition guiding these interpretations is accurate, that late style sediments as the transformative complication of form, perhaps it is precisely this, a late style, which we encounter in Angelopoulos’ final films. Perhaps, too, late style might explain why those films are so consistently preoccupied with the historical outcast and recurrently with the undertakings of ageing and intransigent movie directors. ‘His late works’, Said tells us of Adorno, ‘are a form of exile from his milieu’ (2006: 14). But what our preliminary description of Angelopoulos neglects is the selfcontradictory aspect of late style. Angelopoulos’ unmistakable 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. As Jorge Sanjinés rightly claimed in 1977, ‘a beautiful film can be more revolutionarily effective, because it won’t stay at the level of the pamphlet. A cinema, like a gun, as the cinematic expression of a people without a cinema, must be preoccupied with beauty because beauty is an indispensable element’ (cited in Galt 2011: 208).1 To embrace beauty is not necessarily a capitulation to bourgeois ideology or an expression of market cynicism. Rather, the beautiful is a crucial artistic concept whose ownership remains a point of contestation. ‘For we are fighting’, claims Sanjinés, ‘for the beauty of our people, this beauty that imperialism today tries to destroy, to degrade, to overwhelm’ (cited in Galt 2011: 208). While this kind of thinking might contribute to an understanding of Angelopoulos’ late films and their performative concern with beauty, what would remain unacknowledged is that The Dust of Time fails to satisfy with the stunning visuals we might expect from its director. In many instances and as a whole the film’s potential beauty seems degraded and overwhelmed. For

tracks in the eurozon e  143 that reason, I want to suggest this film is 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 unattractively disjointed. For instance, and to cite one of the more readily apparent complications, this film is somewhat brief by Angelopoulos’ standards. Shorter films are fine and pose no aesthetic problems of their own, but here that relative brevity creates formal tension when truant scenes appear to have been replaced by verbal exposition. Moreover, the expository dialogue, which is delivered predominantly in English, often comes across as wooden, as though the cast of international superstars is uncertain how to deliver lines. As Sylvie Rollet puts it in this book with reference to the stilted acting: ‘The film seems to “speak” the classical language of cinema as if it were a dead language’. Irreducible and interconnected aspects of the film such as these might betray the force of real contradiction: that, in the pursuit of a particular aesthetic, Angelopoulos made a palatably shorter film with an appealing cast, but a film whose length and cast ultimately contribute to its bristling recalcitrance. This chapter argues that in The Dust of Time Angelopoulos is not just arriving at or intensifying a late style for reasons intrinsic to the aesthetic logic of his cinema, though that is certainly a key aspect to the final works. Specifically, my sense is that his late style is equally a response to unresolvable material conditions as it is to the oeuvre from which it evolved, and that the warping presence of history registers consciously in the film’s narrative but also unconsciously in its objective discordance. When asked to respond to his critics about this film, Angelopoulos insisted that ‘directors are not chosen by the critics or by the audience but by the time’, and claimed that each film he makes is another chapter ‘of a big book, about human destiny, about the times passed and about the times coming’ (cited in ‘The Dust of Time’, 2009). Taking the director’s statement seriously, the goal here is to demonstrate that Angelopoulos’ late style is not a matter of historical dissimulation. It is, rather, a mediated response to history, and a response that nonetheless retains its political energy. With a mixture of formal analysis and historical description I want to show that in its complications Angelopoulos’ late style nonetheless enshrines a consummate political intelligence. Rather than dismiss the actual problems with the film my goal here is to situate them within Angelopoulos’ evolving aesthetic and within their historical context, and to demonstrate the peculiar relationship between form and history in this work. Without critically ameliorating such problems, this demonstration might help revise the c­ onventional narrative of Angelopoulos’ political involution. The Dust of Time knowingly weaves itself between two historical moments, both of which occupy the two films that were to bookend it as the centrepiece of an incomplete trilogy. The narrative conceit that locks these moments into a dialectic is simple enough, comprising the director, A. (Willem Dafoe),

144  m a r k s te ve n attempting to make a film about his parents, Eleni (Irène Jacob) and Spyros (Michel Piccoli), about their experience in the USSR in the 1950s, and about their subsequent emigration to the United States and Canada in the 1970s; and, narratively fulfilling the dialectical configuration, it also contains scenes in which A.’s efforts to direct this film are met by his parents’ return to Europe in the present day. Of course, the various trilogies into which Angelopoulos periodised his own films should be approached with some caution given how imprecise the director was with that term, but in this final iteration the unifying structure is much firmer than elsewhere. Unlike the other trilogies this one was deigned from the outset to obtain within a triadic structure; indeed, what was to become the trilogy had originally been intended for just one film. Moreover, each film is historically sequential to the one that preceded it, so that if completed the trilogy would have chronicled three consecutive periods in world history, spanning from the Greek diaspora’s exile from Odessa in 1919 to the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis beginning in 2009. The trilogy begins with To Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004), which is set during the historical period of interwar modernism as defined by serious political projects, grand military allegiances and world-historical oppositions between the communist left and the fascist right. Formally, this film resembles Angelopoulos’ work from the 1970s, reprising many of the technical feats from that period: collective subjectivities woven into epic narratives, discontinuous temporalities, surreal tableaux, lengthy tracking sequences, planimetric long shots and so on. Using these familiar forms, the film chronicles the historical blight of modern Greece, ranging from the Red Army invasion of 1919 through World War II and the Civil War of 1945–50, and it does so while focusing its narrative on a tragically fated pair of lovers, Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) and Alexis (Nikos Poursanidis). The Weeping Meadow thus returns formally to a major site of cinematic modernism, to its revivification in the 1960s and 1970s, but also thematically to first-wave modernism’s distinctive coloration by military struggle and by an upsurge of radical politics.2 While The Weeping Meadow, made in the early years of the twenty-first century, might be the result of nostalgia for cinematic modernism and its historical undercurrents, the renewed interest in older forms and the insurgency those forms depict produces an aesthetic and political symbiosis that will be useful in our analysis of its sequel. A desire to recapitulate older forms in relation to the historical period that was the focus of those earlier political films is to forge a dialectical bond between cinematic form and historical content, as though to imply that the avant-garde aesthetic from the earlier work is inseparably peculiar to its time. But, in this film, the avant-garde aesthetic and the political vitality of collective life are mutually dependent and perfectly anachronistic. As Vrasidas Karalis has observed of this film’s direction: ‘when he reverts to his old monumental style, a certain incommensurability emerges

tracks in the eurozon e  145 between the form and its significations. The personal is the new mode to emerge in the latest films by Angelopoulos’ (2012: 263). To be sure, that its narrative takes place under the generic ensign of tragedy might even betray a conscious realisation of its superannuation within the director’s oeuvre. The trilogy would have concluded in the late capitalist present, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in which the ascendency of neoliberalism finds itself antagonised by internal contradiction and by a resurgence of the old oppositions between left and right. This historical period reached a localised apotheosis with the creation of the Eurozone, an economic and monetary union comprising seventeen European member states, all of which adopted the Euro as their common currency and sole legal tender. The mass adoption of the Euro by eleven states on the first of January 1999 was one of the most punctual and systematic transformations in economic history, comparable to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc approximately one decade earlier. ‘The substitution of a dozen monies by one was’, as Perry Anderson has put it, ‘handled extremely smoothly, without glitch or mishap: an administrative tour de force’ (2011: 49). The stated purpose of the single, shared currency is to lower transaction costs and increase predictability of returns for business, and therefore to unleash higher investment and faster growth of productivity and output; its shared policies, however, allowed for the financially stable sovereigns to exact coercive power on the domestic administration of individual states. It is thus that the Eurozone – often working cheek-by-jowl with the IMF and the ECB – nominates a legally sanctioned force of economic imperialism, driving the money nexus more directly, as mediated through ­governmental apparatuses, into experiential life. The final, incomplete film in the trilogy would have been H Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea), a movie that promised to address itself to the situation of neoliberalism in Greece, conceived of as a member of the Eurozone. If completed, The Other Sea would have been the film with which Angelopoulos joined ranks with a number of other historically interested filmmakers to document the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis. On that front, Greece has felt the effects of the Eurozone perhaps more directly and more negatively than have most other participating states. Soon after its entry in 2002, Greece was subject to charges that its economy was not strong enough to warrant admission, given that its government appeared to have falsified their deficit numbers by using antiquated accounting methods. All of this, most of which took place after the Financial Audit of 2004, led to immediate changes in domestic policy, many of which pre-empted the Eurozone’s direct interventions to follow in 2009. These interventions include the external imposition and internal implementation of shock-therapeutic austerity measures, the privatisation of government assets and the transformation of laws surrounding domestic production. Despite and also because of massive cuts to its funding, Greek cinema has been

146  m a r k s te ve n quick to react to this situation, and the Greek Weird Wave arguably occupies within an aesthetic of nationalised reaction.3 Though we can only speculate on how The Other Sea would have been realised on screen, from what we know about its narrative we can safely forecast that from within this context it would have given new life to the political energies of the earlier films. As Andrew Horton shows by looking at its script in the afterward to this book, the film was to have taken place amidst factories and shanty towns and it was to have been populated by striking workers and unemployed immigrants; it was to have portrayed parliamentary corruption in the despicable crime of people trafficking; there was to have been open conflict between the state and the workers, intensified by the bulldozing of an immigrant settlement; and, at the heart of all this, there was to have been a small theatrical troupe, an evident throwback to the 1970s films and especially Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1971), trying to stage Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. The Dust of Time is concerned with what happened between these two very different moments, of revolutionary modernism and of a politically animate response to neoliberalism, and so it represents a kind of interregnum for political and artistic practice. The opening sequence, which typifies the narrative to follow, folds time and history in such a way that recalls what Angelopoulos once achieved when combining several years into a single shot. In this sequence, A. arrives at the Cinecittà movie studio in Rome, to edit a film that we later learn is about his parents. Several shots depict him pacing through the studio with a beleaguered assistant who reminds him of his producers’ concern for the film, which is running over budget and behind schedule. These shots are intercut with those of a man on a train, receiving counterfeit papers with which he and an unnamed woman are to cross the border out of the USSR. After superimposed text announces the film’s title, the camera moves in for a close-up of A.’s face while he gazes through a viewing apparatus, with the rapidly passing filmstrip partially obscuring our view of his concentration. Accompanying this image are the triumphant overtones of a marching band accompanied by the cheering of a crowd, which together serve as a sound-bridge to what follows. The scene cuts to a medium close-up of Joseph Stalin, in what appears to be the stock historical footage viewed by A., which then alternates increasingly distant and low-angle shots of the iconic demagogue with panning medium shots of a clearly exuberant crowd, marching in Red Square. The camera pulls back to reveal that this footage is screening in an old cinema, in a commune for exiled Greeks somewhere in the USSR. Here the man from the train, Spyros, meets with Eleni, with whom an attempted exodus from the USSR thus begins. As a technical device, this sequence unites the film’s two temporalities and in that sense it formalises A.’s opening monologue, a kind of Faulknerian epigraph: ‘Nothing ended’, he says in voice-over. ‘Nothing ever ends. I returned to where I let a story slip into the past. Losing its clarity under the dust of time,

tracks in the eurozon e  147 and then, unexpectedly, at some moment, it returns, like a dream. Nothing ever ends’. But note here that the mediation between past and present is by way of film: the cinematic medium is presented as an index to these seemingly distant and hitherto narratively unrelated temporalities. And note, too, that the past is monumentally socialist, whereas the present, with its talk of producers, financiers and budgetary constraints, is decisively bound to the market. It is as though the film itself, The Dust of Time, wants to allegorise its own historical location, stretched between these two moments and the political forces that define them. The aesthetic labour for The Dust of Time, which is dictated by its position within the trilogy as well as by this opening scene, is to register that historical transition from modernism to neoliberalism dialectically. Many years ago now, Jameson proposed that, in Angelopoulos’ shifting architectonic, the ‘elements of a formal regression to much less interesting matters coexist with a leap ahead to a new formal situation utterly unforeseen in the earlier period, and anticipatory of realities not yet adequately confronted anywhere in the art beginning to emerge in our New World Order . . .’ (1997: 89) The challenge faced by Angelopoulos is to present capitalism’s post-war defeat of the left at the same time as delineating a prehistory for the future left’s unpredictable resurgence. In what follows I want us to look at scenes set in the past of the USSR (specifically the USSR soon after Stalin’s death) and scenes set in the European neoliberalism that mediates this past back into the film’s narrative present. The goal here will be to scan those two overlapping space-times for a submerged political intelligence making itself known precisely through their overlap, and to determine the ways in which that intelligence might seize hold of and galvanise a late style.

POST- U TO P I AN C I NEMA One of the early scenes in The Dust of Time introduces a visual trope that will return throughout the film: an extreme long shot depicting vast metallurgical plants that pump billowing plumes of smoke and ash into a poisoned sky. This tableau is emblematic of what Slavoj Žižek describes as the historical terrain mostly likely to produce revolution. ‘The postindustrial wasteland of the Second World’, he says, ‘is in effect the privileged “evental site”, the symptomal point out of which one can undermine the totality of today’s global capitalism’ (2006: 159). While this formulation might be abstract, it nevertheless acquires an additional potency in relation to the films of Angelopoulos, where factories remain home to variously disenfranchised collectives and a principal site on which those collectives forge if not revolutionary then at least historically obstinate modes of being.4 But in The Dust of Time, the revolution took

148  m a r k s te ve n place many years earlier; its historical sequence has already run its course; and now the factories are once again alien. They remain operational, but their landscapes are uninhibited and seemingly uninhabitable. There is, to be sure, no single shot that includes both humans and factories on the same visual plane; instead, the former are doomed to trudge aimlessly about snowdrifts on the steppe, appearing only in distant foregrounds, while the latter function in the background as though by daemonic volition. Humanity’s manifest alienation from this landscape is emphasised in one of the film’s more remarkable images: a slowly zooming and upwardly tilting long shot of a zigzagging stairwell, standing out black against ashen snow, which men and women mount in resolute silence. Unlike the slow march of alienated factory workers in Metropolis (1927), this Escher-like ascent keeps its climbers in isolation from one another, visually spacing them apart with only two or three workers to each flight of stairs, like ants forever circling the Mobius strip. In voice-over, Eleni informs us that we are in Siberia and that the year is 1956, three years after the death of Stalin (which we will discuss in a moment). This kind of decaying industrial landscape, so frequently emblematic not of revolutionary momentum but of historical stagnation, has been a staple for cinema in the late USSR and its aftermath, receiving devoted treatment in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr.5 I nominate these two directors because of the obvious similarities between them and Angelopoulos, but also because they are in almost every way antithetical to their distant geopolitical precursors, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, whose utopianism was palpable in the unrivalled speed of their forms and in their sheer love for the industrial proletariat. These two decidedly post-utopian filmmakers, Tarkovsky and Tarr, traded in montage and action-images for long shots and extended duration; their films reactively depict lumpen masses as opposed to the victorious multitude; their narrative focus shifted from the collective (and its heroic leaders) to the hard-won humanism of the (often fractured) family unit; and, perhaps most notably, they enjoy classical beauty. Here I want to identify The Dust of Time, or at least its USSR sequences, with the aesthetic predilections of those other two directors, and so with the melancholic tendencies of what I would like to call post-utopian cinema. András Bálint Kovács provides a perceptive description of the political undercurrents guiding this aesthetic with specific reference to Tarr. For him, after the descent into Stalinism, ‘the wish to overturn the communist regime by force was viewed as purely destructive rather than heroic and revolutionary, and so the slow erosion of an authoritarian, corrupt, cynical and unproductive social and political system seemed to be the future for generations to come’ (2013: 132). One particularly melancholic feature of the mise en scène in The Dust of Time is a visual trope that appears and reappears throughout Angelopoulos’ career and as a marker of his late style: a preoccupation with ‘broken stones and

tracks in the eurozon e  149 statues’, as one of his characters put it in an earlier film. During the mid-to-late1950s and after Stalin’s death, statues of socialist leaders and the champions of the Russian Revolution became metonymic for the process of de-Stalinisation, with every disintegrating bust and severed head ultimately registering the deterioration of state socialism. In The Dust of Time, Eleni’s temporary lover, Jacob (Bruno Ganz) is summoned by the director of the Cultural Centre, in Siberia, and is led into an abandoned warehouse, in which he and Eleni navigate their way between dozens of alabaster statues of Stalin. ‘Siberia, December ’56’, Eleni’s voice-over reminds us. ‘In the space of a single night portraits and statues of Stalin disappeared’. The visual effect here is much less striking than Lenin’s colossal funeral barge in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), but these smaller statues serve the same metonymic purpose, signifying elegiacally. ‘It’s a goodbye to an era’, explained Angelopoulos. ‘I am saying goodbye to all of that, which is or was also part of me and my childhood and youth. That broken statue represents the end. A complete end’ (Horton 1997b: 104). There are historical reasons for the affective intensity with which Angelopoulos feels that end, and many of these reasons are to do with the dissociation of communism as a utopian idea from its implementation through the socialist state, and especially with that state’s assimilation back into the matrices of capitalism. The historical transition from socialism into a post-socialist aftermath is given no finer artistic treatment than in one of the more inspired sequences from The Dust of Time, which centrally involves a statue. At the beginning of their attempted escape from the USSR, Eleni and Jacob board a streetcar, which soon grinds to a halt before the convergence of a silent multitude, whose hundreds of men and women are amassing before

Figure 9.1 The Dust of Time

150  m a r k s te ve n a ­town-square statue of Stalin and a column of red flags. The scene begins within the streetcar, which is still moving, as we gaze out through a cloudy window. Once the streetcar stops there are two alternating shot types. One is the non-focalised but embodied perspective shot, which first tracks and pans to follow the streetcar before settling on the people marching alongside it, and which later views the scene from within the streetcar, panning 90° away from the multitude to focus on the melodrama of the two, when Eleni and Spyros declare their love. Eleni notices that the music has stopped. Until now we have only heard the classical score on a non-diegetic soundtrack, to which Eleni and Spyros also seem to be recorded, giving their voices an uncanny, almost disembodied feel. As both lovers look out of the window, the film cuts not to their perspective but to the centre of the square, below the statue, looking back at them: it is almost a distant reverse shot, depicting five soldiers, the crowd that surrounds them and the roof of the streetcar which is barely visible over their heads in the background. This second type of shot belongs to the inhuman perspective camera itself, which previously observed the marching crowds with a frontal medium shot, before recreating that angle here from the foot of the statue. Four more soldiers fall in and salute as a crackly speaker system makes its announcement, which translates into English: ‘Comrades! Citizens of the Soviet Union! Today our leader Comrade Stalin has died. His great heart has stopped beating. The sun has set’. The camera cranes upward and simultaneously tilts downward so as to capture the entire crowd in a single overhead image, keeping the nine soldiers in the centre foreground. The speaker requests a moment of silence, the Internationale is played, the Internationale ends, and the crowd gradually disperses, with the soldiers leaving first. Sobbing and wailing is audible over the crunching of heavy boots through snow. The final person to leave, from just right of the shot’s centre, pauses and raises both arms, as though bemused. This is how the collective atomises, decoupling down to the singular individual, to the affected, subjective analogue for whatever romantic drama now plays out invisibly in the streetcar. While that melodrama prepares to resume its place as the narrative focalisation the multitude leaves only temporary tracks in the snow. The camera’s movements serve to illustrate and emphasise this transition, from one world view to another, shifting from an epic or monumental historiography to the differently affective realm of sexual and familial relations. This scene takes place early in the film, and it thus helps frame the events that follow both narratively and historically. According to Boris Groys, it was this event, the death of Stalin, which inaugurated a post-utopian way of life in the Soviet: The barricades against bourgeois progress that were supposed to protect the country from the flood of historical change now crumbled as the Soviet Union sought to return to history. Some time passed before it was

tracks in the eurozon e  151 realized that there was nowhere to return to, for history itself had in the meantime disappeared. The entire world entered the posthistorical phase when – and here Stalin’s experiment played a part – it lost its faith that history could be overcome. For when history no longer strives toward consummation, it disappears, ceases to be history, stagnates. (1992: 75) Despite its apparent disappointment with the outcome of Soviet history, post-utopian cinema, which in this film consciously post-dates Stalin’s death, does not descend into a facile celebration of capitalism and liberal democracy. Instead, it returns to those sites of a now extinct or exhausted socialism with a conflicted sense of longing, as though wanting to preserve the residual energies of the premise on which the USSR was created to begin with. While the former GDR is perhaps the most familiar locale of this affective structure, which articulates as historical farce through films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Good Bye Lenin! (2003), The Dust of Time is similarly conflicted about the transition from socialism and it registers that conflict with a more sombre formalism.6 We can see this in its depiction of Eleni and Jacob leaving the USSR for the West, in an episode that clearly registers an even more potent disappointment with the USSR’s geopolitical alternative than with the Gulag-esque setting in which they been living. ‘Goodbye, Russia. Goodbye’, mutters Jacob, at the Soviet-Austrian border. During their admission to Austria, Eleni and Jacob are positioned at the front of a large group, not quite as numerous as that which gathered around the statue for Stalin’s death, whose final member, an elderly man, is reluctant to cross. He stops, sits on his suitcase, and cries, before his granddaughter rushes back, leading him by hand into the free world whilst singing a Christmas tune. The world into which he as well as Eleni and Jacob now enter is depicted in the subsequent shot, in which we are told that it is New Year, 1974. The Soviet refugees dance to an accordion and at what appears to be gunpoint (watchtowers with spotlights and armed guards preside over them). The crowd is then divided into two groups, destined either for Israel or for the United States and elsewhere, and the two speaking characters, Eleni and Jacob, are sent in their separate directions. ‘My destiny takes me somewhere else,’ says Eleni. ‘No matter how many years have gone by, no matter what happened between us, I am someone else’s woman. Let me go.’ Once again, like the passage from Stalinism into its aftermath, the transition from the USSR into the West is a movement defined by atomisation, and it registers here as melodrama. These objective features of the film – the industrial landscapes, the broken statues, the tilting crane shot, the visual and narrative scattering of the USSR’s former subjects – should recall those celebrated shots from Angelopoulos’ earlier films, in which the form itself seemed to forge politicised groups. That is what we see when the marching drunkards are tracked by the camera as they

152  m a r k s te ve n become lockstep fascists in The Travelling Players; or when the prisoners are rearranged into an insurgent cell by panning shots in Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972); or even in The Weeping Meadow, when the planimetric depiction of the flotilla generates a community borne together and hierarchically flattened by grief. But, in The Dust of Time, that collectivising composition is set to play out in reverse, disaggregating multitudes into individuated subjects. Unlike those earlier films, here groups are only depicted at the moment of their dispersal, as they splinter apart visually, narratively and historically. This is the very essence of a post-utopian cinema, the atomisation of humans into unrelated and alienated individuals, preparing them for a new life under capitalism. It also underwrites one of the defining features of Angelopoulos’ late style, a shift away from the collective to the individual, and the kind of aesthetic tropes that accompany such a shift.

SCREEN I NG CAP I TAL I SM The USSR sequences are not part of the film’s dominant narrative modality. Rather, those sequences take place in analepsis, and are reframed by the film’s structuring device, which centres on a director whose attempt to make a film about his parents’ experience in the USSR is interrupted by the disappearance of his daughter, who is also named Eleni. Casting a filmmaker as the protagonist had by 2004 become a mainstay of Angelopoulos’ narratives, and is readily familiar from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) and Ulysses’ Gaze. But here the decision to focus on a director provides a critical mediation between the past and present, hypothetically allowing the film to think about its own role and the role of its medium in the transition between historical moments. For what remains of this chapter, I want us to look at some of the ways the film invites this reflexive allegory, and to account for some of the ways that its historical context contributes to an aesthetic discordancy, which will return us to the question of late style. Setting aside the producers who finance and capitalise on A.’s creative output, whose invisible presence is telegraphed in the film’s opening minutes, the world he inhabits is conspicuously more repressive, more securitised and altogether more authoritarian than the Siberian setting in which he was conceived and born. Almost all of the outdoor scenes set in the present day include an assortment of paramilitary guards or what A. criticises as ‘Rambo types’, jackbooted men dressed in black fatigues, heavily armed and sometimes tethered to guard dogs. The securitised state as figured by this omnipresence of military force also articulates the multiple screens made visible in this setting. When the present-day Eleni and Spyros pass through an airport there is a long, slowly zooming shot of the X-ray scans to which all passengers must submit

tracks in the eurozon e  153 prior to entry into Europe. The shot is composed, looking from its margins to its centre, by multiple screens: nearest to the frame are two blue X-ray scanners, before which stand the fully clothed passengers; more central to those are two vertical screens upon which images of the passengers appear naked; at the centre of the frame, in the background, is a door leading to an exit, flanked by two guards; in the foreground is another screen, where a third guard checks the replicated images of the naked passengers. The camera slowly zooms in on that foreground monitor when an elderly Spyros appears on it, as though to accentuate physical senescence.7 After several seconds the shot is interrupted by A.’s off-screen shouting: ‘What do you want from me? What the hell do you want from me? I refuse to go through this humiliating process’. An anonymous mans breaks free of the queue, fleeing from the guards and into a completely different space-time: the scene of the border crossing, which we have already discussed. These images of high-tech security scans and of an emphatically intimidating paramilitary appear on either side of that scene, emphasising a continuity between guarded borders leading out of the USSR and, here, borders into the Eurozone. They imply a subtext about the militarisation of the free world and the recruitment of screen media for that purpose, and they seem to indicate that both historical moments, past and present, have been conceived of by the one consciousness. If Angelopoulos’ post-utopian cinema can be diagnosed with political nihilism or even with a conflicted nostalgia for historically inaccessible socialist alternatives, then that diagnosis must account for the fact that the scenes set in the USSR have been imagined from this very present. One scene, from near the film’s ending, knowingly emblematises the relationship between this kind of cinema and the historical moment that produced it. A.’s missing daughter, the younger Eleni, has been located. A. as well as both his parents, Eleni and Spyros, are brought to her location, where she has been sited looking from the window on the third floor of a derelict building that is now surrounded by riot police. The senior Eleni is granted entry by the building’s hitherto unseen inhabitants. As she arrives on the third floor the camera circles her and in doing so it takes in the mass of dispossessed men and women living there, one of whom tosses a bottle that shatters near her feet, as well as the advancing squadron of riot police, who have amassed on neighbouring rooftops and are filling the lower levels of an adjacent building. There is real suspense in this, conveyed by an unmistakable volatility. Here, in the Eurozone, ‘the unemployed and underemployed’ are, as Costas Douzinas has written, debarred from ‘the political system’ and ‘treated as a security threat and policing measure’, and it is precisely that threat which temporarily dynamises this scene (2013: 26). All of this is redolent of Angelopoulos’ 1970s films, and even The Weeping Meadow, where refugees take shelter in abandoned buildings, and in which barely repressed class conflict is forever on the verge of eruption. Here,

154  m a r k s te ve n however, the sutures that previously would have sided us with the refugees and exiles have been aggressively reversed in what appears to be a supreme act of bad faith. As the two Elenis are reunited for a moment of unearned pathos – the granddaughter runs to her grandmother and unconvincingly repeats the phrase ‘I want to die’ – the riot police close in, forcibly clearing the building of its inhabitants. There is no struggle or retaliation. The volatility dissipates and melodrama is triumphant. By dispersing the building’s occupants the riot police ensure the melodramatic sacrosanctity of this narrative instant, so that the film can better enjoy its sentimental apotheosis without feeling the threat of history, embodied by the disenfranchised multitude, which paradoxically is now more present than ever in its forceful extirpation. Whatever beauty or humanism or melodrama prevails here is forcefully surcharged by military force.8 We have seen that this film contains elements of post-utopian cinema, that the forces of capital seem to structure its circumambient narrative, and that these two levels of the diegetic universe overlap for an uneasy late style, which shifts formally and thematically away from the collective and towards individuation, and in doing so faces if not outright contradiction then at least a paradox. The film depicts that shift, allegorising the fate of its own aesthetic as a response to history, without necessarily endorsing it: the melancholy border-crossing out of the past and the highly visible militarisation of the present seem to authorise this assessment. While this does not ameliorate some of the film’s more basic errors (the dialogue remains especially painful) it nevertheless provides us with an optic through which to review some of the more self-contradictory aspects of Angelopoulos’ late style, which attempts to forge something beautiful from material conditions that militate against its success. Finally, then, what about those seemingly divine glimpses of a utopian alternative, which were offered by the earlier films and which might stubbornly convey the nucleus of a now impossible collective life, before that life prepares for its unpredictable reactivation in the trilogy’s incomplete third film: are they present in all of this? Bringing us full circle, we encounter signs of collective life in moments of late style as a kind of expatriate grace, and we can finish here with just one instance of this. Reunited in old age, in what we already know to be the militarised Eurozone, the three lovers, Eleni, Spyros, and Jacob, wander the streets of Berlin and enter a Metro station. ‘We dreamt of another world,’ says Jacob. ‘Now it is all lost. Yet it all began so differently,’ to which Spyros replies: ‘We were cast aside by history.’ A folk band busks in the Metro and the three lovers take turns dancing: first Spyros and Eleni, then Spyros allows Jacob, now Eleni’s husband, to take his place. The dance lasts only seconds, with the camera slowly arcing around the three like an invisible fourth party, but in this moment and for just those few seconds we bear witness to the cinematic recoupling of the preterite individuals, whose descendants will, if not yet

tracks in the eurozon e  155 ­ istorically then at least in a nigh fittingly unrealised sequel, be seen to inherit h the earth. Late style emerges once again here in a structural complication faced by narrative continuity, as the inability to convincingly terminate this genuinely affecting orchestration, which would thereby reconcile the characters’ past with their historical present. Rather than having the dance end naturally or by way of some external intervention, the form itself seems to intrude on them through another melodramatic irruption. Eleni’s inexplicably failing health, or perhaps even her age, causes her to faint. The three characters are thus returned to their post-utopian present, but that return is underwritten by the force of a late style, which complicates any peaceable reconciliation between the Soviet refugees and the New World Order: for now, theirs is a life that can only endure aside from history.

NOTES 1. In the excellent book from which this quotation is borrowed, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, Rosalind Galt argues that ‘art cinema’s definitional interest in the artistic qualities of the medium’ suggest that it will comprise a ‘complicating rejection of modernist austerity’, a dynamic which, she insists, contributed to the canonisation of Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci. ‘Between anti-aesthetic austerity and the richly designed image’, she argues, ‘prettiness is at stake in art cinema and in the terms of its critical contestation’ (2011: 192–3). 2. This is how András Bálint Kovács periodises cinematic modernism, whose dominant periods ‘followed the two important avant-garde or modernist waves in art: the first in the 1910s and 1920s, the second in the 1960s’ (2007: 52). 3. As the director of one of these films, Athina Rachel Tsangari, describes her assuredly postindustrial aesthetic: ‘These are the ruins of modern Greece. They are like the Acropolis, which are the ruins of our collective psychosis with our past. It’s a bauxite mine, depleted by a French company that came, took everything, ruined everything and left’ (Tsangari in Lucas 2012). 4. See, for instance, the scene from The Weeping Meadow, in which a band of musicians emerge, one by one, from within the abandoned factory. 5. We can see this in Зеркало (The Mirror, 1975) and Сталкер (Stalker, 1979) directed by Tarkovsky, and in Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000) directed by Tarr. 6. In The Dust of Time the dismantling of the Berlin Wall is only mentioned via radio broadcast, heard distantly from the USA. However, the recurrent trope of an angel’s ‘third wing’ can be taken as an allusion to Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), which is set in East Berlin and which also stars Bruno Ganz. 7. The blocking here is a near quotation of the old man in the hospice from Werckmeister harmóniák. 8. This scene might be productively juxtaposed to the superlative travelling shot from the end of Children of Men (2003), which is narratively and thematically similar to this, but tonally very different: unlike this, that scene amplifies the political tension to a fever pitch.

C H APTER 10

Cinematography of the Group: Angelopoulos and the Collective Subject of Cinema Julian Murphet

I

t would be arguable that the gold standard of commercial narrative film, the ‘affection image’ or facial close-up, is a fatal error for any cinema of the Left; that Griffith’s pioneering innovations in the conventions of close-up cinematography were nothing less than a capture of the fledgling discourse of narrative cinema for the forces of sentimental reaction, leaving a legacy of bourgeois individualism lodged within the very grammar of the form. The conventions of eye-line matching and shot-reverse-shot montage, and the anchoring of emotional catharsis in the fetishised face as such, have tended to predispose commercial film narrative towards an individualist formal conservatism – melodrama in the age of mechanical reproduction. To that extent, the programmed apparition of these faces in a crowd – the routine singling out of some privileged visage from amid the anonymous masses of modernity – ­functions invariably in narrative cinema as a foreclosure of potential political energies, and their translation into some other ethical discourse: personal, emotive, moralistic. Within the hegemony of the close-up as ‘money-shot’ of sentimental cinema, other modes of framing, especially the long shot, are subordinated to roles of mere locational establishment or the necessary discharge of kinetic energy in relatively autonomous action sequences. It is more or less impossible to construct a critical political cinema in the terms offered by this hegemony, even when treating the most ‘radical’ materials, as witness the fatuous mendacities of Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), or the clunking mechanics of the biopic in Frida (2002), to mention only two egregious examples. The long history of Left cinema has typically sought strategies of refusing this particular trap of ideological closure, and to articulate new, collective ways of seeing and feeling in film form. Eisenstein’s heroic working masses tended to swarm inside the frame, dynamically overrunning the Apollonian constraints of the individual body on screen, and serving to counterpoint his mostly satiric close-up portraits of the people’s class enemies. Apart from their

160  j u l i a n m urphe t service in framing the notable ‘world-historical’ individuals (Kerensky, Lenin, Ivan, Nevsky) who people his films, Eisenstein’s close-ups were indeed more often of Marxian ‘types’ than bourgeois subjects: lumpens, spies, ecclesiastics, officers, politicians, and industrialists. Vertov meanwhile waged war on the individual as any kind of support for cinematic sequences, and even when detailing the individual body tended to compose it out of dissociated parts, so that the faces themselves seemed to float free of any particular person. Buñuel, having framed the rural poor with only passing attention to individual faces in Las Hurdes (1933), and presented the urban lumpenproletariat with a sly neo-realist classicism in Los Olvidados (1950), then developed a satirical group cinematography for the ruling-class collectives of his later films – and relished scenarios in which these groups were broken in upon or exposed to other groups, instigating a formal breakdown in the cinema’s closed group security for the bourgeoisie. By the 1970s, with an international rise in militant Left and Third cinemas, new strategies were devised for the presentation of the collective nature of experience – as witness Cuban cinema’s revolutionary collectivism, Fellini’s nostalgic-progressive evocations of organic communities, or Godard’s pitiless horizontal track, in Tout va bien (1972), back and forth along a line of supermarket checkouts, beyond which the anarchist youth c­ ollective agitates the milling herd. Moving images like Godard’s rehearse the contemporary work by JeanPaul Sartre on groups, and the dialectical tension between the ‘inert seriality’ (Sartre [1960] 2004: 355) of massed modern living, on the one hand, and the eventful creation of a synthesised or ‘fused group’ (2004: 345) in the movement of praxis, on the other. The very logic of these films’ various attempts to propose a new, non- or post-individualistic subjectivity for filmic elaboration chimes with the rise of new political group formations in the women’s movement, anti-colonial activism, Black Power and gay liberation at the same time. Sartre’s pioneering conceptual efforts could thus be seen to have taken on flesh in the streets in this period, in a manner evidently more propitious for cinematic treatment than the much more abstract and forbidding notion of economic class itself, only fitfully transposable into filmic form on the basis of this or that vanguard party or group in any event, if not in an openly proletkult manner or apolitical ‘blue collar’ variety. In these and many other Left cinematic efforts over the long arc of the twentieth century, the individual was displaced from the centre of narrative gravity, in favour of forms of collective subjectivity, a tendency reaching some kind of apotheosis in Peter Watkins’ extraordinary, nearly six-hour long La Commune (de Paris, 1871). In a more liberal mode, the tendency can also be seen working its way through the American canon in the cinema of Robert Altman, who proved stubbornly indifferent to the standard individualism of his national climate; and more ­latterly in the early work of his great disciple Paul Thomas Anderson.

cine m ato graphy of the group   161 If it is true, as Fredric Jameson observes, that in Theo Angelopoulos we have a cinema openly seeking to ‘neutralize the categories of individualism and the individual body but also the individual character altogether’ (1997: 85), then it will be useful to specify some of the formal means whereby that neutralisation is effected. For while Angelopoulos remains a distinctive politico-aesthetic intelligence, as distant from the Vertov-like provocations of midperiod Godard as he is from the categories of ‘imperfect cinema’ or Watkins’ pseudo-documentary style – closer, perhaps, to Antonioni and Tarkovsky than these more dedicated ‘group’ forms, Angelopoulos nevertheless retains elements of an aesthetic quite foreign to those other post-war auteurs; a veritable (and nationally derived) classicism whose ponderous indifference to standard principles of action or conventional scenography is registered in the extreme longueurs of his various episodes. That is to say, in Angelopoulos, the group shot is always conceived through a double-optic: at once a formal reference to a classical pre-modernity in which the travails of individuality have not yet properly emerged, and a political incitation from within the throes of late modernity to re-imagine post-subjective collective identities resistant to alienation and anomie, typically by way of references to the militant group ­formations of Greece’s tortured political past. Or at least, so much might be said for the first sustained phase of his oeuvre, spanning the years 1970–80, since the determinate break that has been universally detected at that latter point is generally associated with a turn to more subjective cinema (rightly or wrongly), in which the group focus is typically constricted to a familial scale if it survives at all as a bearer of actantial value. Jameson’s charge that the second phase is organised around ‘the individual subjectivity, the individual experience, the leading protagonist, the narrative ‘point of view’, which he characterises in terms of aesthetic ‘regression’ and an ‘annulment’ of the first phase’s commitment to collectivity (1997: 88–9),1 strikes me as rather unfair and properly descriptive of only the director’s least important work, the execrable Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986), and the studious festival work Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995); since one would be hard put to identify the protagonist of Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) or Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), while Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) strikes a determined return to collectivity proper, and the glorious Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) not only features a pseudo-couple as its central actant, but centrally revives the travelling players themselves. In any event, it is surely important to insist that just as the Oresteia itself (like all the Aeschylean and Sophoclean classics that Angelopoulos habitually invokes) is concerned with the allegorical relationship between the family and the state, the group in Angelopoulos is never to be fully separated from the familial network in which it is invariably enmeshed. His classicism, indeed, makes it

162  j u l i a n m urphe t finally impossible to disentangle the sacred affective investments of familial ethics from the political responsibilities of the group itself. In any event, the purpose of this chapter is to scan Angelopoulos’ early contributions to the project of a collectivist cinema for those signature formal effects that make his work truly distinctive; and so to delineate some aestheticpolitical limits to his cinematography of the group, which may therefore have forced him by a mounting aesthetic logic – as well as a geopolitical one – to transfer to a more ‘subjectivist’ approach in his later work. Rather than assume that the change in focus and the retrieval of what Jameson elsewhere calls ‘protagonicity’ from 1984 onwards is an extrinsic phenomenon imported into the work – for example, that the themes of migrancy and of the cosmopolitan peripatetic artist that pepper the later work, are simple effects of historical change: the crisis in the Balkans, and the closure of a certain chapter in Greek history within an emergent neoliberal consensus – it is as well to consider the strong possibility that the change resulted as much from internal pressures and the sensed limitations of the earlier mode itself. My own hypothesis is that both extrinsic and intrinsic causality dovetailed in the early 1980s, and precipitated a seismic redistribution of cinematic techniques within Angelopoulos’ formal arsenal – the most evident of which is the relative eclipse, indeed the virtual disappearance, of what will be the central technical exhibit of this chapter, namely the long-take circular or semi-circular pan in long shot, stretching from between 180° and 720°, as the great auteur’s most distinctive device for dynamic group framing. The pan, whose etymological origins in the Greek word (Πᾶν) for totality is an obvious dimension of its significance in this classicist cinema, is an understudied grammatical term in cinematic articulation: less flamboyant than the tracking shot, less aggressive than the cut, and more invisible than the zoom or tilt, the pan seems destined to a relatively minor role in the distribution of filmic narrative devices, on the order of the comma in written language, relegated to the analogous gesture of a turn of the head in conversation. And yet things begin to look different when the 90° angle is breached, and the camera proceeds to exceed the natural turning angle of the human neck (à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist) – for at such moments, the pan truly seeks to fulfil its concept in that 360° arc which completes a full circuit and maps out all the available space in a single horizontal sweep. Think of the opening telephoto pan of Altman’s Thieves Like Us, (1974), which patiently articulates the convict world by way of handcar, boat, and automobile; or the early stable shot in Andrei Rublev, (1966), which fuses the world of peasant carnival and laughter into a rounded whole; or the farmyard piano sequence in Godard’s Weekend (1967); or the well-known murder scene from Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of M. Lange, 1936), which Bazin described as a ‘pure spatial expression of the entire mise-en-scène’ (Bazin [1971] 1992: 42).

cine m ato graphy of the group   163 The pan, once it leaps the traces of an acute angle, is perhaps cinema’s most trenchant shorthand for the totality as such: a camera movement whose logic is not self-regarding but self-effacing, committed to opening up the space that surrounds the frame, dismantling the fourth wall, and disintegrating the privileged position of the spectator. In early Angelopoulos, as we are about to see, that logic is precisely matched with his avocation for a cinematography of the group, such that its principal function is to allow the group to come into being as such, as a mobile and purposeful unit, and not merely a ‘planimetric’ spatial composition of bodies (Bordwell 1997: 21–2). In a word, if the pan’s most august aesthetic role is to unfurl a world, then in Angelopoulos that world is always already occupied by groups, alive with their cross-purposes and contradictions. Here, to totalise is to disclose the way in which a world is riven from within by the various groups that claim it, incompatibly, as their own. Let us begin where Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) ends, in the culminating scene where the murderous couple are led away from the village by the agents of the state, only to confront what Hegel would have called the ‘ethical community’ of village women standing for the ‘law of the heart’ – who attack the murderess in a group assault. The scene is mounted in a sequence of shots: first a panning still camera which follows the culprits and the police down the hill, only to break its rightward drift when the woman catches sight of what we do not yet see, and lurches left to trace a full 360° pan which articulates the hitherto dissociated village community into a ‘fused group’ ready to act: its total silence and the stillness of the poised bodies endows the ­full-circular pan with a prodigious aesthetic gravity. This is followed by a quick medium shot, panning left, of a breakaway woman who leads the charge; then a high-angle tilted shot of the whole group rushing upon and surrounding the guilty woman for violating the family bond. There follows a montage of five hand-held POV shots of the melee (very unusual for Angelopoulos: he would never again repeat the same device); and then a punctuating return to the high-angle group shot as the affray nears its end (in a circular composition that will be loosely echoed and perfected ten years later in the climactic sequence of Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980) as we shall see. What bears particular attention here is the slow and silent 360° pan at the start, for with it Angelopoulos establishes what will be an enduring strategy for presenting the group in his cinematic discourse. Indeed, I am going to argue that the 360°, 720° or 180° pan is his preferred technical device for transforming a mere community into a fused group. Its virtues in this regard are several: • The pan discloses the spatial horizon within which a group emerges, since in Angelopoulos there can be no group without the space in which its act becomes possible.

164  j u l i a n m urphe t • The pan gathers anonymous, distributed agents into a circle, a knot, of political or ethical energy. • The pan exceeds the orbit or trajectory of any particular individual, its momentum is molar, not molecular. • The pan totalises, it literally fixes the Πα˜ν or all within which a group breaks loose from its merely serial, practico-inert dispensation in the larger collective. So far, so good. And we can immediately see the difference a totalising pan can make when we compare the opening scene from Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972). Here the energy is arranged entirely the other way around: a static extreme high-angle shot of the workers gathering in the factory square, followed by a motivated pan, tracking the political organiser as he approaches the elevated ground where he will be assassinated. This is a distinct grammar: the grammar of non-fusion, of an aborted encirclement, of a collective failing to group itself. It is ‘corrected’ later in the film, in the great prison-yard sequence, which is the first of Angelopoulos’ fully mature 360° pans, and which firmly establishes the irresistible logic of a group’s fusion from scattered corpuscles. In a truly bravura demonstration, Angelopoulos does for the closed yard what he had before done (and will again do) for the mountain-top village: establish its ‘world’, its horizon and spatial limit, as well as the inhabitants who, scattered into eight groups around the yard, mill and smoke and mutter in their everyday alienation. But far more than this, the slow duration of the shot, its inching pan around the yard, maps out something extraordinary, the lineaments of an event – as, in eight separate linked trajectories, an emissary from each groupuscule nonchalantly ‘passes it forward’ to the next, the unspoken word of revolt, unheard but communicated with a sequential logic whose dynamic is that of totalisation. This is how a group forms out of a serial collective, in an orchestrated pan that the panoptical eye of the prison authorities is of course trained to perceive, and rushes in only to find the word already threading the group together unassailably into a political unit. This extraordinary sequence shot performs precisely what was most distinctive about Angelopoulos’ cinematography of the group: its patience and apparent turgidity, within which a surreptitious political energy incubates and spreads along a highly disciplined circular vector. Those implications will be taken up and ‘sublated’ in the pivotal central sequence of Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), wherein first one collective, and then another, more focused and fused one, gather in a town square to rally for the progressive cause against royalist nationalism. Here, the pan is itself sublated, gathered up into itself and squared: as the off-screen gunshots disrupt the rally, scattering the collective into the alleyways and lanes, the circling camera, with a pause at the 180° mark, patiently traces the evaporation

cine m ato graphy of the group   165

Figure 10.1 Diagram for the opening scene of Days of ’36

of the crowd until, having come full-circle, only a lone bagpiper traverses the square behind the dead bodies and one, the old accordionist (Yiannis Furios), rises from playing possum and disappears – before, miraculously, the unthinkable happens, and the camera begins a second 360° tour of the square, which now, again pausing at the 180° point, recalls the scattered collective from its holes and warrens back into the light of day, only purified of those elements that had prevented it from fusing into a militant collective in the first place – the pro-Americans and the Greek chauvinists. In this film’s dialectical nostalgia, only the red flag can convoke a true group, a genuine political subject, in the political economy of urban space. And it takes a 720° pan to prove it: the first circuit disavowing the solidarity of the unstable coalition; the second convoking the true political agent, the militant group adequate to the totality. This dynamic framing is what Angelopoulos calls a ‘close-up of the group’ (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 32–3). This is a film whose extraordinary formal dialectic allows for a further complication of the logic of group cinematography: first by way of the three medium shot monologues that serve as punctual choruses to the film’s historical tragedy (as close as Angelopoulos allows himself to come to a genuine closeup); and second by way of a different device to establish another kind of group formation – the right-wing collective as fused group, presented allegorically in

166  j u l i a n m urphe t

Figure 10.2 The Hunters

the film’s greatest tracking shot as the passage from dancehall to town square of some inebriated royalists in progressive stages of tightening cohesion, packaged into a single sequence shot traversing six years of narrative time. These two devices offset the central 720° pan by recalling us to lateral or linear movement, on the one hand, and tragic stasis, on the other. The unique political dynamism of the film arises from its articulation of distinct group formations by way of specific formal devices, a clash of registers and modes that express the underlying political tectonics in the space of presentation. At its heart is a group that never properly fuses – the players themselves – and which is not the subject of totalising pans, but of frontal or dorsal frieze-like ‘planimetric’ tableaux compositions, which can either move or not, but which dispose the collective as a horizontal line, a cut or fold in space, but never a unity as such. The travelling players ‘carry’ the film, but they are not the subjects of its totalisations. These rather happen in the spaces around them, and the film’s formal genius is to allow their traversals of the countryside to enable such moments, from left and from right;2 ‘things happen to them; they don’t make things happen’ (Kovács 2007: 254) as András Bálint Kovács writes of characters in neo-realist cinema. But Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) is perverse in displacing its centre of narrative gravity away from the communists and partisans, or the artists, and towards the ruling class as a group in its own right, leading the film towards properly Buñuelian effects and a mood openly satiric despite the grim materials covered. The specific dependency on Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972) is felt heavily, as is the Hitchcockian

cine m ato graphy of the group   167 wit of The Trouble with Harry (1955)3 and Rope (1948), not to mention the savage group aesthetic of Salò, or the 120 Says of Sodom (Pasolini, 1975). But in the film’s most dazzling shot we see how determined Angelopoulos is to use the pan (here only 180°, and with some minor longitudinal tracking) to articulate groups along an irreconcilable faultline. The triumphal ruling-class group, singing their fascist anthem boisterously on the lakeside boardwalk outside its nostalgic hotel, is arrested by a spectacle that pulls the camera rightward in a motivated eye-line pan, where it discovers the miraculous sight of a surreal flotilla of communist vessels flanked by swans, tracing a red line of blood and political loss across the melancholy horizon of water, mountain and evening sky. It is the most calculatedly glorious shot in early Angelopoulos, a serious down-payment on his later aestheticism. But its function is to convoke two groups, both fused, along an axis of disjunction: the transition from land to water, from present to past, from ruling class to partisan ghosts, is absolute, horizontal, and pure. The pan totalises what cannot be totalised, which is perhaps why it stops halfway, arrested by the political contradiction into which it has stumbled. This is a film about the haunting of one class by another, about the persistence of the obliterated past within the present, and Angelopoulos has discovered the means to have his cake and eat it with his signature formal effect. Another pan somewhat earlier in the film (52:35–56:14) takes up the allegorical mode of the tracking group shot in Travelling Players, and arranges for the ruling-class group (emerging from their club and dancing towards the camera) to come into open confrontation with the organised working class at a crossroads in a built-up city area. Once again, rather than an act of fusion or totalisation, what we have here is an interrupted pan that stalls in order to propose a conflict of lines and spatial forces. Finally, the pan completes itself in a scan away from the site of conflict just as it is growing hot, and describes its 180° semicircle, but only to capture the solo witness of the ruling-class group’s uneasy ‘fellow-traveller’, who cannot be fused – we watch him watching the brutal act of political suppression. But this has not yet exhausted the permutations on the pan in this remarkable film; for what are we to make of the utterly innovative moment in which, finally celebrating the New Year as an uncontaminated collective, the ruling group is visited by the ghost of the dead king, who proceeds to dance with the hitherto silent female member of the group. This astonishing shot 4 contains within itself the perfect formal inversion of a 360° pan: a 360° orbital glide, which places the woman (Eva Kotamanidou) where the panning camera would usually be, and completes a glacial circuit around her dancing form, such that the entire group is d ­ isclosed, seated in dinner suits and evening dresses, around her and the king’s invisible spectre, who eventually copulate on the floor. It is as if Angelopoulos has turned the glove of the full-circular pan inside out, in order

168  j u l i a n m urphe t to expose the obscene kernel of ruling-class group formation: the sentimental nuclear fusion of nostalgic reaction, whose secret political logic is rape and human sacrifice. All of which could still not have prepared us for that supreme apotheosis of group cinematography that is Megalexandros – as astonishing a meditation on collectivism and the politics of group formation as anything in the canon, and certainly Angelopoulos’ most sustained experiment in de-individualised cinema, which perversely takes as its subject the irruption of a charismatic individual from within the ‘knowable community’ of an anarcho-syndicalist mountain-top village commune. The film’s subject matter concerns the inevitable political and ethical tensions over time between this commune and the militia that it secretes from itself as a necessary instrument for preserving its autonomy: between the community and its guardians, since, in Plato’s sense, the philosopher (‘Teacher’) is entirely in the service of the commune. The initial entrance of Alexander (Omero Antonutti) into the village is one of several memorable set pieces: a first, static extreme long shot of the communards spilling over the lip of the protective hill; cut to a leftward panning shot of the company of militia and accompanying anarchists arriving at the place of the first shot, so that the two groups can hail one another across the liquid element of a bordering river (already a recurrent tableau in Angelopoulos, and one that will be elaborated further in subsequent films); next a radical surprise, a 90° lateral cut to frame the bridge that links the village path to the rest of the country, but in total silence apart from the burbling stream, as a swinging pan left and right connects the militia leader, Alexander, with the commune’s organic intellectual, the Teacher (Christophoros Nezer), who then proceed to embrace on the bridge; then a cut to the critical shot of the village square, in which Alexander is surrounded in an organic circle by the entire village, as if to reintegrate him into their ethical substance, their nation and express his belonging to them. Here I want to argue that the totalising circle, the 360° pan, is displaced from the camera’s movements onto the group itself, which takes upon itself the tasks of encircling and fusing what the camera would otherwise have managed. But the commune is not simply what encircles and absorbs. At its peak of distress, after the militia has killed the village’s sheep for a second time in protest against the socialisation of property, the commune flattens itself into stratified planes – first the ethical community of women, and behind them, the proto-political community of men. From this planimetric redistribution of the organic circle of communal life, there emerges the rushing stream of expropriating men, who raid the militia’s quarters and liberate their property in what is not to be distinguished from a mob. But this, precisely, is not a totalised group; it is a disaggregated community defined by ressentiment, and is easily subdued by the militia’s intrinsic understanding of the logic of totalisation: the panning

cine m ato graphy of the group   169 circle, as in the scene where the guardians-turned-plunderers dance with rifles raised into a tight circle and conjure back into their midst the charismatic Alexander to restore the balance of power. From a slightly elevated angle, the camera mutely regards the fusion of this group and attends helplessly to its logic, which has progressively eaten away the very fibre and meaning of the commune. And yet, in the most extraordinary couple of shots he ever mounted, Angelopoulos finally restores the power of totalisation to the villagers themselves, and to the panning camera as their mediator. The death of Alexander, for me his single greatest sequence, pushes this entire disquisition to its resounding finale: two shots, the first, a meticulous complex shot that begins by tracing the beaten Alexander in a panning retreat to the evacuated space of the village square where he collapses in stasis, and then undertakes one of Angelopoulos’ signature 360° pans, gradually bringing out the entire commune to gather in a knot around the fallen general – definitively establishing the genetic link between the circular pan as such, and the circular form of bodies within the mise en scène. What happens next defies description; it is the final surmounting of the very logic of this tendency. A cut to a high-angle shot, which recalls the last scene in Reconstruction, sees the aggregated commune tighten into a single, pulverising social sphincter, which closes in on the hero and consumes him without a word.5 The annihilation of the charismatic individual by the anonymous group from which it came: the cinematography of the group can go no further, it has reached its culmination, and as the sun miraculously emerges from behind the clouds for one instant to reveal an empty ground, we are left with the lingering questions that such a cinema was unable to answer: what, after all, of the individual? This sequence of films began and ended in small, mountain-top villages, knowable communities without named characters other than the invidious ones, where alienation had not yet eaten away the ethical substance of national life. The mode of production here is basically agrarian, traditional and premodern in all the critical ways. Even when this great tetralogy had ventured gamely into modernity, it avoided the critical question of individual subjectivity by masking its optics in classical formal vestments or the operations of satire; so that the historical group could be secured formally and politically against dissolution, but at the great expense, I would suggest, of language itself, the essence of Spirit, as Hegel called it. Angelopoulos’ groups are uniquely sustained by a prodigious silence amongst themselves. Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) herself does not speak, apart from her monologue away from the group, and so it most often is – members of a group speak only outside the parameters of their inclusivity, or do so clandestinely and away from our ears. I have a powerful feeling that Angelopoulos came out of the completion of Megalexandros with the feeling that he had avoided precisely the most

170  j u l i a n m urphe t a­ gonising aesthetic problems of modernity, which is presumably why its final shot is of the young Alexander emerging from the mists of myth, allegory and the village commune to confront what nothing in the tetralogy had yet prepared us for: a totalising pan, not of the community, or the group, but the vast sprawling cosmos of modern Athens itself, the sounds of car horns emanating from its impenetrable web, a social space whose totalisation, or the fusion of whose groups, can never be possibly managed via a cinematic pan, because the space itself is unrepresentable apart from the shorthand of this inhuman panopticism of clotted architectures and unnavigable thoroughfares. When Alexander goes down into the cities, we need a new cinematic language. Of course, the isolation in abstract of a single cinematic device from the dense weave of techniques and tropes that characterise a given cinematic oeuvre is a perfectly artificial exercise. It ignores the larger formal architectonic that supports any sequence of works and breathes consistency (as well as variation) into that progression. Worse still, it promotes a formalism so exaggerated that historical and political time is only allowed in the back door at exceptional analytical moments, as when a technological development (a new lens type, faster film stock, innovative widescreen format and so on) generated elsewhere in the general mode of production, migrates inexorably into the beating heart of an auteur’s aesthetic mode of production. And yet the value of such an exercise is made quite clear at those turning points in a given oeuvre when, for all intents and purposes, the device in question can be said to lapse from a former prominence, replaced by other techniques that can now be seen to do the job better, or do a different job entirely. Such is the case here, and there can be no question that, after Megalexandros, the full-circular pan suffers an absolute decline in fortunes in Angelopoulos’ cinema, reviving tentatively here and there, but henceforth without any of the powerful aesthetic logic of its earlier mode of operation. In what remains I want to offer a very provisional and cursory explanation of this demotion, which will then hopefully shed some belated light on that larger architectonic so far kept out of this chapter’s frame. In the first place, inasmuch as the next sequence of works chafes against the national border itself, and turns increasingly to thematics of exile, departure and transcendental homelessness, the earlier emphasis on bounded and fused groups ceases to have the figurative purchase it did previously. Of course, groups do go into exile and return from it, as the triumphant work of restoration The Weeping Meadow so achingly attests; but by and large exile is at best a small-group or familial experience, and most typically an individual alienation that opens up zones of indiscernibility within the existential self. Nowhere is this better depicted than in the curious figure of Marcello Mastroianni’s nameless persona in The Suspended Step of the Stork around whom the entire film turns in undecidable suspension, since he is both the runaway Greek politician

cine m ato graphy of the group   171 and the Albanian refugee, at one and the same time. Or alternatively, the two children who go seeking their mythical father in Germany in Landscape in the Mist, finding a resurrected Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou) as their guardian angel instead, could hardly be presented apart from their fundamental sexual duality, and must be understood to exist outside of either an individual or a group frame, as a pseudo-couple in the strong sense: precisely the optimal actant for thinking the quest in exile.6 Angelopoulos’ increasing concern for what falls outside of national frames of belonging – both with the residual (if battered) utopian and internationalist spirit of a communism that cannot be circumscribed under a chauvinist flag, as with the late postmodern proliferation of internment camps, sans papiers, and homo sacer – leaves his paradigmatic device of the full-circular pan with little to do and nowhere to go. Horizontal movement, rather than circular, seems better equipped to grasp the existential gist of this New World Order. In its place, however, is a new concern for liquid (if not quite gaseous) perception, a sumptuous array of camera movements set in gentle counterpoint to the various spaces of displacement – train stations, interchanges, police pursuits, truck-stop cafes, ports, border towers and the ubiquitous rivers that instantiate the very idea of the Border, even as they give torrential testimony to the evanescence of all things. It is as if, indeed, the camera movements now want to partake of the very principle of the river, baptised in that liquid element to emerge with a novel sinuosity of gesture and undulating grace of motion. It is not, of course, as if this cinema had hitherto lacked camera movement;7 not only does the entirety of my argument to date refute that, but we have only passingly touched on those austere travelling shots that are the formal complement of the pans here treated. However, what now declares its hegemony over the mise en scène is a species of movement liberated alike from procrustean tracks and from the steady y-axis of the typical pan: namely, arcing crane shots, whose newfound freedom to soar and to dip, as well as dolly and pan, surely endows the second and third phases of Angelopoulos’ career with a degree of visceral pleasure in camera motion that would have been thoroughly incompatible with the earlier classicism of his ‘historical’ sequence.8 Nowhere will this extraordinary will to pleasure in the rise and fall of a crane-borne camera create effects as satisfying as in The Suspended Step of the Stork, whose very title seems to associate its aesthetic with that hovering, equivocal gesture of the crane (or stork!) between walking and flying. But it only remains to add that, of course, there is no question of any unmediated return of the now superannuated 360° pan in a cinema opened up like this one to movements as glorious as that in which, in the rail yard, the Reporter (Gregory Karr) and the Colonel (Ilias Logothetis) discover the suspended body of the hanged man (from a crane), which the camera then observes being  lowered into the mass of ululating women, before dollying

172  j u l i a n m urphe t forward to catch the Reporter greeting the train that will deliver the politician’s wife (Jeanne Moreau) to this desolate border town, then rising and returning back to the very point from which the corpse had been suspended, and looking down upon its encirclement by the community itself; or indeed, back at the station, the descending crane shot that brings the Reporter to witness the deportation of the militant collective, gives us the defiance of the partisan child on the tracks, then loops back to disclose Mastroianni among the observers. Such gestures are imbued with an aesthetic logic that defies the embeddedness of any national cinema in a ‘totalisable’ horizon; rather, they strain at the very limits of a mappable milieu. In the new world that they are suspended over, the totalising pan is a wilful anachronism, as witness the elaborate tracking 540° pan that gives us again the travelling players on the beach, in Landscape in the Mist (46:29–52:40): a perfectly knowing moment of formal nostalgia. All of this is in keeping with those larger international currents at work in the 1980s and 1990s, presided over by the neoliberal consensus, but attaining specific institutional form in the rebranded international film festival as the premier market for all ‘art cinemas’, in a context where national quotas and restrictions on Hollywood product were systematically gutted in a slurry of ‘free-trade’ agreements. To survive on the festival circuit, filmmakers whose work had hitherto obeyed dictates sprung from a specific conjuncture or fault-line in national space, found themselves reaching towards an idiom legible to cinéphile audiences in places as far-flung as Auckland, Oslo, and Ouagadougou; in practice, this meant a tendentious conformity to the meretricious renaissance of ‘beauty’ as the lingua franca of festival cinema in the New World Order. So it was that, with even Godard – in Passion (1982) and subsequent works – trotting out the tatters of a humanistic reverence for the beautiful, the film world’s international artists as a group finally ‘transcended’ the anti-aesthetic or ‘imperfect’ agendas of the 1970s in the name of a revival of traditional (and very Western) aesthetics. The perfect inevitability of this collective decision under the auspices of late capitalism, and the various recantations of those more Brechtian and avant-gardist tendencies that had underwritten so many auteurist reputations, set the stage for a situation in which Chinese ‘art cinema’ of the 1980s came to resemble contemporary Iranian ‘art cinema’ more than it did the heroic communist cinema of its own recent past. That is to say that almost all of the serious cinema of this period can be caught in the act of allegorising its own ‘internationalisation’ under the dominion of capital, and flying the flag of beauty, in order to relocate its primary arena of operations, from a nationally specific political intelligentsia, to a disseminated congeries of festival locations comprising a nontotalisable ‘whole’ whose only aesthetic commonality was a thirst for gorgeous imagery.

cine m ato graphy of the group   173 Angelopoulos belongs to this narrative as much as anybody else. His films from Voyage to Cythera onward are honest enough to make explicit what others may have disavowed through folksy hokum and the retreat into sheer aestheticism: they are immanent allegories of ‘art cinema’s’ new transcendental homelessness, performing their own formal dislocation from a traditional matrix with the stubborn persistence of a ‘theme’. Such a multinational space cannot be totalised, of course, and least of all by that anachronistic device of a 360° pan. Instead, what we find is that trope demoted and repurposed in a thoroughly altered set of aesthetic and economic circumstances, hanging on despite its superannuation in overt nods of nostalgia, self-conscious declensions within domestic spaces, and a covert resistance to the persistent ­interruptions and blockages of a more mobile cinematic language. The new, sweeping camera movements herald a transnational space-time saturated by  capital, in which the older horizontal fixity of the pan begins to look archaic  and c­lassical, tethered to a national geography, searching for the outward limit of an ethos that nowhere, in the prevailing neoliberal hegemony today, finds its local habitation or name. The decline of the pan in Angelopoulos’ cinema is a function of the global dissociation of class relations in the New World Order, a melancholic acknowledgement that the older cleavages in national space no longer hold the secret to the dynamics of history, which now have to be sought, in a perpetual displacement, at the very fringes of the perceptible.

NOTES 1. David Bordwell concurs that ‘apolitical’ is an inappropriate epithet for describing this second phase (2005: 184). 2. It is then particularly telling that, when this now archetypal group is resurrected in Landscape in the Mist, their most extended presentation (on a beach) consists in the film’s only 360° pan, a bravura demonstration of how context alters the meaning of a trope, even with the selfsame content: for this is never how they are presented in The Travelling Players, their own film. 3. This derivation is acknowledged in an interview with Angelopoulos by Francesco Casetti ([1977] 2001: 27). 4. Though it continues for several more minutes beyond this, the ‘shot’ is in fact interrupted at this point by a straightforward Rope cut, using the dark back of a man’s suit to mask the incision: the nods to Hitchcock are several. 5. Angelos Koutsourakis points out in conversation that this scene has clear intertextual references to Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pociąg (Night Train, 1959). 6. Don Quixote only inaugurates a long series of essential works in which this link is forged and forged anew. 7. As Angelopoulos says: ‘I am trying to bring back to the cinema its primal element, that is, movement in space. In this context, my work is an attempt to return to the real dimension of the image, the image as the fundamental element. This does not mean that

174  j ul i a n m ur ph e t logos is not important. Logos is to be identified within the image, but it has to be composed in such a way that can be spatially verifiable’ (Angelopoulos in Stathi 1999: 151). 8. Which Jameson can then (mis-)characterise in terms of its well-nigh intolerable ‘stillness of the camera’ (1997: 82).

C H A P TER 11

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos Caroline Eades

T

o examine the presence and significance of literary references in Theo Angelopoulos’ films, one can start by looking at the influence of antiquity in his work.1 Since his historical tetralogy – Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) Οι Kυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), and Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980) – Angelopoulos’ oeuvre has been imbued with allusions and direct references to classical texts: Greek tragedies at first, The Odyssey throughout his work, and various passages from Plato and Ovid more sporadically. But his interest in the poetic function of language also led him to draw inspiration from modern and contemporary writers known for their references to ancient stories and characters, from Eliot, Joyce and Faulkner, to Seferis and Cavafy.2 This constant feature in Angelopoulos’ cinema seems to have gained a particular momentum in his later films: Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Μια Aιωνιότητα και μια Uέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998), followed by the trilogy on modern Greece – Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004), Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) and Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea, interrupted by Angelopoulos’ death in 2012). In this chapter I will argue that throughout Angelopoulos’ forty-year long 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. Angelopoulos’ turn to a more traditional form of cinema is nonetheless consistent with the inclination towards controversy and polemics he has demonstrated throughout his training and career as a filmmaker. After fighting the Hollywood model of narrative

176  c a r o l i ne e ade s continuity for many years, he seems to have veered away from both a ‘cinema of discourse’, with an explicit political and ideological stance, and a ‘cinema of affects’ as defined by recent film scholarship.3 In addition, changes in the choice of subject and theme, noticeable since Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) have led to a re-centring of Angelopoulos’ narratives on the individual, and more precisely on the situation and the status of the artist as a storyteller. This is evidenced by the use of narrative devices borrowed from literature as well as a structural shift from explicit references to Greek tragedy in his first films to the influence of the Homeric epic and other narrative forms in his later films. Many critics focused on the visual elements of Angelopoulos’ aesthetics, often designated as a ‘cinema of contemplation’, to quote the title of Andrew Horton’s book (1997a).4 But this consensus should not undermine the fact that his work is also a ‘cinema of narration’, as Horton acknowledges in his chapter on Ulysses’ Gaze: ‘the title evokes Homer, and thus a poetic world of storytelling and a full range of the human imagination [. . .] Ulysses’ Gaze surely, and richly, solidifies our sense of what I have called in this study the Faulknerian element, that is, the existence of a fictional universe that is referenced from work to work in terms of characters, location, actions, themes, and situations’ (1997a: 182). But this idiosyncratic world has tended to forgo the dramatic figures and situations of his first films inspired by Greek tragedies and readily identified by film scholars such as Maria A. Stassinopoulos (2007: 25–40), Sylvie Rollet (1993: 51–4), and William Guynn (2006: 154–64), among others. The main characters – A., Alexandros, Spyros, Eleni – and historical situations in the films that followed could have led Angelopoulos to participate in what Robert Burgoyne describes as ‘the re-emergence of the epic form’ in relation to ‘the cultural, social and political context of the present period’ (2008: 15). But in order to tell the stories of his strong and committed protagonists within their historical context, Angelopoulos opted in his later films for another model of narrative: until the very end, his work remained radically different from the spectacular, ‘action-packed’, larger-than-life and Manichean epics spanning from Hollywood classical cinema and Italian neopeplum to today’s ‘return of the epic film’ defined by Andrew Elliot as ‘a body of films loosely based around historical – usually ancient or classical, but also medieval – periods’ (2014: 7). Angelopoulos’ reference to the cultural heritage of archaic and Classical Greece is not limited to literary forms and figures. As for many other graphic and visual artists before him, Greek sculpture held a special place in the constitution of his own aesthetics. But instead of simply displaying or imitating Greek statuary, Angelopoulos endeavoured to transpose to cinema what typically stands out as the characteristics of sculpture as a figurative art: the representation of forms in space, the relief of shapes and figures, and the stillness

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   177 of objects and characters caught in the passing of time. At the symbolic level, Angelopoulos used Greek statuary to stress the irony that rises from the contrast between sculpture as a monumental art dedicated to the representation of glory and beauty in ancient times, and the petty concerns of our contemporary societies obsessed by utilitarianism, dominance and a fascination with technology in spite of its ugly and inhuman corollaries. A helicopter hoists the fragment of a giant ancient sculpture in Τοπίο στην Oμίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988); a barge transports the dismembered statue of Lenin in Ulysses’ Gaze: and, in Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998), the statuette of a Greek goddess serves as a lamp leg in a modern apartment. All these examples do not seem, however, to abide by the precepts of antique sculpture or Platonician aesthetics. Statues fail to evoke the imposing silhouette of a divine being or the ideal ‘Form of Beauty’, as Diotima explains to Socrates in The Symposium (210–211). Located within a network of conceptual oppositions, they lose their mimetic as well as their usual symbolic value to become strictly instrumental: they are reduced to their decorative function or allude to a ‘referent’ they cannot represent any longer (the past, the dominant political establishment, the political apparatus, the communist utopia). The most extreme consequence of the specific, yet diminished place of ancient statues in the film narrative could be its own disappearance from the photographic image: in Ulysses’ Gaze, A. (Harvey Keitel), a Greek film director in exile, describes to Kali (Maia Morgenstern), a Macedonian archivist, how he discovered the head of an ancient statue of Apollo while location scouting. When he tried to take pictures of his finding with a Polaroid, he only captured ‘blank negatives’, as if ‘his glance was not working’. Objects from the ancient past are objects of history, in both acceptations of the word: they cannot be part of our daily environment any longer or find a place in art today. Their integrity cannot be preserved in a modern world, and it is not our gaze but our voice, oral expression, verbal language – in short, the means of storytelling – that can lift them from oblivion. Together with the Manakis’ ‘lost reels’, this ‘lost glance’ refers in Ulysses’ Gaze to the ‘historical death’ of ‘cinema and the pleasures of mobile vision’, according to Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2010: 150). I would argue, however, that Angelopoulos confronts this threat with the same tactics literature used in the same situation at the beginning of the twentieth century: by ‘poach[ing] technological material properties from those other arts’ that endangered its legitimacy and survival (Murphet 2009: 5). But, this time, it is cinema that is threatened, and literary resources that are called to the rescue by the filmmaker. The presence of statues in Angelopoulos’ last films therefore contributes to reinstate the narrator in his storytelling capacity as a first step towards Angelopoulos’ rethinking of the place of cinema in regards to literature. As the desperate filmmaker in The Dust of Time cries out to his ex-wife, ‘my

178  c a r o l i ne e ade s only home is in the stories I tell. In every place else, I feel like a stranger, I feel lost’. In Ulysses’ Gaze, once it is established that the protagonist cannot look at the statue of Apollo, he is shown as being able to share the point of view of a gigantic and dismembered statue of Lenin: both the character and the statue are travelling on a barge along the Danube and are in position to look down on the crowd lining up on the riverbanks. Even if the shot of the people standing along the bank is not explicitly subjective, the character is clearly shown as sharing the same space and motion as the statue. The fact that he is not looking down indicates a transfer of the vision to the film viewer.5 A similar high-angle shot captures the gaze of a statue in The Dust of Time; in this instance, it is a statue of Stalin whose death has just been announced to the citizens of Temirtau in Kazakhstan. The camera remains focused on the population gathered in front of the statue for a last homage to the Soviet leader, but, in this long shot, there is no character acting as an intermediary between the gaze of the statue and that of the film viewer. At the narrative level, this scene seems to constitute a pause in the verbal and visual account of the unfolding drama: Spyros (Michel Piccoli) and his wife Eleni (Irène Jacob)  are being reunited  after years of anguished separation. In fact, the high-angle shot achieves two narrative purposes: it indicates the cause of the characters’ past misfortune – Stalin’s brutal regime – and prefigures another episode presented from a high-angle perspective – the deadly fight between a biker and young Eleni’s friend. As Fredric Jameson aptly observes, the emphasis on ‘psychological crises’ in later films doesn’t affect Angelopoulos’ unique visual style so much as it signals the filmmaker’s ‘return to an older framework of the individual subjectivity, the individual experience, the leading protagonist, the narrative “point of view”’ (1997: 89). In addition to providing a contemplative pause on the mishaps of contemporary history, Angelopoulos assigns a narrative function to statues: he uses them to probe the role of the narrator and the problematic relation of art and mimesis in the footsteps of another poet, Ovid, and his writings on Pygmalion’s myth, the power of the gaze and the fascination for statues (Metamorphoses, Book 10, v. 243–97).6 A further aspect of Angelopoulos’ aesthetics, borrowed from antique art, contributed to develop the narrative component of his most recent films. Many abstract oppositions – past and present, the sacred and the utilitarian, daydreaming and reality, love and death – are reflected by dichromatic patterns that have become a distinctive trait of Angelopoulos’ style since Landscape in the Mist. As we demonstrated in the case of Ulysses’ Gaze (Eades and Létoublon 1999: 301–16), Angelopoulos’ use of a two-tone pattern – often yellow and blue – can be found in many of his films to characterise secondary characters’ clothing, vehicles, buildings and other elements of mise en scène. Such dichromatic patterns in film images can be reminiscent of the style of

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   179

Figure 11.1 Eternity and a Day

antique sculptures and paintings, more specifically the black and red figure techniques of Greek vase painting. In a manner very similar to ancient ceramics, the choice of colours in Angelopoulos’ films is endowed with a structural and pragmatic function: it serves to accentuate shapes and contours and to reveal the relationship between represented objects, including secondary characters or elements of decor. In Angelopoulos’ last films, the apparition of the colour red brings a notable counterpoint to the recurring yellow and blue pattern. Red flags brandished by a demonstrator in Eternity and a Day and the workers’ union leader in The Weeping Meadow, as well as the red banners hanging in the streets of The Dust of Time carry a strong ideological message and are, rather conventionally, associated with leftist groups, or labour unions within the film narratives. But the colour red in these instances also allows the viewers to transform their exposure to a symbolic meaning into a progressive understanding of the various levels of the film discourse: the development of the plot per se, and eventually a commentary on cinema in general. In The Dust of Time, for example, the significance of red flags and banners is emphasised by the scarcity of colours in the Kazakh city under the snow or Berlin in the rain. As the characters start their journey to another exile (since none of them will return to Greece), the colour red also undergoes an exile of its own. Its identity seems to fade as the narrative progresses: the flags at the Austrian border, crossed by Jacob and Eleni, and at the Canadian border, reached by Eleni and her son, are red and white, or only ‘half-red’, so to speak. These objects don’t have any other function than to signify the territorial limits of a nation, but, at the

180  c a r o l i ne e ade s ­ arrative level, their colours seem to reflect the divided selves of the characters n in various regards – personal, political, cultural, geographical and of course emotional – as they move onward in space and in time. For Robert Burgoyne, the use of colour in some recent epic films serves ‘to assert a kind of alternative vision of history, centred on the triumph of emotion and desire’ as a counterpoint to the traditional ‘narrative patterning that dominates these films – the rise and fall of the hero, the unfolding of a heroic destiny –’ (2014: 96). Here again, Angelopoulos underscores his distance from both his previous films and contemporary epics by inflecting the role of colour and its historical value towards the narrative and the subjective. Furthermore, the treatment of colours in the last trilogies reveals Angelopoulos’ intention to place cinema in an artistic tradition that started long before the photographic image. The inclusion of postcards and sepia photographs in the films seems to undermine the primacy of colour photography which is then considered as just one of many occurrences in a history of forms that dates back to antiquity. Angelopoulos’ most striking scenes are deprived of vivid colours: blurry surroundings, foggy landscapes and spectral figures create dream-like images in half-toned grey, yellow and blue to shroud the cruel reality of traumatic events, such as the killing of an entire family in Sarajevo in Ulysses’ Gaze, the impossibility of crossing borders in To Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), or the last moments of the union leader shot by the army in The Weeping Meadow.7 In these instances, the signifying power of the image is even diminished to demonstrate a contrario the need for a verbal narrative as the primordial storytelling medium. By possibly referring to the industrial transition to halftone technology in the history of visual media, Angelopoulos is not indulging in nostalgia. Rather, he seems to refute the idea of ‘remediation’, the progressive idea of the replacement of one media by a more advanced one, in favour of what Murphet describes as the modernist moment: the coexistence and even competition of various media at a given time (2009: 40–46). What is even more significant is the fact that, in Voyage to Cythera, Ulysses’ Gaze, and The Dust of Time, the character called upon to tell these stories is a filmmaker. There has been a tendency to analyse Angelopoulos’ most recent films as a return to a more conventional narrative based on the re-emergence of the dramatic and the psychological. Angelopoulos himself has often acknowledged Michelangelo Antonioni’s influence (elaborated in detail by Hamish Ford in his chapter for this collection) at the stylistic level as attested by the use of long takes as well as stark contrasts between monochromatic and colourful settings. But for many film scholars this influence is also noticeable at the narrative level, especially in his more recent films ‘more concentrated on the individual [and] delineating personal crises which express, as the emigrant author of The Suspended Step of the Stork puts it, fin de siècle melancholy’ (Bordwell 1997: 23).

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   181 The opening of Eternity and a Day can provide an example of this change in terms of narrative content and form. In accordance with his systematic disregard for typical representations of antiquity, Angelopoulos rarely referred to Greek archaeological sites in his films. Exceptions include the Sounio temple of Poseidon visited by foreigners in Megalexandros, the aforementioned story of Apollo’s statue in Ulysses’ Gaze, and the allusion to a sunken city in Eternity and a Day. In the opening shot of this film, two children speak about the disappearance of an ancient city under the sea in the aftermath of an earthquake. The evocation of this lost place is verbal and direct, since the children remain off-screen and the viewers can only hear their voices and see a still shot of the family house in Thessaloniki. The story can elicit images of Alexandria, Pompeii or Atlantis in the viewers’ imagination, but the film does not provide any realistic representation of ancient sites. The verbal and oral aspects of the scene are emphasised by the fact that it focuses on a story told by children and structured as a rather conventional mythical narrative: the lost city is given an anthropomorphic dimension as it is said to rise from the sea upon the call of the morning star. This scene appears therefore as typical of the later period of Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, characterised by the use of literary texts and narrations to describe the ‘personal crises’ of protagonists in search of childhood memories. But if one can read this example as a return to the ‘problematic of the subject’, it can also be symptomatic of a ‘modernist’ attempt to situate film alongside literature in the ‘trace history of the competing media institutions of the moment’ (Murphet 2009: 3). In sum, Angelopoulos’ late turn towards a more traditional conception of the narrative, influenced by literary references, can be viewed either as a regression to a prior style of filmmaking or as another instance of his lifelong rebellious and provocative stance against stereotypes and clichés. The beginning of his career seemed indeed to have fulfilled, mutatis mutandis, the 1926 prophecy of British film critic R. E. C. Swann, quoted by Laura Marcus: Then came war, the increasing hegemony of the American film industry and the commercialism of the industry. The way of the future, Swann suggested, and the potential for originality in film, lay in ‘‘an escape from the bondage of words, from all literary association’’, an imaginative use of film space. (Marcus 2007: 258) But Angelopoulos’ later films prompted a number of critics to notice a significant change in his style and to brand him as ‘the last modernist’ (Horton 1997b: 1–4) or a ‘late modernist’ (Jameson 1997: 78). This argument supposes that in order to understand Angelopoulos’ rapprochement between film and literature at the turn of the millennium, we acknowledge the specificity of the relations between cinema and literature at the turn of the century as ‘the

182  c a r o l i ne e ade s coexistence of cinema and of the ‘cinematic vision’ as it emerged in fictional and other writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’ (Marcus 2007: 20).8 Such perspective would then justify an approach to Angelopoulos’ later films as being not only influenced by the works of other filmmakers but also, as stated earlier, inspired by the writings of other ‘poets’ such as Seferis and Cavafy. In fact, Angelopoulos often presented himself as a filmmaker yearning for poetry: ‘The question I am asking myself all the time is: How can I transform personal experiences into poetry?’ (cited in Schulz 2001: 120). And just like Rilke in The Tenth Elegy, he turned to antiquity to engage with what the Austrian poet described as ‘a symbolic walk through a landscape that motivates the poet to explore his relationship to ancient civilisations and past poetic traditions’ (Ryan 2004: 181). For both artists, the impetus to creativity springs from contradiction and the tension it produces: they ‘struggled with central issues of the period: autonomy and engagement, originality and borrowing, tradition and technology’ (2004: 14). But whereas modernist writers found in cinema a new vision to address the acceleration, automatisation and depersonalisation of modern life, Angelopoulos returned to literature to revisit his art and confront the challenges of his own times. It is not only the increasing predominance of literary references as it is the techniques and the very purpose of literature that pervade Angelopoulos’ later work. Some of his most remarkable images attest to the expressive power of painting, sculpture and other graphic arts: for example, as we previously noted (Eades, Létoublon and Rollet 2002: 186), the Prologue of Ulysses’ Gaze features a blue ship sailing on the horizon that could be a reference to René Magritte’s painting, The Tempter (1950), and represent ‘the first time in our lives we see water’ (Magritte 2001: 236). But throughout the rest of this film, literature is explicitly designated as the true object of the filmmaker’s quest and as the art of storytelling par excellence. The specific place thus attributed to literature within a film that pays homage to the pioneers of Greek cinema could very well echo the attempts of early film critics at establishing a hierarchy of arts that would include the new medium. In 1930, for instance, French playwright, novelist and filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol advocated a special place for cinema as an advanced form of the dramatic art (1991, 14). In addition, the direct reference to the famous ancient epic character in the title and in the last scene of Ulysses’ Gaze brings a modernist slant to the film through the allusion to other re-writings of The Odyssey, such as James Joyce’s, and the idea of a necessary return to storytelling that would involve ‘not some ‘‘inward turn’’ to the depths of a putative ‘‘modern subject’’, but on the contrary a raising of the matter of literature to a surface of touch and conversion with other media’ (Murphet 2009, 4). And indeed Ulysses’ Gaze does not end, as suggested in the Prologue, with the first image filmed by the pioneers of Greek cinema,

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   183 but with a poem inspired by The Odyssey (Book 19 v. 390, 396, 467, 479; Book 23 v. 291, 296, 300, 343; Book 24 v. 234, 262, 328, 345) and delivered by the protagonist in tears in front of a blank screen. The film narrative has turned the main character, a filmmaker, into an adventurer at first, and in fine into a bard who vows to ‘tell about the journey (. . .) the whole human adventure, the story that never ends’. The re-centring of Angelopoulos’ narratives on the situation and status of the artist as a storyteller is evidenced at first by explicit mentions of literary texts and the presence of verbal and poetic expression in his later films, but also by the emergence of a ‘narrative imperative’ in his creative process. Such ‘poaching’ on the other art of storytelling implies the increasing use of devices that are not specific to literature but designed by early filmmakers to achieve similar effects as when they are used in literary narratives. In that sense, Angelopoulos’ drive bears many resemblances to D. W. Griffith’s ‘narrator system’, as Tom Gunning calls it (1991: 25–6) and David Trotter defines it: the development of Griffith’s ‘own idiosyncratic but widely influential version of a cinema of narrative integration’ by means of such stylistic figures as alternating editing, repetition, intertitles, verbal quotations and commentaries (2007: 51-9). In his last film, The Dust of Time, Angelopoulos mobilised the same film rhetoric resources to emphasise the presence of a narrative voice and reach a similar goal: to tell a story in film with as much efficiency and complexity as a literary text. In doing so, Angelopoulos seems to have achieved his reconciliation with the traditional model described by Bordwell as the classical Hollywood narrative (1985, 157–8): based on continuity and unity, it includes ‘a dual plotline structure which promotes narrative parallels and causal linkages, (. . .) a goal-oriented protagonist struggling to overcome overt obstacles, (. . .) a narrative closure that contains the narrative by finishing it off’ (Berliner 2013: 197). At the very end of the film, young Eleni (Tiziana Pfiffner) and her grandfather (Sviatoslav Yshakov) run hand in hand, in the snow, away from the Brandenburg Gate and towards the camera. This shot follows an earlier scene with a similar long take of Eleni running in the snow towards the camera with Spyros right behind her and the Karaganda steel mill complex in the background. The Brandenburg Gate was part of the Berlin Wall, and the Kazakh steel plant was built under the aegis of the Soviet Industrial Development Plans. Through their association with the socialist regime, both have now become traces of an oppressive past and witnesses to two events that brought about new political entities in the late twentieth century: the reunification of Germany and the reconstitution of the Russian Federation. The repetition and differentiation of these two scenes, both essential for the story of the protagonist’s family, thus point towards a grand narrative, the history of Eastern Europe, which has been an explicit topic of Angelopoulos’ films since Ulysses’

184  c a r o l i ne e ade s Gaze. Buildings, factories, monuments are remnants of this past but they also have their own history: they tell the story of individuals and nations as much as they themselves experienced unexpected changes and misuses, sometimes quite different from the initial purpose of their construction. Moreover, these two shots are significant inasmuch as they are presented from the same subjective point of view emphasised by the movement of the characters and the composition of the frame. This point of view is at the same time that of the filmmaker ‘dreaming’ the film-to-be in Cinecittà, and that of Angelopoulos making the actual film. The superimposition of the narrators’ gazes not only reinforces their presence and function, it also includes the film viewers in the storytelling process. They are thus able to imagine the other side of the camera, the potential reverse-shot, the diegetic off-space: the first of these two shots recalls the beginning of the film when Eleni and Spyros ran to catch a tramway which is not actually shown this time. In other terms, Angelopoulos presents here what Jean-Pierre Oudart calls ‘the ideal chain of a sutured discourse’: both shots are indeed ‘articulated into figures which it is no longer appropriate to call shot/reverse shot but which mark the need – so that the chain can function – for an articulation of the space such that the same portion of space be represented at least twice, in the filmic field and in the imaginary field’ (1977: 39). What is particular in the second scene is that the ‘unseen’ shot remains truly imaginary (it is replaced by the end titles of the film) but can be reintegrated in the narration as the protagonist’s gaze as well as Angelopoulos’. According to Kaja Silverman, narrative represents an ‘indispensable part of the system of suture. It transforms cinematic space into dramatic place, thereby providing the viewer not just with a vantage but a subject position’ (1983: 214). Not only is subjectivity highlighted at the very end of the film through rather conventional narrative techniques based on repetition and editing, it is also reinforced by the presence of two narrators of their own father’s story.9 The suspension of the reverse shot could be considered as more typical of Angelopoulos’ idiosyncratic style, but it ultimately points towards the absent figure of the film narrator in the Brandenburg shot: the ‘poet’ telling his personal story with history in the background. Film historians too have singled out parallel editing as a feature of Griffith’s ‘narrator system’ that has since become a fixture of conventional narrative cinema.10 The opening of The Dust of Time is characterised by two parallel segments of shots that ultimately converge to emphasise the presence of the narrator, its embodiment in the narrative and a subjective point of view. The opening sequence of the film alternates between the protagonist’s walk through Cinecittà and Spyros’ train journey from Berlin to Moscow in 1953. Two different sets of characters, times, locations and elements of mise en scène (colour, soundtrack and frame composition) allow to distinguish both scenes clearly. Although the voice of the narrator mentions a possible return

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   185 to the past in the opening shot, there is no clue such as a flashback or an interior monologue to suggest a chronological link between the two series. To use Christian Metz’s classification, this sequence is composed of what appears to be ‘achronological’ or ‘parallel syntagmas’ until the last shots introduce a relation of consecutiveness/simultaneity between the two series through the gaze of the protagonist.11 He is now in a projection booth looking at a filmstrip, probably rushes of the film he is in the process of shooting in Cinecittà. Although the contents of these rushes are not shown, one could infer from the previous part of the sequence that they are actually the second series of shots, Spyros’ journey, since its elaborate mise en scène contrasts with the documentary style of the Cinecittà series. The beginning of The Dust of Time thus raises issues of temporality through editing and dialogue, and this is typical of Angelopoulos’ work. What is more unusual is the fact that the initial ambiguity established by the use of parallel editing without any chronological, dramatic or axiological connection between the series, is immediately solved by the visual and narrative focus on the filmmaker as a storyteller (reminiscent of the very end of Ulysses’ Gaze). A possible explanation of the fact that the reverse shot on the ‘gazer’ remains unseen is provided by Angelopoulos himself when he acknowledges: ‘I am under the impression that we try to be the Subject of history when we are in fact the Object of History’ (Ciment 2013: 92). And indeed, the next scene, a documentary featuring a military parade on Red Square presided over by Stalin, is presented as a sequel to both the protagonist’s film and Angelopoulos’ own narrative. The sequence now gains a political dimension while keeping and even reinforcing its narrative function, since the documentary is framed by a series of successive and imbricate gazes: first the filmmaker’s gaze, then the viewers’, and finally Spyros’, all of them explicitly and carefully orchestrated by Angelopoulos himself. This string of points of view constitutes the backbone of the narration of a personal story embedded in the master narrative of history. If, as Trotter argues, ‘early cinema had begun to figure for the novelist the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy relentlessly at work in modern experience’ (2007: 19), conversely, narrative devices (storytelling, narrators, subjective points of view) commonly used in literature play a significant role in Angelopoulos’ last film to address the tension between the documentary and the subjective in cinema. Angelopoulos thus seems intent on demonstrating what Gaudreault calls ‘filmic literariness’ or ‘the ability of film language to produce different énoncés at a higher level of abstraction than mere monstration’ (2009: 162). For Gaudreault, monstration is ‘a way to describe and identify this mode of communicating a story, which consists in showing characters who act out rather than tell the vicissitudes to which they are subjected’ (2009, 69) whereas narration or ‘filmic literariness is located at various levels of filmmaking activity, but is at work principally on two levels: in the intertitles and in editing’ (2009:

186  c a r o l i ne e ade s 162). Previous examples from The Dust of Time have demonstrated the significant role of editing, but in this film the prominent use of verbal language does not simply rely on intertitles: Angelopoulos also resorts to the narrator’s voice, verbal account of letters and poems read aloud to introduce and depict characters whose visual presence is often partial or distorted. Spyros is only seen from behind in the opening sequence. Besides the fact that her hair has turned white, there is not much change to Eleni’s face or demeanour in the scenes when she is eighty compared to the scenes that portray her at a younger age. Viewers are left to find clues in the dialogue and the scene’s environment to identify the film’s characters and their roles. Ulysses’ Gaze is even more radical in this regard since the same actress, Maia Morgenstern, plays all female characters. Angelopoulos’ ‘filmic literariness’ consists of altering the usual function of places in his narratives in a similar manner: a market is transformed into a movie theatre in Ulysses’ Gaze, a building under construction becomes a mortuary chapel in Eternity and a Day, a wagon is converted into a fugitive’s home in The Suspended Step of the Stork, and a theatre is turned into a refugees’ camp in The Weeping Meadow. This kind of displacement points towards the storyteller – the intradiegetic narrator as well as the author of the film – and frees the film from realistic or mimetic constraints by subjugating spatial representations to a ‘higher level of abstraction’, the narrative i­mperative, the constraints of the narration. To achieve this goal, the importance of the verbal component becomes even more apparent in The Dust of Time where Angelopoulos seems to share ‘the modernist fascination with ideographic and hieroglyphic languages, perceived to lie, or to conjoin, word and image’ (Marcus 2007: 9). The walls of Termirtau Cultural Centre display inscriptions in Russian Cyrillic alphabet and there are graffiti all over the Berlin squat. Since both types of writing look like obscure hieroglyphs to the average non-Russian viewer, Angelopoulos might be alluding here to the contradiction between the obvious function of language – ­communication – and the obstacles raised by cultural and social norms. The need for a conventional form of narration is thus justified to overcome the shortcomings of any language and mobilise the resources of all languages (whether verbal or filmic) to improve communication between people. In short, all narrative categories (characters, time, point of view, space) have been revisited by Angelopoulos in his last films to emphasise the shift towards a narrator’s system and to address modernist issues such as the ‘revision of ways of understanding (. . .) the status of language, time and consciousness’ (Shail 2012: 196). He did not shy away from challenging his former practice as a filmmaker in order to illustrate the ability of cinema to integrate verbal language and poetic expression, and acknowledge cinema’s ongoing competition with literature in this regard. This change of perspective can also account for further diversification in Angelopoulos’ choice of narrative genres and

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   187 structures: late films are characterised by the insertion of tales, fables, legends and poems in the main plot. These short stories are often associated with semifantastic characters, mostly children like the Albanian boy (Achileas Skevis) who appears and disappears at will under the eyes of Alexander (Bruno Ganz), or A.’s young guide to the Sarajevo film archives. Such embedded narratives and unusual characters can be reminiscent of Oriental tales since they are presented as a dream or a fable inserted in the primary narrative, sometimes for almost the total duration of the film.12 Angelopoulos said of his protagonist in Voyage to Cythera: ‘the whole film really takes place inside his head’ (cited in Horton 1997b: 109). The same could apply to other characters such as Alexander embarking on an imaginary journey while sleeping in his car in Eternity and a Day, A.’s dreaming about his quest for lost reels in Ulysses’ Gaze during the projection of his own film, and, as seen previously in The Dust of Time, the filmmaker preparing the next day’s shooting of his film at Cinecittà. Angelopoulos’ attempt at reinstating the protagonist as a storyteller and his own film as ‘a poem including history’, to use Ezra Pound’s definition of the epic ([1934] 1968, 86), can be reminiscent of the modernist period as a moment of intense ‘exchange between various art forms at the time’ (Shail 2012: 4). Literature remains, however, for Angelopoulos at least, the art with which cinema entertains a specific relation that ‘can best be understood as a shared preoccupation’ and is ‘constituted by parallel histories’ (Trotter 2007: 3). Not only, as previously seen, do his films repeatedly attest to the transmission of myth to cinema through literary texts and narrative forms rather than other artistic practices, but they also extend these references to diverse literatures. Allusions to The Odyssey or Ovid’s Metamorphoses in late films confirm his allegiance to oral tradition as a fluid, trans-secular, transnational, and popular form of composition and transmission based on storytelling, verbal language and poetic expression.13 Similarly, the Eastern frontier becomes the location of choice for his characters leaving the heart of Greece to reach the Balkans or the shores of the Black Sea.14 In short, the diasporic status of his intradiegetic narrators combined with a displacement of the film plots in Eastern Europe (including northern Greece, Germany, and the former Soviet Union) contributed to include other literatures than classical texts from antiquity and later. In 1997, Fredric Jameson seemed at first rather critical of the turn Angelopoulos had taken since 1986: he defined it as ‘a formal regression [inasmuch as it returns] to a framework organised around an individual protagonist, an individual hero or narrator, and it is a regression which thereby annuls the innovations and the formal conquests that Angelopoulos’ earlier films had made by way of the construction of their unique collective narratives’ (1997: 90). But even before he revisited this position in a more recent text (published in this volume), Jameson optimistically concluded his analysis by acknowledging that these formal and structural changes had not affected Angelopoulos’

188  c a r o l i ne e ade s fundamental commitment to political and social issues. And indeed, the most recent films seem to respond to what Jameson described as ‘the dissolution of an autonomous Greek story, the gradual opening of Greece (as of most other national situations) to dependency on the invisible force field of the world market itself’ (1997: 91). For Jameson, the last innovations in Angelopoulos’ style therefore ‘posit the possibility of some new narrative form of regional mapping, over against the world system’ (1997: 94). One could argue that Angelopoulos’ return to conventional narrative forms in his late films intended to address the situation brought about by new geopolitical configurations, but resulted in placing him in a tradition of storytelling that dates back to antiquity and has reflected similar situations of oppression and domination at the personal and the collective level throughout centuries. In Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, the interweaving of personal and familial memories with the recent history of Greek communities at first, and European diasporas ultimately, reveals not so much the intention to base fictional narratives on ‘true’ stories as it underscores the interplay of memory and history as a fundamental topic. With resources specific to his own art, Angelopoulos endeavoured to take up the work of the ‘historical novelist’ which, according to Georg Lukàcs, consists of ‘penetrating facts in order to elicit their inner connections and then to find a story and characters which can express this inner connection better than what is immediately discoverable’ ([1924] 1983: 76). The filmmaker’s growing inclination to use the resources of literary narratives and practices has thus provided a constructive alternative to Pierre Nora’s ominous prediction on the future of history and literature: ‘memory has been promoted to the centre of history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature’ (1989: 24). In fact, one could consider that Angelopoulos’ cinema participated in the revival of literature by reinforcing the narrative imperative within his films, and addressing the ‘anxiety about the death of classical cinema returning in the form of its failure: that of messages’, which is, for Badiou, located ‘at the heart of modernity’ (2013: 59). Angelopoulos’ oeuvre presents a successful counterpoint to old forms of literary cinema and historical literature, and offers a new legitimacy to memory as the ‘centre of history’ within the spectacular survival of cinema as the art of the narrative. Such perspective would then justify an approach to Angelopoulos’ later films as being not so much under the influence of Antonioni as on a parallel course to Wim Wenders’ trajectory. James Quandt already observed that ‘three of Angelopoulos’ films – Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist – form a loose road trilogy that bears more than a few similarities to Wim Wenders’s road trilogy: Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Movement and Kings of the Road ’ (1990: 25). According to Martin Brady and Joanne Leal, during his collaboration with writer Peter Handke, Wim Wenders ‘increasingly gained confidence in his own powers as a storyteller and at the same time became

t he narrat i ve i m p erat i ve   189 interested in narrative cinema’ (2011: 241). The Wrong Move (1975) and Wings of Desire (1987) bear the mark of the German director’s evolution inasmuch as they ‘literarise what is a self-conscious poetic allegory of the artist-filmmaker as redemptive storyteller.’ (2011: 32). It is therefore possible to develop Quandt’s comparison between Angelopoulos and Wenders on the basis of a common perspective on the role of literature within and parallel to cinema. Angelopoulos’ work doesn’t raise the question of the transformation of a literary text into film since he never engaged in adaptation per se, but Vincenzo Bonaccorsi, among others, rightfully proposed that the third wing of the angel in The Dust of Time be interpreted as a reference to Wings of Desire (2013: 12). The mysterious and poetic clue could then serve as an allegory, ‘a dialectical image of the artist’s entrapment in the flow of memory’, or the ‘desperate cry of a poetess’ (whether Anna Achmatova, Marina Cvetaeva or any other victim of Stalinism). The Dust of Time would achieve the perfect symbiosis between Wenders’ literary vocation and Angelopoulos’ constant engagement with history: ‘Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history [that] haunts films like Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day’, re-emerged in The Dust of Time but, instead of ‘acting as a counterpoint to the Proustian intuition of the redemptive power of art’ as Martine Beugnet proposes (2004: 237), it confirms and reinforces the power of cinema to encompass, rival, challenge and energise literature as the Form of History.

NOTES   1. See for example Michel Ciment and Hélène Tierchant (1989: 47–61), Yvette Biro (1995: 67–71), Françoise Létoublon (2007: 79–88), and Irini Stathi (2007: 89–97).   2. In an interview with Andrew Horton (1997b: 107), Angelopoulos acknowledges that he was more interested in poetry than cinema during his youth.   3. Anti-narrative perspectives have been developed in recent studies focusing on the emotions and affects produced by the film apparatus (see Murray Smith [1995], Laura Marks [1999] and Eve Sedgwick [2003] for example) as well as critical texts revisiting narratology in the light of cognitive science and philosophy. See Noël Carroll (1996), David Bordwell (2007) and Arthur Shimamura (2013), among others.   4. For Andrew Horton, Angelopoulos in Ulysses’ Gaze ‘also evokes Plato (. . .) in the quotation which appears at the beginning of the film, and thus he calls on a Hellenic tradition of contemplation and philosophical inquiry’ (1997a: 181). David Bordwell describes Angelopoulos’ style as a ‘suspension of dramatic progression which allows both detached contemplation and a sense of dry, understated emotion’ (1997: 18). Jameson praises Angelopoulos’ films for being ‘very much in motion’ and thus solving the problem posed by movement ‘for any theory or description of ontology, which one tends rather to associate with contemplation’ (1997: 85).   5. For a detailed analysis of the sequence, see Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2010: 148–9).   6. See Andrew Feldherr (2010: 146) and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (2005: 68–75) for Ovid’s poetic treatment of the narrative voice and the role of the gaze in Pygmalion’s tale.

190  c a r o l i ne e ade s   7. This particular feature of Angelopoulos’ films could account for their self-referential nature inasmuch as they seem to call for a psychoanalytical reading based on the association between dream states and the cinematic apparatus through similar mechanisms: displacement, condensation, considerations of representability, translation of abstract thoughts in images, and the presence of a narrative as secondary revision (see Christian Metz [1977] 1986: 83 note 17).   8. In his foreword to David Trotter’s book on Cinema and Modernism, Colin MacCabe observes that André Bazin indirectly ‘characterised the relations between the twentiethcentury literature and cinema not as direct influence or borrowing but as a “certain aesthetic convergence”’ (2007: xi).   9. Angelopoulos’ father was arrested and imprisoned by the Communist partisans during the Greek Civil War, but he was eventually set free. 10. Trotter mentions the works of Joyce Jesionowski (1987), Scott Simmon (1993), Paolo Cherchi Usai (1999–2008) and Iris Barry ([1940] 2002), in addition to Tom Gunning’s book on D. W. Griffith (1991). 11. In Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema, Christian Metz identifies ‘two main types of nonchronological syntagma. One of them is well known by film aestheticians and is called ‘parallel montage sequence’ (. . .) Definition: montage brings together and interweaves two or more alternating ‘motifs’, but no precise relationship (whether temporal or spatial) is assigned to them – at least on the level of denotation. This kind of montage has a direct symbolic value’ ([1968] 1991: 125) by opposition to ‘narrative syntagmas – that is to say, syntagmas in which the temporal relationship between the objects seen in the images contains elements of consecutiveness and not only of simultaneity’ (1991: 128). 12. This particular narrative structure (a series of short stories embedded in a main frame) had already become popular in Europe in the fourteenth century with the publication of Boccacio’s Decameron in Italy and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in England. 13. For references to Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s work on Homeric epics and SerboCroatian oral tradition in Ulysses’ Gaze, see Eades and Létoublon (1999: 301–16). 14. The Weeping Meadow is not an exception in this regard: Eleni was expecting to receive Alexis’ letters from ‘the West’ since he left for America, but they are in fact coming from the Far East where Alexis has been sent to fight in the Battle of the Pacific.

C H A P TER 12

Syncope and Fractal Liminality: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera and the Question of Borders Dany Nobus and Nektaria Pouli

I

ntertwined and iterative as Angelopoulos’ films may be, Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) occupies a special place in the director’s oeuvre. Speaking to the French film critic Michel Ciment shortly after its release, Angelopoulos conceded that Voyage to Cythera was his ‘least Greek’ and his ‘least deep-rooted’ film, insofar as it was intended to express a ‘general illbeing’ (cited in Ciment 1985: 26). Anyone familiar with Greece’s tumultuous political history during the twentieth century will find this statement surprising, given the film’s central concern (or so it would seem) with the impossible homecoming of an exiled communist Αντάρτης (partisan) after the general amnesty of 1982. Yet on various occasions, Angelopoulos has indicated that he only added the socio-political backdrop to the film in order to distance himself from it, moving away from a representation of the collective history of the Greek people towards a consideration of individual lives. As such, the film proposes to exchange depictions of the social forces animating communities during and over particular historical periods for the cinematic analysis of particular subjects, specific identities and individual constructions. Although some scholars have continued to situate Voyage to Cythera within an unbroken cycle of collective socio-political histories, it is more commonly accepted that the film constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos’ career – the moment of what could be called an ‘anthropocentric turn’ (Grodent [1985] 2001: 49). After Voyage to Cythera, Angelopoulos’ films became much more personal and individualistic, more focused on intimate subjective dramas than on collective historical tragedies. This re-calibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films’ characters. Voyage to Cythera is the first of Angelopoulos’ films in which the protagonist is a film director, although the viewer may be involuntarily focused on Old Man Spyros (Manos Katrakis)1, which somehow suggests that when Angelopoulos places the human being in the centre, it is for this human

192  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li being to become decentred, estranged, marginalised, alienated. In addition, Voyage to Cythera is the first film in which Angelopoulos named two of his main characters, notably the elderly couple, after his own parents – Spyros and Katerina – and two other characters (the film director’s absent brother Nikos, and his ‘film-sister’ Voula) after his own brother and sister. More poignantly, Angelopoulos chose the actress Dora Volanaki to play the role of Katerina, because of her extraordinary resemblance to his own mother, even going so far as to dress her in his mother’s clothes. And whenever the film director in Voyage to Cythera speaks, it is Angelopoulos’ own voice we hear (see Ciment 1985: 30; Horton 1997a: 18). On account of this ‘anthropocentric turn’, Angelopoulos’ post Voyage to Cythera films could no doubt be seen as more self-centred and solipsistic, thus appealing only to a small audience of like-minded aficionados. Yet in a 1993 interview with the American film-scholar Andrew Horton, the ever mercurial director highlighted an interesting paradox: I feel the deeper one goes into one’s particular place – Greece for me – the more universal it will become for others. What I don’t like are those films that try to please everyone with a little bit of everything but which wind up being nothing in particular . . . [W]e call such films ‘Europudding’! They have no one strong taste’. (cited in Horton 1997a: 204) The least that can be said about the films Angelopoulos made after Voyage to Cythera is indeed that they leave behind a strong taste, that their taste is highly distinctive and that more often than not it is extraordinarily bitter.2 In this chapter, we will employ Voyage to Cythera as a starting point for the elaboration of two interrelated concepts and two interlocking mental ­functions  – syncope and fractal liminality. Broadly drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of Angelopoulos’ ‘film-text’, yet avoiding the classic Freudian methodology of assuming the existence of a latent subtext behind the manifest content of a work of art, we will argue that Voyage to Cythera condenses within its intricate filmic texture Angelopoulos’ key paradigm of the ‘boundary phenomenon’. In our analysis, we will show that this paradigm separates between different strands of human socio-political and mental experience, without therefore constituting a clearly identifiable frontier. In the first section of the text, we will demonstrate 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. We will show that these liminalities are not restricted to social constellations, but also appear within the psychic sphere, and indeed pervade Angelopoulos’ own search for the definitive film. Voyage to Cythera can be

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  193 designated, here, as a liminality in itself, insofar as it stands at the crossroads between two distinct periods in Angelopoulos’ works, whereby we have to bear in mind that the film is already the re-working of an anterior ‘primal script’, which may very well have its roots in Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970). In the second section of the chapter, we will argue that Angelopoulos’ ‘fractal liminalities’ coincide with the affective quality of ‘syncope’ – a socio-political and mental state of suspension, which is literally ‘neither here nor there’, and which represents a state of rhythmic vacillation coinciding with the experience of ‘being out of step’. We will also argue, however, that Angelopoulos is not campaigning for the abolition of liminalities (and the associated state of syncope), but rather for a more fluctuating, less rigid, more intrinsically transformative type of boundary, a littoral rather than a strict frontier. The shifting liminality prevents the syncope from becoming a persistent state of passive hesitation, and allows it to become a new source of creative power, which facilitates the embarkation on an authentic life-journey. As we believe Angelopoulos himself shows in his long artistic voyage, it is par excellence the cinematic imagination which contains the revolutionary power to shift the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and to establish the creative syncope that would allow for an innovative constellation of social and subjective sensibilities. In a 1985 interview with the Belgian journalist Michel Grodent, Angelopoulos stated: ‘I always say that my films are my universities. I learned a lot from my films. They are my personal luggage and my psychoanalytic sessions’ (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 48). So what is there to be learned from Voyage to Cythera? What could Angelopoulos have gained from this particular psychoanalytic session – the film with which he attempted to put collective history to rest, which ushered in his ‘anthropocentric turn’, and which (much like Reconstruction previously) encapsulated in utero the core motifs of all his subsequent films?3 The first thing to note is that Voyage to Cythera is effectively a multi-­ layered, self-duplicating palimpsest. As Angelopoulos disclosed to Grodent: ‘The origin of the film is an old poem I wrote once; I thought I would plant it somewhere in the film, but finally I didn’t’ (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 44).4 For unknown reasons, the poem did not make it into the film, but was overwritten with an eponymous script, yet parts of this ‘primal script’ were also deleted from the film. In the ‘primal script’, Alexander wakes up to noises coming from the street, goes outside and sees how a naked man is about to jump from an upstairs window, whilst waving his arms like a huge seabird and reciting mysterious words. After a brief interruption, when Alexander imagines following an attractive woman through the streets, he walks up a ladder towards the naked man, only to discover that he is looking at himself. He tries to speak to the man, but the latter jumps to his death, and at that point Alexander hears

194  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li a familiar female voice calling out to a child. Questioned by Grodent about this deletion, Angelopoulos pointed out that he did shoot the scene, but that he decided to leave it out because he felt that ‘it toppled the delicate balance between the two levels of fiction’ in the film, namely his own film and the one prepared by Alexander, adding that he did not want the director’s story to obfuscate the story of Old Man Spyros, and that the ‘point of the scene’, which is ‘dominated by this search for the right equilibrium and true inspiration’ was also repeated elsewhere (ibid. 40). However, this is by no means the only place in the film’s ‘primal script’ where it differs substantially from the film scenario. For example, the former includes a scene in which Alexander wakes up in a strange house and discovers, to his shock and surprise, pictures of himself and the woman with whom he has become infatuated, as if he has already been leading a second life in an altered state of consciousness, but more significantly it also includes the first stanza of the poem ‘Voyage to Cythera’ (Fotopoulos, 1991: 65–68). Furthermore, between the ‘primal script’ and the final film screenplay there are likely to have existed a large number of additional iterations, each one part of Angelopoulos’ ongoing search for the definitive film. As Angelopoulos’ cherished composer Eleni Karaindrou affirmed in an interview with the Belgian film critic Gorik de Henau, the Greek director was in the habit of re-writing his scenarios ‘at least two hundred times’, only to end up changing things again on the set and during the editing process (de Henau 2013: 37).5 To add another layer to this seemingly endless process of reconstruction, it should be mentioned that the film shown at Cannes in 1985 may have become the ‘standard’ version of Voyage to Cythera, but that it was not the only version Angelopoulos cut. Apart from the ‘original film’, Angelopoulos made a shorter version of 120 minutes for German cinemas and a longer ‘television version’ of 149 minutes for the German public-service broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) (Nagel 1992: 223). And as if all of this was still not enough, Angelopoulos suggested to Karaindrou that she compose a ‘hasapiko-dance’ for the film, which resulted in a song called ‘Voyage to Cythera’ – sung by Yorgos Dalaras when Alexander, Voula and Panagiotis drink coffee at a roadside cantina –whose main theme is repeated throughout the film in at least four different musical idioms (jazz, rock, classical, popular Greek).6 One poem, a ‘primal script’ containing a fragment of the poem, three versions of a film without the poem, a film and a song with the same title, the same notes repeated with different instruments and performed in alternative musical styles, a song and a poem with the same title but different words – it is hard to imagine a more complex composite picture of superimposed, intersecting variations on a theme, in what is already a highly hybrid art form, combining poetry, literature, film and music. At the risk of pushing the reader over the edge, we should mention that ‘A Voyage to Cythera’ is also the title of a poem by Charles Baudelaire and the common title of an early eighteenth-century

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  195 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, which exists in two versions, and that Angelopoulos was familiar with both these works (cited in Ciment 1985: 27). What interests us in this vertiginous constellation of interlocking words, images, voices and sounds, is less the infinite intertextuality and the limitless self-referentiality of Angelopoulos’ film(s), and more the lines and points where the multifarious components that make up the constellation are being given the chance to connect and are simultaneously put at risk of becoming detached. Although Angelopoulos’ films are distinctively Greek, and draw on historical socio-political events, particularly during his early years, it seems to us that beyond the national tragedies and culture-bound dilemmas that his films depict, they raise more fundamental, possibly universal questions about the function and status of borders and boundaries, limits, edges and frontiers for the definition of our ‘general ill-being’. Much as Angelopoulos makes it extremely difficult for the viewer (and sometimes extraordinarily painful for the scholar) to distinguish between fantasy and reality, between dream life and wakefulness, between one character and another, between one film and another, between wives and lovers, between himself and his protagonists, between air and water, between fact and fiction, and between truth and falsity, there is a common denominator to all these blurs, namely the (im)possibility of distinction as such. Throughout his career, yet especially after making Voyage to Cythera, Angelopoulos became obsessed with ‘lines of separation’, demarcations that can represent both a coupling or coming together of distinct entities, and a disjunction between different parts of one and the same entity. Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998) are generally designated as Angelopoulos’ ‘trilogy of borders’, yet already in Reconstruction, he allocates a key role to the trope of the border, as the constitutive semantic of departures and arrivals, as what governs the dynamics of exile and homecoming, but also as what presides over life and death. When, in Reconstruction, the husband crosses again the threshold of his home (metaphorically as well as literally) he returns to his former life, but he also walks straight into his assassination. Moreover, Angelopoulos’ border is not just the geographical representation of national frontiers, an external physical boundary which has been erected to mark the separation between countries and cultures, politics and values, and which conditions the existence of exiles and refugees, but also (and more importantly) the social representation of intracultural divisions and interpersonal disputes, and (most important of all) the psychic representation of intrapersonal, subjective conflicts. To Angelopoulos, borders do not only exist within a certain spatial arrangement, where they would be represented by fences, checkpoints, watchtowers, passport controls and customs officials, but also as part of a temporal order,

196  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li where their significance is felt as the inevitable passing of time. This spatiotemporal conjunction, which constitutes a border in its own right, is portrayed magnificently in the last day of the poet Alexander (Bruno Ganz) in Eternity and a Day, insofar as every hour, every minute and every second of the day he spends travelling around (and to and from the geographical frontier between Greece and Albania) represents the crossing of a crucial psychic and biological limit, which brings him closer to death. It is also captured in Ulysses’ Gaze, when the film director’s voyage across the Balkans in search of some historical film reels coincides with a mental journey backwards in time, all the way to a significant encounter in his own childhood, from which he then travels forwards again, speeding through a period of five years in the space of a couple of minutes. A similar conjunction underpins the way in which Alexander creates and reconstructs Old Man Spyros in Voyage to Cythera, with the proviso that, here, it is the disjunction rather than the conflation of space and time that is being articulated: after having lived more than thirty years on the other side of the Greek border, Spyros crosses the border of his homeland again, but only to find himself an exile in his own country, because he has not crossed the temporal border that would have allowed him to ‘keep up’ with the times. Given the wide-ranging connotations and the multidimensionality of the border phenomenon in Angelopoulos’ works, we shall refer to it with the anthropological notion of ‘liminality’, which has the advantage of encapsulating the threshold status of certain objects and events, as well as the transitional, inchoate, ‘limbo’ quality of the associated experience. Liminality pervades Voyage to Cythera as a constant reminder of the fragile equilibrium between fantasy and reality, but also as an intermittent punctuation of the flux of human experience. As a viewer, we are never entirely sure whether Alexander, the film director, is acting as Old Man Spyros’ son within the film he is attempting to make, or acting as ‘himself’, in the film Angelopoulos has made.7 It is clear that the film director occasionally leaves his own film in order to rejoin his familiar ‘reality’, but it is not always clear when the transition is being made. We know the border is there, but we can rarely situate it with certainty and precision. In the character of Old Man Spyros, the problematic representation of liminality is compounded by the fact that Alexander’s unexpected embodied encounter with the lavender seller in the café, which sparks a powerful moment of recognition in his mind, may either signal the identification of his own long lost father, or his sudden discovery of the perfect Spyros film-character. We are led to believe that he is looking for someone to play the role of an old man who says ‘Εγώ είμαι’ (‘It’s me’), when he absent-mindedly walks into an audition, but when he first sees the lavender seller (reflected in a mirror), the man does not say anything. ‘It’s me’, we hear Spyros say the very first time he speaks, but the problem is that we cannot be sure that it really is him, and when Alexander and Voula see

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  197 him standing in front of them, with his suitcase and his violin, they are not quite sure either. When the police ask Alexander ‘Are you quite sure he’s your father?’, Alexander does not say anything, and so the police are convinced Spyros must be his father. When a journalist asks Alexander ‘What’s your connection with him?’, Alexander remains silent, stands up and walks away. But even if it really is him, who would he actually be? Spyros the communist fighter who was exiled during the Greek Civil War and who returns to his family and his native country after more than thirty years? Spyros the lavender seller who accidentally ends up playing the communist fighter who was exiled during the Greek Civil War in Alexander’s film? Spyros the actor who first plays a lavender seller, and ends up playing the communist fighter? Angelopoulos plays on the liminality, here, between different identities, and the statement ‘It’s me’ is as much of an affirmation as it is a question and a demand for confirmation: ‘Who am I?’, ‘Please confirm that I am the person I am claiming to be’. These are also the statements and questions that are being formulated at geographical borders, where crossings are only allowed if people can demonstrate who they are, if they can present solid proof of identity, and if it has been confirmed that they are indeed who they claim to be. Of course, the drama of Spyros in Voyage to Cythera is that the authorities in his ‘home country’ regard him as being stateless, and therefore have no other option than to expel him into international waters, because he himself has never abandoned his own identity as a communist fighter. Spyros is identified as a troublemaker, because unfortunately he is still the person he has always been. The Greek authorities impose a new non-identity upon him, precisely because his former identity has not changed. Of course, Spyros is both ‘him’

Figure 12.1 Voyage to Cythera

198  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li and ‘not him’. When he says ‘Εγώ είμαι’ – although the words are likely to have been written by Alexander’s scriptwriter – he is simultaneously the man his family have been waiting for, and a completely different character. He is still Spyros the communist fighter, who has remained truthful to his political ideals, but he is also no longer the same man who was exiled thirty odd years ago. To Katerina, he is at the same time her beloved husband, and a man who has betrayed her on account of getting married and fathering three children abroad. To Panagiotis, he is simultaneously an old friend who still knows the ‘outlaw code’, and someone whose revolutionary spirit no longer has the political edge of yore. To Voula and Alexander, Spyros is at the same time their long lost father, and a diminutive shadow of his former self. In Voyage to Cythera, Angelopoulos represents liminality as ‘fractal’, in a persistent mise-en-abyme, the most fundamental expression of which is to be found in the psychic economies of his characters, his viewers and himself.8 Angelopoulos does not invite his viewer to identify with one of his characters, or at least he leaves the viewer’s options open, but precisely on account of these fluctuating, shifting identifications the viewer surreptitiously enters a world in which appearances dominate and nothing really is what it seems. The more the viewer tries to establish the border between fantasy and reality, the more he or she is forced to accept that, although the border must exist somewhere, its concrete representation as a line of separation is endlessly receding. Alexander always seems to operate on the threshold of a dream, or on the verge of an imaginary journey, but when he moves to the other side of consciousness and starts to live in this ‘parallel reality’, new thresholds continue to appear, and on occasion it may seem as if he is about to enter a dream within the dream, ad infinitum. Much like our consciousness does not register the moment when we fall asleep and start to experience the endless possibilities of the oneiric cinematography, Angelopoulos’ characters in Voyage to Cythera cannot consciously acknowledge the moment when they start becoming part of a film, and the viewer too is unable to ascertain when exactly the film has started and people have been recuperated within it as actors playing a part. Yet Angelopoulos goes a step further and demonstrates that when our consciousness registers the moment when the film is over we should not interpret this punctuation as an end, but rather as a new beginning. The Voyage to Cythera – the poem, the script, the film, the film within the film, the song, Spyros and Katerina’s journey of love and death – stops, but it does not end, and it is pointless to try to conceive of a definitive end to the journey, because the latter could never be anything but a new threshold. In Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) the young boy Alexander (Michalis Zeke) at one point asks his sister Voula (Tania Palaiologou) about the meaning of the word ‘border’. Voula does not answer. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the man who has been identified as the disappeared politician (Marcello Mastroianni) –

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  199 but is it really him? – seems to know what the word ‘border’ means, but ends up wondering ‘How many borders do we need to cross before we get home?’ The question is rhetorical. One could no doubt regard Angelopoulos’ obsession with borders, especially after his ‘anthropocentric turn’, as a refraction of his own personal critique of political ideologies of segregation and repressive fanaticisms of national identity. In a thoughtful exploration of the theme of border crossings in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, Wendy Everett has interpreted the director’s portrayal of various types of border – external and internal, social and psychic, political and cultural – as an implicit condemnation of the absurdity of frontiers and lines of separation, which always appear as ‘negative phenomena’, even when (as in Landscape in the Mist) they present themselves with the promise of freedom and the hope of a new, better life. (Everett 2004: 72).9 What Everett refers to as the ‘stasis and negativity’ of Angelopoulos’ borders could in itself be interpreted, here, in at least two different ways. Firstly, each and every border epitomises conflictual separation, insofar as it drives a wedge between two or more parts of the same entity that organically belong together. Secondly, although the border elicits a desire to ‘cross the line’ and to overcome the separation, the satisfaction of this desire is a strictly asymptotical function, because each and every crossing opens up a new set of borders in the space of fractal liminality, like a mathematical ‘infinite series’. Angelopoulos’ exiles and refugees find themselves in a similar position to Zeno’s Achilles when he is desperately trying to catch up with the tortoise. Every time they cross a hurdle in their race home, another hurdle needs to be overcome and so the race is never finished and the destination never reached. The problem is not so much that ‘home’ is infinitely retracting, but that the way towards ‘home’ presents itself as an infinite series of borders to be crossed. Valuable as this outlook may be, we wish to adopt a slightly different perspective, which does not detract from Angelopoulos’ political engagement, but which places his fractal liminality within the context of a broader set of reflections on the redeeming power of fantasy, the imagination and indeed cinema itself. If the figure of fractal liminality in Voyage to Cythera may easily escape the viewer’s attention, it is not so much because it is cleverly concealed, but rather because it is ‘hidden in full view’ – like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous story.10 However, there is another detail in the film which belongs more strictly to Freud’s cherished ‘rubbish-heap’ of our ­representational world, and which is in a sense the affective counterpart of the film’s fractal liminality.11 Towards the end of Voyage to Cythera, someone opens the front door of the cafeteria and claps his hands twice (one, two . . .), urging the musicians to go outside. Off-camera, the microphones are being tested: ‘One, two . . . Testing. One, two . . . Testing’. The harbour commander looks through his

200  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li binoculars from behind the window of the cafeteria and says: ‘You can no longer see him [Old Man Spyros on the raft]. The motorboat with the technicians is coming back. I can see its headlights’. Alexander can be seen pacing around the cafeteria in silence, as if wondering about his next step. Then he echoes the sound of the microphones being tested outside and says: ‘Ένα δύο, ένα δύο. . .Θεε μου, χάνω το ρυθμό . . . Ένα δύο, ένα δύο . . . Τρία . . . Νύχτα’ (‘One, two . . . One, two . . . My God, I’m losing the rhythm . . . One, two . . . Three . . . Night). The scene cuts to outside the cafeteria, where darkness has fallen. A voice can be heard counting: ‘One, two, three, four, five . . .’ At the count of five, the musicians’ stage is completely illuminated.12 The entire sequence only lasts a couple of minutes and is easily overlooked, yet the repeated numbers and the process of counting capture a crucial element of Angelopoulos’ film, which runs through it like a delicate gossamer thread. Spyros has been away for thirty-two years. The villagers have not set foot in their old town for fifteen years. In the cemetery, Spyros sings of forty red apples. Antonis reminds him that he has been condemned to death four times. Spyros has three other children in Russia. To Katerina, Spyros says he has been banished for the third time. Three times Katerina repeats that she wants to go with Spyros. Whereas all these figures may seem trivial and irrelevant, the numbers and the counting represent a type of cadence, whereby people are organising their lives and their individual life histories around a set of numerical scansions. When at the beginning of the film, Alexander leaves his house and walks along the pavement towards his car, he can be seen hopping from one stone to another, before resuming his normal step. Later on in the film, Alexander stops on a zebra crossing in the middle of the road and taps with his finger, as if playing the notes of a song on a keyboard. After listening to a voice on his answering machine stating the various stops taken by the daily boat to Cythera, Alexander hops around his flat in the same way he had been hopping on the pavement, before crossing the threshold to another part of the flat. In these scenes, Alexander is neither dancing, nor performing an involuntary obsessive-compulsive ritual, but rather trying to find his rhythm, much like he is trying to find his film (and his life). At the end of Voyage to Cythera the musicians’ testing of the microphones reminds him of this fervent search for cadence, with the proviso that he is also becoming aware that he is ‘losing it’, that he can’t keep up with the pace and the tempo, in short that he is at risk of being ‘out of step’. Alexander is not the only character in Voyage to Cythera who is trying to find his rhythm, who is somehow incapable of adapting to a regular pattern, and who can be seen stumbling through life crudely and unsteadily. Old Man Spyros refused to conform to the political cadence of the Greek government armies, lost his battle and was forced into exile, but upon his return to his homeland he is still following old patterns of thought, and is therefore once

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  201 again out of step with the world. When Spyros realises, after the scene in the cemetery, that the ‘forty red apples’ are an illusion, he produces the ultimate counterpoint of the ‘rotten, withered apple’, first pronounced in Greek (σάπιο μήλο) when he is given the key to his old house, and later on repeated in Russian (гнилой яблоко) when he stands outside the house with Katerina. The bunch of apples has been reduced to one, and the one that is left is likely to spoil all the others. Voula berates Spyros for ‘never giving other people a thought’, for ruining her mother’s life, and she criticises him for coming back, but she herself does not know how she should participate in this difficult homecoming, if at all. ‘I don’t intend to spend my life running after ghosts. One victim in the family is quite enough,’ she says to Alexander. ‘Nobody forced you to come,’ Alexander replies. ‘That’s why I’m angry,’ Voula says, ‘Angry at myself.’ Much like Alexander, Voula is trying to find her rhythm, but she feels that she is constantly at risk of being out of step – if not with the external world, then definitely with herself. In a sense, Katerina is unlike the other characters, because she deliberately chooses another, ‘counter-cadence’ in insisting that she wants to go with Spyros on his last voyage. In her case, it is a self-imposed exile, but also a symbol of her unfailing commitment to her husband, which allows her to find peace with herself.13 Not being able to find the rhythm, feeling that they are out of step with the world around them and with themselves, the main characters in Voyage to Cythera operate in a state of suspension or, better still, in an almost permanent condition of syncope, which in this case refers equally to their living outside a self-transparent, lucid consciousness and to their constantly ‘missing the beat’. In Voyage to Cythera, the physical and mental state of syncope is never dissociated from the experience of fractal liminality, yet the most captivating representation of their convergence appears at the beginning of The Suspended Step of the Stork, which is both the epilogue to Voyage to Cythera and the first instalment of Angelopoulos’ trilogy of borders. Alexander (Gregory Carr) follows a Greek army colonel (Ilias Logothetis) towards the border. During an inspection of the troops, a soldier states: ‘It’s not the border I’m afraid of, but the wrong move that could prove fatal.’ Alexander and the colonel walk towards the middle of a bridge across the river. ‘Do you know what borders are?’, he asks Alexander. No response. They stop before a line that is drawn across the bridge. ‘This blue line is where Greece ends,’ he says. ‘If I take one more step, I’m elsewhere or I die.’ From the other side of the border an armed guard approaches. The colonel lifts his right leg and adopts the suspended step of the stork. They walk back. In this extraordinary scene, it is the presence of the border – a tiny colourful line drawn across a man-made overpass – that allows the captain to be suspended, neither here nor there, with one foot on Greek soil and the other pointing towards an ‘elsewhere’, which also comes with the threat of death. It is a difficult balancing act, and one that is full of

202  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li emotional tension. Unlike the soldier, the colonel does not seem to be afraid of making the wrong move, but proceeds to performing the state of anxiety itself in a breathtaking moment of suspended animation. It is tempting to argue, here, that in the portrayal of suspended steps and syncopated states of minds, Angelopoulos again exposes the dangers of borders, and uses his films as a means to promote a more integrated, less mutilated life. However, it seems to us that in all his explicit denunciations of the artificiality and randomness of borders, Angelopoulos does not ­campaign for their abolition. Rather than an evil, traumatising phenomenon, ­liminality appears in Angelopoulos’ works as a conditio sine qua non for ­maintaining the most essential quality of human life – the possibility of a voyage. ‘The first thing God created was the journey’, we hear in Ulysses’ Gaze, but Angelopoulos also appears to be saying that in order to make a genuine, ­life-affirming journey, we require the presence of borders. Without liminality, there is no crossing, and without the experience of crossing, the journey of life becomes meaningless. Likewise, the syncope experienced by Angelopoulos’ characters in Voyage to Cythera is not an intrinsically negative phenomenon, but rather a mental state of inchoate tension, which is pregnant with the promise of new opportunities. If Alexander, Spyros and Voula experience the syncope as painful, if they remain trapped within a state of persistent vacillation, it is not because they are suffering from the overwhelming presence of fractal liminality, but rather because their internal and external liminality has become fixated, petrified, sclerotic and impermeable. Spyros ends up in international waters – in a liquid landscape without borders, where the sea and the air melt seamlessly into each other – because he is incapable of crossing the threshold to a changed world. His personal drama, which the film neither glorifies nor condemns, is that he remains too truthful to what he believes to be his cardinal values. If the villagers have sold their soul to capitalism, then Spyros is effectively being condemned to death when he categorically refuses to sell and quite literally uproots the new boundaries. The film does not suggest that Spyros should have saved his own life by adapting to the new socio-political circumstances, but instead it questions the value of Spyros’ uncompromising attitude towards his own convictions. In addition, the character of Spyros is a reflection – quite literally, insofar as he appears for the first time in a mirror – of Alexander’s own traumatic syncope, with the caveat that the borders he seems unable to cross are not those associated with ideological principles, but rather those ­governing the creative process of filmmaking per se. What Angelopoulos is advocating in his representation of the spatio-­ temporal confluence of syncope and fractal liminality is for borders to become more dynamic, less stable, more adjustable, less secure. Were a border to be properly recognised in its artificiality, as a moveable line of separation,

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  203 the resulting condition of syncope would not be reduced to an immobilising mental twilight zone, but would effectively embody the creative power of change. What appears, therefore, in Angelopoulos’ works is neither a reprobation of liminality, nor a rejection of syncope, but rather an argument for the installation of the border as a littoral – a space where the meeting point between two separate entities is always in flux, much like the way in which the constant ebb and flow of the seawater makes it impossible to establish where the land ends and where the ocean begins. Angelopoulos’ work connects, here, with Lacan’s concept of the letter (and literature) as a littoral, whereby writing does not represent an established border between Innenwelt and Umwelt, between the internal world and its external environment, but epitomises a moving shoreline between inside and outside (Lacan [1971] 2013: 329). Whereas language and writing are crucially important to Angelopoulos too, as yet another instance of borders that simultaneously separate and connect, in Voyage to Cythera (and many subsequent films) it is primarily the cinematic imagination that is being presented as the most important tool for shifting liminality. It is not by accident that Alexander’s exasperating mal-à-l’aise coincides with his unrealised attempt at making a film. Although the film-within-the-film can be regarded as one protracted fantasy, in a sense Alexander suffers from a lack of imagination, as a result of which the fractal liminality becomes traumatic and the syncope turns into a state of distant, disengaged apathy. For Angelopoulos, the cinematic imagination itself constitutes an inexhaustible source of creative change, the most important tool for borders to be transformed into littorals, and for our syncopated space-time coordinates to become the framework for an authentic life-journey.

NOTES   1. It is important to note that the choice of Manos Katrakis for the role of Spyros also has extra-textual resonances. Katrakis was a member of EAM/ELAS during the war. After the end of the war, he refused to sign a declaration of repentance and, along with other resistant fighters and Communists, he was exiled to the concentration camp in Makronisos.   2. Although it should be noted that when reviewing the world premiere of Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Ronald Bergan wrote that the film ‘seemed to have all the makings of a Europudding’. See Bergan (2008).   3. For a detailed synopsis of the film, we can refer the reader to Andrew Horton’s seminal monograph on Angelopoulos Horton (1997a: 129–37). However, the reader should be aware that this synopsis does not mention a number of significant details, such as Voula having sex with an anonymous sailor at the end of the film, and also contains quite a few inaccuracies. During the opening credits of the film, the galaxy is not just ‘swirling in the heavens’, but projected on the dome of a planetarium, making it an artificial rather than a ‘real galaxy’. In the first scene of the film, the young boy is not chased by German

204  d a n y n o bu s and ne ktar i a p o u li soldiers, but by just one German soldier, notably the one he has been taunting. When Alexander and Voula await the arrival of Old Man Spyros, Voula does not ask her brother ‘After thirty-two years, why are you still running after a shadow?’, but formulates a much more rhetorical question, in the first person plural: ‘Why should we keep running after a shadow?’ (Γιατί θα πρέπει να λαχανιάζουμε κοινηγώντας μια σκιά). When Old Man Spyros is taken home, he does not meet his wife Katerina inside the house; she is waiting for him outside. When the villagers move in on Spyros, they are indeed on foot and in cars, but not on motorcycles. In fact, many of them are on donkeys. When Spyros is taken to the old family home, he does not repeat the ballad of ‘Forty Red Apples’ that his friend Panagiotis has sung to him in the cemetery, but rather says ‘σάπιο μήλο’ (‘rotten apple’ or ‘withered apple’). When the villagers are called forward ‘in alphabetical order’ to sign the contract, this does not mimic the casting call in the studio at the beginning of the film, because in the studio scene the actors are repeating ‘Εγώ είμαι’ (‘It’s me’), that is, what Old Man Spyros will be saying later on. Instead, the villagers say ‘Παρών’ (‘present’), which is a line that is being rehearsed off-camera outside the coffee place where Alexander meets his lover. When Spyros refuses to sign the sale agreement, it is not Panagiotis who confronts him, but the local café-owner Antonis. When Spyros, Katerina, Alexander and Voula are back at the house, it is not Voula, but Katerina who slices the bread. Outside the house, it is not Panagiotis, but Antonis who shouts to Spyros ‘You’re dead!’ (‘Είσαι νεκρός’). When Spyros refuses to leave, it is again not Panagiotis, but Antonis who speaks to him about the Greek civil war. When Alexander, Voula and Panagiotis drink coffee at a roadside cantina, it is not Panagiotis but Voula who says that Spyros has ‘brought all his troubles upon himself by not signing papers’. When, in the last sequence, Alexander is counting ‘One, two . . .’, he is not echoing the police testing their walkie-talkies, but the musicians outside testing their microphones. Horton claims elsewhere in his book that the song ‘Forty Red Apples’ is about ‘drying up in old age’, but it is actually a melancholy love song (ibid. 47). In the same section, Horton indicates that when Spyros is being placed on a raft he starts singing ‘Forty Red Apples’ again, yet no such thing actually takes place. Apart from Horton’s synopsis of the film, there is another, slightly shorter one by the German broadcaster and journalist Josef Nagel, yet this one too contains a number of errors, the most significant one being the misidentification of Alexander’s lover and ‘film-sister’ Voula (Mary Chronopoulou) as his wife (Despina Geroulanou), both in the scene where Alexander is having sex with Voula in the theatre and in the scene where Voula is having sex with the anonymous sailor. See Nagel (1992: 156–8).   4. In the original French text of the interview, Angelopoulos actually states that he intended to use the poem as the epigraph to the film (‘j’aurais voulu le placer en exergue’), whereby it would have captured the film’s central theme. See Grodent (1985: 55). As it happens, when Angelopoulos started shooting Voyage to Cythera, the poem was not all that ‘old’, given that it had been composed during the summer of 1982. In a typically Angelopoulosian twist, the poem made its appearance in The Suspended Step of the Stork, where it features as the words which the disappeared politician (Marcello Mastroianni) had allegedly left behind on the answerphone of his wife (Jeanne Moreau). After part of the words (the first three stanzas of the poem) have been played on a tape to the investigative journalist (Gregory Karr) – and we hear them being spoken by Angelopoulos himself – the latter subsequently uses all the words (and thus Angelopoulos’ full poem) in an attempt to establish the true identity of the mysterious character in the border town. For the full original text of the poem entitled ‘Voyage to Cythera’ and a French translation, see Sylvie Rollet (2003: 347). An alternative French

s ynco p e and f ractal l i m i n al i ty  205

  5.   6.   7.

  8.

  9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

translation of the poem, without its title, appears on the first page of the special issue of Revue belge du Cinéma, no. 11 (1985), which is entirely devoted to Angelopoulos, and the three stanzas played to the journalist by the politician’s wife in The Suspended Step of the Stork are also included in French translation in Rollet (2007: 149), although here they are printed in quotation marks, unattributed and without a title. On Angelopoulos constantly changing the script of Voyage to Cythera, in search of his own film, see Ciment (1985: 30). For the lyrics of the song and the musical score, see Rollet (2003: 348, 352). An alternative French translation of the song can be found in Revue belge du Cinéma, no. 11(1985), 61. The reader will no doubt be amused to hear that Giulio Brogi, the actor who plays Alexander in Voyage to Cythera, also starred in the Taviani brothers’ 1972 San Michele aveva un gallo (St Michael had a rooster), where he played Giulio Manieri, the leader of a group of anarchists who after ten years’ imprisonment is allowed to return home, only to find that the revolutionary spirit has changed and that he is no longer at home with his own people. Some years ago, the English film-scholar Wendy Everett introduced the interesting term ‘fractal film’, yet without any reference to Angelopoulos and using ‘fractal theory’ – the mathematical theory of infinite self-similarity elaborated by Benoît Mandelbrot – almost as a synonym for chaos theory. The absence of Angelopoulos in Everett’s paper is all the more remarkable since she herself had previously written on Angelopoulos’ films. See Everett (2004: 55–80) and Everett (2005: 159–71). For a more nuanced reading of Angelopoulos’ representation of boundaries and divisions (and the trains, rails, ships, waterways and bridges that allow people to cross them) in Ulysses’ Gaze, see Anne Rutherford (2002: 63–84). See Poe ([1844] 1988), 319–33. In his 1914 paper on Michelangelo’s marble statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Freud argued that the ‘general impression’ and the ‘main features of a picture’ matter less to the psychoanalyst than the ‘minor details’, the ‘despised or unnoticed features’, and the ‘rubbish-heap’ of one’s observations. See Freud ([1914b] 1955, 222). Speaking to Grodent about the scene, Angelopoulos disclosed that the voice coming through the loudspeakers was actually his own, and that on this occasion he also lent his voice to Alexander when he can be heard repeating the lines with his Italian accent . . . See Grodent ([1985] 2001: 51). Both in his interview with Grodent and in a 1995 interview with Horton, Angelopoulos indicated that he considered Katerina to be the strongest character in the film. See Grodent ([1985] 2001: 48). See also Horton (1997b: 108).

C HA P TER 13

Landscape in the Mist: Thinking Beyond the Perimeter Fence Stephanie Hemelryk Donald

A

ngelopoulos’ Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) 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 the film are two runaway children, the eleven-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou), and the five-year-old Alexander (Michalis Zeke), and a young adult Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou). Voula bears the name of Angelopoulos’ late sister,1 producing an emotional proximity and equivalence with the filmmaker that supports an argument I wish to make in this paper, namely that Voula is both protagonist and a critical agent within the thinking body of the film. Voula’s screen presence (through the performance of Palaiologou) critiques the film’s trajectory even as she presents it. I will suggest, for example, that the rape sequence which is crucial to Angelopoulos’ narrative of maturing in a hard world is only understood by the actress and Orestes, but not by the filmmaker himself. So, when a male critic writes of Voula, now an abused child, as ‘das zur Frau wurde’ (now a woman) (Schütte 1992: 37), he supports the bizarre but not unusual notion that rape is part of sexual maturation, rather than a violent repression of the self which may in fact inhibit sexual maturation and development in the victim. Alexander is a recurring name in Angelopoulos’ post-1984 work, such as in Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), and in Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998). What we may draw from this is perhaps that the Greek boy and the Greek man are not always distinct entities, that in fact the boy is already showing the wisdom of age, whilst the aged are already returning to the insights of childhood. Orestes, is of course himself, the ever-heroic, ever-desired soldier/brother who featured both as adult partisan hero and as silent child in the filmmaker’s earlier film-essay on

t hi nk ing be y o nd t h e p er i meter fen ce   207 history and p ­ erformance: Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975). He is also a cinematic agent who circles age and time in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. In an early and particular response to Landscape in the Mist, he has also been described as an ‘angel’ (Murphy, 1990: 38). That response correctly recognises the spiritual journey that informs the film, but is also perhaps indicative of the effect of Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) There two male angels look after the young, and the lost, but also those with a certain stubborn vision, trapeze artists yes, but also those who can find ways of flying (literally or metaphorically) across the landscapes of modernity. The film is set in peri-urban industrial dead space, in small town centres, in Thessaloniki, and on the road; but the landscape of the title gestures to an occluded destination. This hidden ‘misty’ landscape is introduced to the protagonists, and us, on a small piece of discarded film stock. Hardly legible, its image is only realised in the final frames of the film, where it emerges – through the mist – as a lone tree. The tree, I would suggest, is the end point of a process of sacrifice and redemption. The children are sacrificed to redeem an idea of Greece and a belief in paternity. With this chapter I want to suggest that the film’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. They leave Greece only to arrive at its heart and soul. The return to a magical centre is in keeping with the fairy tale structure of the narrative. As I will elaborate in much of the discussion below, the children are on a quest, they seek one magical answer to all their problems, they receive help from an angel, and they transcend mortality. The adult world is dangerous to them, possibly fatally so. Nevertheless it has no capacity to progress without their energy and their will.

T H E FAT H ER The film is the final part of a trilogy. The first part Voyage to Cythera draws on the silence of History, the second part The Beekeeper on the silence of Love, and the third part Landscape in the Mist considers the silence of God. Angelopoulos presents a semi-mystical and highly religious account of the journey of the two children from Greece towards Germany, seeking their Father. They do not know that Germany has no border with Greece, but then, one might say that Heaven has no border with Earth. In any case, the film elides that geographical and indeed metaphysical truth. It is more important that Germany, the Father and the Tree of Life are sought through belief and the strength of the child’s need for home. The Father is both an imagined absent parent and a childish dream of God. He manifests as a voice ­whispering in the children’s heads and through their dreams about their

208  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald quest ­northwards. He is not silent entirely, but – if we return to the Wenders’ conceit – whispers through his angels. As the film opens, the children stand undecided on a station platform, apparently in the grip of the stagnation of Angelopoulos’ Greece, unable to step on a train – for which after all they have no tickets and no adult permission to travel. But it turns out that the film is not about their indecision but about their capacity to move, and hence to remain alert and to think about who they are and where they are going, in stark opposition to the adult incapacity to do either. Angelopoulos poses an adult world that is reactive and venal. Adults are shown to be unthinking where the children, and the film itself, think. Yet, when the children do set out, the geography of the trip is vague. The actual possibility of the children ever leaving Greece is slim not only because the border they are looking for does not exist, but practically too they have nothing they might normally need. They do not have tickets, passports or cash. They have no address, they have no allies in the adult world. Orestes is something else, part cinematic, part angel but not an adult in Angelopoulos’ sense of those contaminated by the past. The children’s determination to move north against such odds thus provides the narrative drama and energy for the film. The Angelopoulos expert, Vassilis Rafailidis, has said of the film that: ‘Landscape in the Mist is a poetic biblical parable on the myth of Genesis, or, to put it more clearly, on the myth of the re-genesis of the world through cinema, the only true illusionist’ (Rafailidis 2003: 82). That sense of cinema is certainly central to the poetic magic that holds the film in thrall to its young protagonists, in turn holding tight to a strip of film that convinces Alexander at least that they are in the realm of the Creator. Their journey will create a tree and the tree will create a myth of redemption. The religious force of the film is specifically triggered by the search for the Father, and is emphasised through descents into hell and visions of glory. But the Father is the Creator, and the Film, that which is created within and outwith. In one sequence, it becomes apparent that Voula has formed an emotional attachment to Orestes. Diegetically this is not surprising. He has appeared along the road just as they are at their most weary, helping them travel once they are thrown off the train. Days later, he takes the children to a nightclub in a cellar and leaves them to wait for him on the stairs. Voula grows anxious and wanders through the club, looking for him. She eventually discovers that it is a gay club and when she finds him, she sees that her erstwhile saviour is flirting with a young man. The club sequence is shot at child’s eye height. It is dark, confusing and clearly a place exclusively for adults. For Angelopoulos it is a descent into hell, perhaps rather crudely so. But the scene and the implied moral criticism are paradoxically redeemed, because for Voula this is worse than hell: it is the place where she realises the pain of love. She can

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Figure 13.1 Landscape in the Mist

only e­ xperience this epiphany by seeing that Orestes may be looking for love himself, and that she is excluded. How can love be found in hell? At the same moment Voula realises that, in the frustration of desire and now almost adult herself, she is vulnerable to despair in a way that she was not when she first boarded the train north. This is the beginning of her awakening into the hell of adult desire. (The hellish nature of adult desire is turned into something much more sinister and violent by a roadside rape but that – as I have suggested – short circuits her journey to maturity rather than accelerating it.) There are also shared visions. Orestes is on his own journey, he is at the age of conscription but despite the urgent need to report for duty, he delays his journey to support the children. One morning Voula looks for him and sees he is not in his bed. Frightened that he has left (in this moment she becomes a small vivid Electra) she walks outside where they stand together, gazing as a great hand from an ancient statue is lifted from the sea and borne skyward above the city by a helicopter. Schütte sees this moment as an illustration of the loss of authority in Greece ‘daß der Hand der Zeigenfinger abgebrochen ist: eine zweifellos drastische Metepher für die orientierungslose Situation, in der alle autoritativen Gesten ihre Macht verloren haben’ (‘the hand’s index finger has broken off, a telling metaphor for a trackless situation in which all gestures of authority have lost their validity’ [1992: 36]). If that is the case, then perhaps we understand why God must talk through the whispers of angels and through the knowing kindness of those who exist only in myth and in the filmmaker’s own oeuvre? In other moments, too, the children see what others cannot. When they leave home they bid farewell to the madman, ‘Seagull’ (Ilias Logothetis),

210  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald imprisoned in what seems to be half-migrant camp, half-asylum at the edge of the town. He stands atop a scrubby hillside and calls to them, his arms flapping, over a perimeter fence. For the children, he is clearly more than a lost soul, but a voice that encourages them towards flights that he cannot make but which they might on his behalf. He is a wingless Messiah. And of course there is the final shot of the children rushing to a tree in the mist and embracing it. But the scene follows a river crossing that strongly suggests a representation of their deaths. At this point the film reveals a disturbing biblical trajectory. The tree of life in the Garden of Eden was the site of Eve’s corruption by Satan: ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’ (Genesis 2:17). Angelopoulos reclaims Voula’s childishness by making the tree of life a paradoxical proof of salvation: ‘Blessed [are] they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city’ (Revelations 22:14). This is the point at which the film ends and the children are left, pinpricks in the mist, hugging the tree and naming it as the Father. It is the culminating shot of a very beautiful film. It is also the moment at which one might have to turn one’s back on the whole enterprise. If we take on the biblical narrative of female descent and salvation, then Voula has been used in a way that makes the film distastefully patriarchal. Some see the film however as an ‘optimistic and dynamic’ treatment of a childish belief in the future (Kolovos 1990: 174), or as a hopeful embrace of the magical properties of cinema. This renders the analytical position more complex. Both those readings are likely, and seductive. Nonetheless, there is a patriarchal turn in the film’s approach to optimism. The abused girl is not the best way to achieve cinematic rebirth or to explore the optimism of migration. I would accept that all of the above are valid and that the combination of the film’s pensive beauty, the presence of its protagonists and the religious intention of the filmmaker are powerfully coherent even in their apparent contradictions. I suggest that Angelopoulos has offered his own internal salvation as a filmmaker through certain earlier sequences that, possibly, provoke a viewing that acknowledges the aspects of religious reference within Angelopoulos’ vision, but at the same time allows that another cinematic and narrative force is at work. It is indeed the agents of the salvation (for cinema, for Greece) the children – both performers and performances – who are enabled to help the film think beyond even its own impossible borders. This can be only a suggestive argument, for it is theoretically presumptuous to state that the film thinks against its maker. Nonetheless it is the only way in which the film’s power makes sense to this viewer, who is not convinced that the children, and especially Voula, are in fact contained by Angelopoulos’ religious and political perimeter fence.

t hi nk ing be y o nd t h e p er i meter fen ce   211

T H E Q U EST The children’s quest is a fairy tale in structure, but it is misguided insofar as the Father they have set out to find is most probably not in Germany, but is simply a man (or two men) who passed through their Mother’s life, leaving children but nothing else. The Father is a ghost who whispers about the future, and who comes to rest in the image of a tree. He is a spirit that leaps wherever the children lead him, and in turn allows the children to imagine a journey into utopia. He is both hunter and hunted, both bait and rod. Yet, unlike the returned partisan in Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) the utopic gaze that Angelopoulos attributes to this Father is indeed turned away from the angel of history and towards something that is not so easily defined, in the mist. The Mother is barely seen in the film and is given scarce credit for her role in the children’s lives nor sympathy for her likely grief at their departure. Simply, we see that she has no narrative that will sustain them other than the myth of paternity which is both peculiarly Greek and yet insubstantial. It is a ghost that whispers and follows its children away. So, in a decade when Greek labour migration northwards was at last slowing after the rush away from the Junta and Civil War (Karafolas 1998: 358–60), the Mother invents a story about Germany, which the children hear as a prompt. Their quest to find a Father is both less and more than what it seems, a pilgrimage from the knee of their Mother’s fantasy to the borders of their imaginations, couched in the conspiratorial agency of a quixotic body of a film. Durham Peters, in Hamid Naficy’s collection on homeland, has noted that various concepts of mobility ‘exile, diaspora and nomadism’ raise different spectres of pain, loss, or opportunity. He explicitly links this to the biblical wanderings after the expulsion from Eden, and the ultimate loss of Paradise. Exile suggests a third party or circumstance enforcing the departure, whilst diaspora retains the notion of a fixed centre from which one is distanced, even if that centre is imaginary or inaccessible (Peters 1998: 20). In Naficy’s own more political reading, nomadism is singularly free of dreams of home (2001: 219). The children’s mobility encompasses both the biblical quest to regain Paradise, and Naficy’s sense that they are – perhaps in this like the Travelling Players themselves although free of their burden of history – without a way home. Theirs is a spiritual and familial migration, part exile and part quest. The children are on a quest ‘of their own’, but they are also subject to Angelopoulos’ religious understanding of how children encounter adulthood; so they are at once courageous travellers, lonely child-migrants and refugees, and vulnerable spiritual ciphers in an adult tale of innocence lost. The children’s presence produces a thinking subject in the fabric of the film, and thus creates the fabric of the film as a thinking body. It is both a naïve, even parodic

212  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald version of the sombre journeys of adults in Angelopoulos’ other road movies (so many of them are just that), but also a transcendental shift in power, from adult to child and from filmmaker to stubborn protagonists and to the film in itself. Kathleen Murphy comments, ‘. . . This children’s crusade aims to reconsecrate not some literal holy- or father-land, but that breeding-ground of potent dreams, the tabula rasa of the movie screen – screen having replaced stage as the polis’ most accessible theater’ (1990: 38). The image of children travelling alone usually signifies national disaster, whether it is in post-war Europe, in contemporary Syria, or on the borderlands of the American south. Voula and Alexander’s journey north is an anguished eulogy to post-war Greece, a hard world swathed in disappointment, weighed down by a past that seems to have no purchase on the future and little to offer the present – both states exemplified by these deracinated child migrants. The adult world that they encounter on the road is disjointed, disoriented, occasionally abrupt and sometimes violent. People are staggering in a kind of collective accelerated dementia. It is a world in drift. The children watch a horse die on a snowy street. Voula strokes the dying horse’s head, Alexander sobs out his grief at the animal’s distress and loss. In the background, a bride rushes out from a wedding party crying. She is taken back into the building and a few moments later the entire party emerges drunkenly singing and weaving out of frame. None has noticed the children or the dead animal in the snow. They are then like other children worldwide travelling alone, sans papiers, attempting an overland, transnational migration. They are refugees. If we hold up the religious lens to the children’s vagrancy, they take so many parts. Adam and Eve returning to Paradise redeemed, the poor trekking across a wide wilderness towards their own, personal border, even as the rich look for the eye of a needle, but also children as children, suffered to ‘come unto me’. As such they are peculiarly subject to both kindness and abuse, doled out by the systems through which they travel and by the individuals they meet along the way. In sum, even as their quest carries the weight of Greek despair and Angelopoulos’ belief in impossible redemption through cinema itself if not through a vague narrative of maturation, the children will notwithstanding be treated like other refugees; extraterritorial, outside the presumed safety of national belonging or geopolitical privilege, vulnerable to exceptional cruelty. For children this extraterritoriality is accentuated by the decoupling from a family unit or group, prematurely released from the official state of ­innocence, which has both constrained and endangered them, but which serves them even more poorly when they reject its embrace. The sense that even the filmmaker believes innocence is something to be lost and found, renders both children – and especially Voula – at the edges of bare life, but also, in this film for this particular journey, sacrificial. There is a contradiction here; surely there always must be when the creator seeks more than a

t hi nk ing be y o nd t h e p er i meter fen ce   213 conclusion but wants to explore redemption. That which was lost is found, that which was dead is alive again (Luke, 15). A fairy tale is also a modern parable of childhood betrayed.

DANGERO U S I NNOCENCE The philosopher Joanne Faulkner has summed up the problem of innocence thus: ‘innocence suggests a state of defencelessness rather than security, and it is as such that it is valued’ . . . ‘the figure of the innocent child delimits an existence at the extreme of vulnerability, rather than one that is invulnerable to everyday risk’ (2013: 127). Childish innocence is an appropriative fantasy, a screen on which adults project their memories and ideals, behind which children move in silhouette unseen and unheard. The analyst Adam Phillips tells us to be optimistic as well as careful. Yes, the traumatic shades of childhood are where the internal life is built and fortified. But there are many shades of childhood and not all are traumatic. To look for it insistently is to misplace the remarkable wonder of some childhoods. Perhaps something akin to what was once called negative theology might be useful here, so that one could say – everything that doesn’t return is what is essential from childhood. We may then have no need to go on – at least in quite the same way – plundering our lives and our children, for childhood. (2002: 155) But Phillips’ argument also supports Faulkner’s concern at appropriation. Children are rendered always vulnerable to harm by the world’s strategy of keeping them ‘innocent’. That is the point. Castañeda’s book on figurations of childhood (2002) has similarly argued against the invocation of child subjectivity, in the work of thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and even Butler, to explain, prefigure and reform the philosopher-adult. Castañeda observes that: ‘working from one’s own adult subjectivity to make claims about the child is fundamentally compromised by the fact that the child has been so consistently constituted as the adult’s pre-subjective other’ (2002: 152). Where children’s subjectivity has been discussed, it is often from the perspective of the needs and fantasies of the adult subject. This is the case to some degree in Landscape in the Mist, but not wholly so. As we shall see, the children can step out of the drifts of adult desire and walk away through the snow. The thinking child subject is then perfectly in step with the thinking film. When Voula and Alexander jump on the northbound train, when they refuse the forced return to their mother, they are outside the structures of protection, and simultaneously suspected of being guilty, not innocent enough.

214  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald Their innocence is then dangerous. This double bind is the trick that catches the child refugee most cruelly. Refugees are mobile. They see too much, they have earned tragic perspective through their exile as well as a sense of scale and borderless return through their nomadism. They have an end in sight that transcends or at least challenges local determinations of normality and possibility. The children pass through Greece like travelling players, like migrants, like soldiers wandering across a battlefield of strange encounters and casual danger, like children travelling alone. Here adults are almost always disappointing. The Players fail to act. When they are on screen, we are witnessing the closing credits, not a play in five parts. They have retreated to the beach. A man in a café gives a five-year-old boy work to do in exchange for a bite of food. Rebuffed by a young waitress (Nadia Mourouzi) at a truck-stop, a driver (Vassilis Kolovos) rapes Voula in the back of his truck to sate and pass on his humiliation. Soldiers on a border, maybe imaginary or maybe not, shoot at children in a boat.

P ENS I V I T Y I have claimed that the children take the film beyond the quest, and into the status of a thinking subject, or a compound thinking subject-ness – children, performances, film. The name of the girl, Voula, admits that the filmmaker wants to honour the dead (his sister). The honour shimmers around the intense vivacity of his lead actress (Tania Paliaologou). Her performance maintains but also transcends the religious and political structure of the film’s interests. Indeed, she does something quite remarkable, embodying the filmmaker’s passion for the long shot in a performance that is at once sustained, persistent and grounded in the cinematic intensity and intelligence that must operate at the centre of a pensive film. Jacques Rancière writes of the pensive image, commenting that ‘someone who is pensive is “full of thoughts”, but this does not mean that she is thinking them’ (2009: 107). He also extends Hegel’s claim for the active passivity of the gods of Olympus to a wider comment on a new aesthetics of ‘immobile motion’, echoing the ‘radical indifference of the sea’s waves’. Rancière is interested in the role of the image in radical and mainstream politics. Nevertheless, I would like to start with his observations to help me think through the status of the agents of pensivity that I observe here: the children themselves. The children think throughout the film. Their consistent pensivity lends them an air of seclusion from the world they traverse, and from the emotional reach of the audience. This again produces the aura of fairy tale reality, in which the magical solution is closest to the real. They think first about their Father – we hear them on voice-over and we watch their purposeful forward motion and

t hi nk ing be y o nd t h e p er i meter fen ce   215 their resistance to those who would take them off their path. But their movement in the film is also a form of positive thinking. The beauty of the film is dependent on the clarity that without these children moving through the film space, without the sheer will underpinning their performances, without Voula’s bright courage and Alexander’s gentle certainty: without the crucial elements the film’s beauty would be absent. The landscape is in the mist, but the set pieces of cinema are sharply in focus. Everything is visible through the children’s presence of mind; a bride’s inexplicable grief and a dying horse, each picked out like single snowflakes on a child’s bedroom window. The historian Hanneke Grootenboer describes the quality of the pensive image, as ‘an interiority different from their meaning or narrative through which these images become thoughtful’ (2011: 17). Rancière concludes that the pensive image does not signify a ‘surplus of plenitude’, but enacts a break in narrative that at once halts and extends the possibilities of action. The child and the film perform a chiasmic relation of being and thinking. The film’s ally in this pas de deux of being its own Creator, whilst disguising its motives, at least to the adults and to the bearers of history (the subject of the pastiche), is weather. The film is looking through the mist, but its main call on the weather, is snow. The snow is a kind of three dimensional visual joke that remains with us long after it has stopped falling: a film of snow, snow falling as if on a faulty image, the people as snowmen, snowed under. In the centrepiece sequence, snow forces a stillness that is as profound as the silence of snow is dense. This sequence starts in a police station, where the children have been taken (and from where they would have been returned to their Mother). But snow falls. The policemen and women are entranced. Only an old lady in widow’s-weeds is unmoved, but then we realise that she is herself blown in from Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) an earlier Angelopoulos film about spousal murder and adulterous desire (significantly the murdered spouse is a returned migrant from Germany). She is already snowed in, and cannot escape the frozen narrative of return and despair into which she was cast eighteen years before. As the children realise that something magical is occurring they slip outside where all adults stand rooted, their faces uplifted in wonder. The snow enchants and stills them, whilst the child world breaks out, celebrating the playfulness of snowflakes, and resuming the quest. There is if you like a conspiracy between film and child, telling them that because they are there, so magic is possible, and so the film can indeed be filmic and let them escape. Angelopoulos has said of the sequence: ‘The scene with the snow . . . The snow reflects the kids’ desire to go away. The desire is so strong that the imaginary father, or an imaginary sign, produces a miracle: makes people frozen and kids invisible’ (cited in Godas 2012). About the scene with the horse:

216  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald The entire trip is a trip in the experience. The kids take the taste of life. Their trip is a trip of initiation. That is what the French call with the specific term ‘voyage de initiation’. This is the meaning of the scene in which the boy works to win two sandwiches and by the way he perceives the meaning of work and gain. This is the meaning of the scene with the horse; the kids have their first touch with death. On the same line, there is a series of events that make the two kids feel the taste of life . . . The same happens in the scene of the rape; Voula perceives the hardness of the world. (cited in Godas 2012) Angelopoulos’ account is provocatively straightforward. The film is a coming of age film, wherein adults reveal their weaknesses and the world makes clear the price of survival (one works for food). I have already said that the children experience this early initiation into cruelty in part because of their status as travellers, dangerous innocents, child migrants. But perhaps he undersells the revelations in the film’s phenomenological substance. The film does not merely instruct its protagonists. Rather, it discovers itself by thinking with the children, and on their behalf. The cinematic image is neither diegesis nor personal cinematic history. It is Greece itself allowing itself to be thought of differently, to favour childhood over managed innocence, to understand the character of its history. So, it delivers a pastiche of chance, an unseasonable weather event, to allow the children to escape, yes, but also to emphasise that the children are pensive subjects where adults are defaming objects. As the feminist literary historian Naomi Schor comments, ‘To be thoughtful does not signify merely to be contemplative, lost, as it were, in one’s thoughts. It also signifies preoccupation and fullness of care’ (2001: 241). ‘The sober Celeste, so gentle and calm, as equable as reason itself, habitually reflective and thoughtful’ (2001: 240). The snow scene is a Balzacian pause. In Balzac the moment of pensivity is a signal that the text is at once at ease and at full alert. The pensivity in Landscape in the Mist emerges from moments of stillness wherein only children and Orestes, the child of actors himself, remain fully mobile and fully alert to the wonder and tragedy of the world around them: a good, madman trying to fly, snow falling, a horse dying, an absent Father whispering in their dreams. It is they who put the film at ease, who persuade through their own gravity that playfulness is appropriate, that the film may take on its own magical propensity. The adult men and women move or stop without thought or without care, with small motivations and a truncated sense of the possible. When they do look, at snow falling out of season, they are held fast, not alert but temporarily thwarted. They are not the thinking body of the film, but the objects of its pity. The adults in Angelopoulos’ first great meditation are the Travelling Players. They return here, as Orestes’ family and as seers of Greece’s many

t hi nk ing be y o nd t h e p er i meter fen ce   217 lost pasts. Standing on a desolate beach, having been wandering for years before these children took to the road, the now aged Travelling Players hang up their costumes for sale and recite the historical low points of the twentieth century. They have lost their engagement with historical thought and political confrontation. With the exception of Orestes and Seagull then, all adults move as a silenced collective, a chorus staring back up at the beach, out to sea, or at snow falling. The bride’s brief escape is an aberration, suddenly aware that she is about to stop living in thought – that marriage is the threshold to collective unthinking. Adult actions and inactions alike appear motivated by a capitulation to fate. The once articulate Travelling Players, who still turn resolutely to camera to assert the detailed trajectories of national disaster are themselves caught in eddies of repetition and return. Andrew Horton describes Angelopoulos’ work as a cinema of contemplation (1997). Horton means something else but contemplation might also refer to the admiration of God. Here, with that spiritual contemplation at work, the object of contemplation is really Greece and the mode of contemplation is the tension between mobility and stasis. Travelling players, refugees, conscripts and returning soldiers cross back and forth between the hinterland and the sea, between the past and the present. Greece has had its gods in plenty, but they are hardly to be seen in these twentieth-century visions. Simply, now and then, fragments of these imperfect lords rise like shards of conscience from the sea. In a film where Angelopoulos is trying to accommodate an Orthodox vision of redemption, the protagonists see the past rising as a pointing finger that soars over the suddenly tiny city below. Is this film really contemplative then, or something more active, more alert? When Meir Wigoder quotes Barthes and Benjamin on the pensive image he quickly avers: ‘Now, we know that he does not mean that the object itself is capable of thinking, just as we know that when Walter Benjamin spoke of the optical unconscious of the photograph no one believed he meant that the object literally stored such hidden thought’ (2012: 270). Well, maybe not. But this film is phenomenological. It knows whose side it’s on. Leo Charney makes the connection between drift, modernity and mobility. He reminds us that the body of the film is ‘hazy’, ‘insubstantial’, like a mist, perhaps, or like drifting snow. In the empty moment, what you call identity ceases to be continuous, linear, apparent. It’s hazy and insubstantial, a jumbled, fragmented surface. It skips around from one time to another, from one place to another. It refuses to respect the need to keep one moment consistent and continuous with the ones that precede or follow it. It’s a film. (1998: 64)

218  s t e ph a n i e h e m e lr yk d o nald This film makes an unruly and disrespectful epiphanic appearance as snow. The children’s urgent need forces a rapturous emptiness in which adults are quiet and children run free. The film enraptures itself within its own stab at hexeity2. The film-as-now creates an empty moment, a time of drift, in which the film can push forward its own improbable tale of children escaping the national malaise of disappointment. Their alert mobility is essential to stave off one of modernity’s more persistent jokes about time. They are travelling along routes of migrant labour to a border that doesn’t exist in search of a migrant who has probably already returned, if he ever went away. And, the old lady has already warned them that the migrant is not welcome at home. He will have been replaced and only his children will wait for his return. But at least the film is on their side, it even leaves a scrap, a strip, of itself, like a director’s shadow, for Orestes to find and for Alexander to hold. The snow lays a coating on the film, the tree is so faint they can barely distinguish it, and the children step across and through the snow, knowing they are part of its contribution to their story, just as the film has been enthralled to its own rapturous world.

NOTES 1. Voula is also the name of the ‘sister of the film-maker’ in Voyage to Cythera. 2. The term ‘hexeity’ derives from Medieval Latin, and refers to the quality that makes something absolutely unique.

C H A P TER 14

An ‘Untimely’ History Sylvie Rollet Translated by Precious Brown

A

n essential (albeit controversial) point should immediately be made clear: the work of Angelopoulos is not ‘modernist’ in the sense that AngloSaxon critics have given to this term to qualify, in art history, a time past, but still belonging to modernity.1 From end to end, Angelopoulos’ work is, in fact, traversed by history. Yet modernity is defined precisely by our awareness of unsurpassable historicity. In the words of Jacques Rancière, we have entered into the ‘age of history’. He adds that it is also the ‘age of cinema’, as this late art possesses a singular power of ‘historicity and historicising’ (Rancière 1998: 60). The films of Angelopoulos implement this power. The filmmaker’s gaze upon Greece allows him to embrace the upheaval that altered the face of Europe throughout the twentieth century. His first full-length film, Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970), which is set in a deserted mountain village abandoned by able-bodied men in search of a livelihood beyond its borders, is dedicated to the disappearance of age-old rural societies, one of the first examples of this upheaval. A succession of authoritarian regimes and foreign occupation are part of Greece’s violent history. Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) describes the years that link General Metaxas’ 1936 takeover to that of Marshal Papagos in 1952 as well as the German occupation and the crushing of communist resistance by royalist forces aided by the American and British armies. As Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) shows, in pitting ‘brother against brother’, the Greek Civil War (1947–1949) left the country long divided. It remained impossible for the fearful propertied classes in Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) to accept the return of those communist guerrillas who were exiled in 1949, whereas a socialist government did come to power in 1981. Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) stages an amnesiac country where the new gods of the market economy exclude any reminder of the struggles and the revolutionary ideals of the past.

220  s y l v i e ro lle t That film thus marks a turning point in Angelopoulos’ work. Ten years earlier, the horizon of The Travelling Players (filmed in 1974 during Greece’s last military junta) was still that of a world free of oppression. Onwards from Voyage to Cythera, Utopias no longer had currency, nor did people seem united by any collective dream. It is this observation which prompts the  ­voluntary exile of the deputy played by Mastroianni in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991). He decides to become one of the refugees (of all backgrounds) who, in the late twentieth century, are the only possible face of Deleuze’s ‘missing people’ (Deleuze 1985). The motif of exile, be it economic or political, is certainly present in Angelopoulos’ first films. However, in Voyage to Cythera, the figure of the stateless person becomes central. ‘The Refugee’, whom Arendt uses as a paradigm of the twentieth century (Arendt 1978) is a tie that binds all the tragedies of a Europe marked by massive displacement of populations. Before being banished from his country as a result of his political affiliation, the old guerrilla in Voyage to Cythera experienced a first exile from Asia Minor (like the father in The Travelling Players). The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in fact ended with the expulsion of over one million Greeks in 1922 and later caused wars in the Balkans which bloodied Yugoslavia at the end of the century. Notwithstanding, from Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) to Η  Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008), the characters are less exiles than returning ‘revenants’.2 Between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, the territorial border becomes a temporal threshold. In the first films, ‘elsewhere’ was ­impenetrable to the eye. In the last films, the multiple temporalities ­communicate as the dead mingle with the living. From one period to another, the ‘experience of the aporia’3 has changed. ‘In one case, the non-passage resembles an impermeability [. . .] In another case, the non-passage, the impasse or the aporia stems from the fact that there is no limit’ (Derrida [1993] (1996): 20). The proper representation of historical events and their historicisation becomes impossible – in spite of the distancing effect staged in the early epic frescoes. Struggling with the traumas of a repressed past ‘that does not pass’, the narrative loses its logical and chronological articulations and seems unable to give any meaning or coherence to history. Henceforth, the historical stage is treated as a psychic scene. The ‘liberal democratic consensus’ rests upon the repression of conflict, so the mourning of combat and revolutionary dreams are forbidden. What is repressed can only return in a spectral form. Angelopoulos’ final film, The Dust of Time, takes Voyage to Cythera’s filmic structure apart (twenty-five years after its making) by staging a filmmaker’s waking dream. The filmmaker hallucinates the return of his mother and father who disappeared in the turmoil of an exile that led them separately to Russia and to America. The repetition of this narrative structure, where

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  221 the imaginary scene largely prevails over ‘reality’, gives the impression that the plot (whose centre or core disappears) itself bears the mark of exile. The recurrence of this off-centred form as well as the obsessive return of collective memory’s same wounds make haunting the only possible rapport with history. The untimeliness of what ‘returns’ through the images, the sounds and the narrative elaborates what could be called a ‘poetics of return’. The break with a representation of time that is linear and chronologically organised according to the historicist paradigm translates into a number of symptoms such as the ‘deregulation’ of the narration, which takes the form of setback, of anachronism or of temporal strata. Jacques Derrida’s comment on the es spukt (the ‘it haunts’ or ‘it spooks’) in Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) is a suitable definition of this generalised spectrality. Indeed, Derrida links ‘the impersonality or the quasi-anonymity of an operation [spuken] without act, without real subject or object, and the production of a figure, that of the revenant [der Spuk]’ (Derrida 2006: 166). The appearance, in contemporary fiction, of the ghosts of the past is attributable to a paradoxical visibility, as it exceeds the opposition of the visible and the invisible (Derrida [1996] (2002): 129). In order to make ‘the ambiguity of reality’ (Ciment 1982: 12) visible, Angelopoulos’ work attains that which materially and ontologically defines the cinematic image as a ‘double’. What’s more, this gift of ‘double vision’ is that of the spectator who is subjected to the appearance of ghosts and becomes the subject of the c­ onstruction of an image of history.

S P ECTRE ( S ) OF H I STOR Y In this context, it is appropriate to question one of the distinctive traits of Angelopoulos’ films: within the contemporary frame of fiction, here and there, more or less explicitly, figures and motifs from ancient myths appear.4 The historicist model is based on the idea of a rectilinear and orientated time and on the possible circumscription of the past as an object of study strictly separated from the present (de Certeau 1987). By contrast, the ghosts of Orestes, Odysseus, Dionysus or Orpheus (see Létoublon 2000; Eades and Letoublon 1999; Eades and Letoublon 1999; Rollet 2005), whom Angelopoulos’ films house, allow the filmmaker to make buried voices heard in today’s images – voices that speak neither in the past tense, nor of past times, but for the present. While the many references can seem an agglomeration of disparate elements, ultimately, only a few mythological figures emerge throughout the ­filmography in a sort of personal mythology. Two corpuses can be distinguished. One is centred around the Atreidae, from Reconstruction to The Travelling Players; the other is centred around The Odyssey, which serves

222  s y l v i e ro lle t explicitly as a foundation for Voyage to Cythera and Ulysses’ Gaze. The shift from tragic subtext to Homeric epic is not insignificant – it bears witness to a rupture in Angelopoulos’ historical thought. The Brechtian treatment of The Travelling Players is apparent in the film’s use of the Oresteia. It is not a question, for Angelopoulos, of giving credit to the common perception of the Greek Civil War as a ‘family tragedy’5 such as that of the torn family of Atreus. In contrast to the belief in the unhistorical permanence of tragic conflict (upon which the dominant ideology is based), this cultural heritage6 must be kept at bay and treated as what Freud calls the ‘family romance of neurotics’ (Freud 1909). Just as the narrative structure of the ‘family romance’ constitutes the subject in a Freudian perspective, myths probably allow for the constitution of the Greek people as a collective subject. However, they also obscure the real history of contemporary struggles against oppression and exploitation. The members of the troupe replay on their own scale, of course, the murders and betrayals in the Atreides. Thus, the assassination of the mother (Aliki Georgouli) and her fascist lover (Vangelis Kazan) by the communist son, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis), makes the tragic conflict suddenly reappear like a shadow double of historical reality.7 Whether they choose the side of resistance, that of fascism or of collaboration with the American occupation, the actors remain on the losing side of history. The critical distance that the film maintains in relation to the tragic model aims to repeat ‘an already fixed form’ in order to ‘get rid of it’ (Ciment 1975: 6) – like the memory process involved in the analytic treatment. Voyage to Cythera, which inaugurates the ‘Odyssean cycle,’ operates in a very different manner. The impossible return of Spyros, the old communist (Manos Katrakis), to a Greece desiring to forget the past in a frenzy of consumption alludes to the return of Odysseus. However, this old man is not the glorious hero of The Odyssey but his spectral double – the foreign beggar in his own country. Between the film and the Homeric text, relationships are less citation or loan than displacement, which excludes any interpretation as a ‘translation’. Indeed, the signifier is not cancelled out by the signified (as symbols do); allegory imposes an indefinitely maintained gap between them. In other words, the Homeric poem is neither the model nor the origin of the narrative; rather, it inhabits the film through a secret presence that is only ­perceptible through its brief flickerings.8 The encounter between Voyage to Cythera and The Odyssey is primarily due to a kind of confusion between individual history and political history that is at hand in the Homeric poem as well as in the film. In both cases, the collective history is thought of in terms of line of descent and transmission. In Angelopoulos’ film, the fracture occurs between the generation of Civil War fighters and that of their descendants. The convergences between the film and the epic make the filmmaker’s subversion of the structure of Homeric

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  223 narrative (see Rollet 2003) all the more sensitive: Ulysses’ return is seen from the point of view of Telemachus, and Voyage to Cythera decides the ‘generation of contenders’ victory. A short circuit is created between fiction and its archaic ‘model’. The apparition of the ‘it haunts’, which obliges a memorial elaboration on the part of the spectator thus acquires heuristic value. In The Odyssey the restoration of the linear continuity of time proceeds from the evocation of the hero’s memories. It is substituted in Voyage to Cythera, by an imaginary film dreamed by the filmmaker-son (Giulio Brogi). During the 1980s, Greece, like the majority of Western neoliberal societies, was dominated by consumerist amnesia, and the return of the father who was exiled at the end of the Civil War was but an illusion. Hence, the film, unlike the epic, cannot end with the restoration of the hero. The return of the old man is at once what is taking place – within the space that the ‘dreamed film’ offers – and that which does not take place – in the ‘real’ framework of the fiction. The time of return and of non-return are embedded into one another. Constantly deferred, always to come – or even cancelled at the very moment it happens – this ‘return’ appears to be the figure par excellence of a properly spectral time; that is, of anachronism and of utopia. One finds an analogous cyclical time based on restoration and incompletion in Ulysses’ Gaze whose hero is A., a filmmaker (Harvey Keitel). His homeland no longer exists. Born in the Greek community of Constanta, Romania, exiled to Florina (in Macedonia) and then to the United States, to where could he possibly ‘return’? He begins a long journey in search of three lost reels filmed by the Manakis brothers at the dawn of the century. His adventure across Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Bosnia, brings him to Sarajevo. His path, however, does not only follow the ‘first cinematic gaze’ of the Manakis brothers; it leads inextricably toward the origin of the never-ending wars of the twentieth century. Early filmmakers nonetheless believed they possessed a universal language – the silent language of images – which seemed to make the horizon of a perpetual peace accessible. The working women the Manakis brothers filmed were, in fact, neither Greek nor Bulgarian, but Balkan. The images of spinners of times past at the beginning of Ulysses’ Gaze suggest the direction the voyage will take and ties the cinema with the vital thread woven by the Fates. The hero’s adventure is a journey back in time. During each segment of his journey, he falls asleep and then awakens at a different era. During one such era, Plovdiv was still called Philippoulolis, and the Aegean Sea could be accessed via the Evros River; during another, in Constanta, Greek, Armenian and Jewish families lived side by side. He falls asleep only to be reborn, gliding across water which abolishes time and borders. From the Black Sea to the Aegean, from the Danube to the Drina, the Balkan peoples drink this unique and manifold water. The new Orpheus descends into the underworld guided

224  s y l v i e ro lle t by a multifaceted Eurydice (played by a single actress, Maia Morgenstern). His beloved is at once an unknown woman, who strolls the nocturnal streets of Florina without seeing the hero, an archivist at the Skopje Cinémathèque, and a Serbian peasant widow. Successively recalling all of the female faces of the Homeric poem – Penelope, Calypso and Nausicaa – this modern Charon is Death with a womanly face (see  Vernant  1989;  Kahn  and  Loraux  1981). The untimely emergence of The Odyssey’s ‘typical scenes’ (Parry 1928) makes the legendary world the reverse side of history that positivist ideology cannot consider. The image acquires a gift of ‘double vision’ that allows it to rediscover the underground language circulating in myths and legends – the language of affect – that historical rationality would like to eradicate (de Certeau 1987: 124). In returning to contemporary fiction in the form of myth, the ‘unconscious’ of time repressed by scientific historiography destroys the homogeneity of the present. The anachronism that digs beneath the fiction, as in an apparition, a plurality of times, appears, in this way, to be the major figure of an era plagued by haunting. As the result of a narrative construction that offers no explanation for the change from one period to another, the anachronism is also inscribed within the duration of the shot. In the opening sequence of Ulysses’ Gaze, before our eyes and in A.’s gaze, Manakis again passes away, at the moment that he looks upon the great blue sail boat that could be the Phaeacians’ ship bringing Ulysses back to Ithaca. These embedded gazes and times constitute the characteristic trait of a generalised spectrality. The Balkan crossing is but a long nekyia, and the entire film something like a consultation of the dead.9 Indeed, if A. – like Ulysses – literally becomes ‘Nobody’, it is less in order to escape the cyclopean eye of the watchtower at the border than it is to become himself an all-seeing gaze. He has neither a name nor a past, so he can endorse all identities, relive all the stories and become the body of all the memories of the Balkan peoples. In Sarajevo, where the history of twentieth-century Europe begins and ends, the hero’s journey comes to a close. The Cinémathèque’s curator, Ivo Levi (Erland Josephson), has managed to reconstitute the chemical formula which will allow him to develop the three recovered film reels. However, the spectator sees nothing of these lost images – only patches of light palpitating on a blank screen. The film ends with the pained gaze of A. whilst, in a final monologue, this modern Ulysses announces his future return to Ithaca.10 As the spectator awaits the impending reverse shot that will fulfil his or her desire to see, in focusing on A.’s suspended gaze, the film maintains the spectator on this shore where the unseen obstacle becomes a powerful lever for imagination. Is it precisely this ‘lost, imprisoned gaze’ (Ciment 1995: 27) that Angelopoulos wishes to liberate?

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  225

I N MEMOR Y OF T H E NAMELESS 1 1 Angelopoulos has often been criticised for the gruelling slowness of his films. The duration of shots extends well beyond the spectator’s needs for information, and it is only with much regret that they link to the following shot. However, the conversion of our gaze depends on this experience of duration. The represented scene then ceases to be a shield and opens up to the sudden appearance of what Benjamin calls a ‘dialectical image’, the foundational event of a non-positivist thinking of history. Indeed, he writes that ‘while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of the whathas-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature, but figural [bildlich]’ (Benjamin 1999: 463). The coalescence that solders, here and now, the image of the past and that of the present does not establish a communication between two times (a picture in the past and in the present) – nor does it create a link between a current image and a virtual one – but unites the two sides of a same image taken totally in the present. Rejecting both the idea of a rectilinear and orientated time and that of a possible circumscription of the past (ideas that guide the historicist model), Angelopoulos’ films implement a historical thought that is intimately linked, as it is for Benjamin, to a theory of remembrance. The images’ ‘work’ engages the spectator in the process of anamnesis, and makes ‘vision’ an event – in that the filmmaker’s work recalls that which never had the form of presence. The spectator who is, as Derrida says, in the gaze of this ‘wholly other’ (Derrida 2002) is confronted with an ‘injunction’ that exceeds him or her. Therefore, the entire aesthetic experience, in the Kantian sense of the term, is subverted. The thought process initiated by the films is in itself a political act. To illuminate the experience (that is literally to say, the ‘crossing’) in which the filmmaker takes us, the vast maritime stretch, hardly limited to the horizon by a confused shoreline in the opening sequence of The Suspended Step of the Stork seems capital. A ballet of helicopters appears above an obscure, formless and indistinct spot in the centre of the frame as well as around it; military patrol boats trace a series of frantic circles. A slow optical travelling shot tightens the frame revealing a strangely localised viewpoint to which no identity may be attributed. It is indeed a viewpoint, but whose? That of the faceless ‘I’ who speaks in voice-over? And is the black mass the dead refugees who were refused asylum? A sense of the ‘uncanny’ comes from this enigmatic perspective and the fragmentary information. ‘Something’ that cannot be figured, and yet insists, slips into this disorder. It is an off-centring force of representation, a purely perceptual event that the spectator is unable to name in spite of its effect on him or her. The presence that is covertly at work in the image impedes the image from disappearing into what it makes visible and forces it to reveal the disfiguring power of the ‘imageless’ (Agamben 1998: 76).

226  s y l v i e ro lle t The power of this ‘unfigurable’ (which gives the shot its ‘rhythm’, in the archaic sense of the term)12 is measured by its perseverance in the filmmaker’s work. The expulsion of Spyros, the old guerrilla in Voyage to Cythera is taken up in an almost identical fashion in the opening sequence of The Suspended Step of the Stork. The old man is abandoned on a barge outside Greek territorial waters and is surveyed at length by military authorities – even though neither the fragile figure of the old man nor the shapeless mass of drowned refugees constitute any serious threat to the established order. The similarity in the trajectory of the forces of order which lines the borders of the frame, and the overemphasis of the movement of circumscription, reveal a compulsive character. The staging evokes the psychic mechanisms of censorship in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. The treatment of space attests to the imaginary quality of the scene. Here, the sea is no longer frame, nor landscape. Treated as a uniform surface – without relief, without depth, without limits – it returns to its original nature as pure liquid. Reaching the status of mental space, it is the only ‘territory’ where the imaginary and invisible frontier of repression can trace itself, as this frontier is at once erased, absorbed, ‘forgotten’. The ‘unfigurable’ must, here, be content, but a number of scenes clearly express an inverse and transgressive desire to meet ghosts. This dynamic unites two almost identical scenes. In Voyage to Cythera, the filmmaker sees a beggar suddenly appear in the mirror of a café and ‘recognises’ the father he has been searching for. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, upon returning from his first news report at the border, the journalist (Gregory Karr) discovers that, by chance, he had video-recorded a deputy (Marcello Mastroianni) who everyone thought had disappeared. These two ‘encounters’ with spectres are placed under the dual sign of fusion and separation. In Voyage to Cythera, the fusion comes from the fact that, in the frame, the ‘real’ image of the filmmaker-son becomes blurred, whereas his reflection remains clear. In this way, he finds himself united with the old beggar in the mirror. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the movement of the journalist and the camera produces an impression of nearness. Karr’s silhouette seems to join that of Mastroianni inside the erased borders of the projection screen. The fusion of the two images, however, remains impossible. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the gaze of the ‘missing’ politician is turned obstinately towards the off-screen space and cannot meet that of the journalist. In Voyage to Cythera, the tension of the filmmaker-son’s gaze, as the spectator awaits the reverse shot, maintains, in the same manner, the fracture between the two worlds. In the mirror or on the screen, the phantom is ‘here’ – although it belongs to an ‘elsewhere’. The image’s ‘problematic’ status (in the etymological sense of πρόβλημα which implies projection and protection) merits attention: while the ‘video frame within a frame’ separates the on-screen space and off-screen spaces,

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  227 two modalities of presence meet within the filmic frame. Faced with the empty theatre of the present of modernity – the supposed only ‘reality’ – for Angelopoulos, cinema seems to be the only territory where the spectres of the past may be hosted. These ghosts insist and demand to find a place in this world, in our world, which they inhabit in the mode of ‘haunting’. This does not, however, make the cinema an instrument of mourning. To the contrary, the obsessive return to the same themes and the constant repetition of a small number of malleable figures gives Angelopoulos’ films the obsessive character of tragic πένθος ἄλαστον, the untiring memory of an ‘unforgettable grief’ that cannot take place. As a stage subject to common judgement, ancient tragedy attempted to oppose this ‘negative will, that makes the past into an eternal present’ (Loraux 2002 : 162) with the critical distance that representation allows. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet have shown that the ancient theatre also functions as a political arena. In this sense, Angelopoulos’ cinema could well be, ‘ante- or anti-political’, to use Nicole Loraux’s terms – the default space of the failure of politics. His cinema stages what cannot be represented in the city and can only return as a ghost. It is not a place of litigation, but of wrong (Lyotard 1988), the interdiction of grief. The very notion of representation in his films becomes unfitting, as the ghosts of history are less represented than insidiously ‘present’ in such a way that it is impossible to tell if they are dead or living. Their ability to ‘appear’ is indeed only matched by the negative and faceless force that aims to erase them. This force can only manifest itself in what it makes disappear: the succession of generations that regulates the order of time, the separation of the dead and the living, the legacy of a common language. Through borderline incestuous relationships – between ‘mother’ and son, in Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980), between brother and ‘sister’ in Voyage to Cythera, between father and ‘daughter’ in The Weeping Meadow –, and in the endless quest for the father (Voyage to Cythera and Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη [Landscape in the Mist, 1988]), disturbances in the line of descent are one of the constants in Angelopoulos’ plots. These disturbances are even more noticeable on the scale of his complete filmography. From one film to the next, characters have the same names but occupy different places. For instance, in The Weeping Meadow, Spyros is the young girl’s adoptive father who narrowly missed the opportunity to marry her and, in The Dust of Time, he is the same Eleni’s lover. The inability to differentiate between the dead and the living concerns both bodies and territories. As for the characters’ bodies, they are generally reduced to silhouettes with blurred contours. The stiffness of their gestures and the slowness of their movements further add to the impression that instead of living beings, these are survivors in a process of petrifaction. Similarly, the foggy landscapes, the mountainous horizons and obstructed seascapes render the fiction’s topography uncertain. Floating, impossible to

228  s y l v i e ro lle t

Figure 14.1 The Suspended Step of the Stork

situate, the places of action are a between-two-worlds that is characteristic of limbo – an ‘elsewhere’ that stretches beyond the known world. At the beginning of The Suspended Step of the Stork, the colonel who leads a regiment of border guards, his foot raised above the fragile blue line that crosses the bridge linking Greece to the other shore, explains the motif of the entire film for the journalist: ‘If I take one step, I am elsewhere . . . or I am dead’. Otherwise stated, to be ‘elsewhere’ is to be dead. This is revealed in the first shot which shows refugees who are stuck in a no-man’s land. The slow tracking shot across the wagons leaves the spectator hesitant. For a few seconds, the viewer thinks the train is moving, but the only movement is that of the camera. The train is stopped. This immobility is reinforced by the rigid posture of refugees who stand in the doorways of the stopped cars. These ‘foreigners’ who have risked their lives to cross the border that separated them from a chimerical promised land find themselves stripped not only of their past but of any future. They remain there, suspended, outside of time. The counter-world of exiles appears as an uninhabitable threshold, closed and ­infinite, without any point of exit because it leads nowhere. The temporality of the entire film is that of ‘frozen’ time – indefinitely transient, pure and unchanged duration. The day sequences are bathed in shadowless grey light. The absence of luminous variations further reinforces the impression of a uniform duration produced by a narrative in which each sequence closes in on itself. Nothing happens. No event seems to have any repercussion on other events. Accordingly, the characters’ gestures and movements are slowed as if to fight the approaching petrification. Like a nightmare,

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  229 the congealment of time expressed in the stiffening of bodies never ceases to return in Angelopoulos’ following films. In Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998), an image emerges before the poet, Alexander, who is attempting to bring an Albanian child across the border: the black silhouettes of bodies – stiffened as if by electric shock – hanging from the fence that marks the limit of the known world. In Ulysses’ Gaze, once across the Albanian border, the hero discovers a landscape of people wandering in the snow with immobilised steps as if under the effect of some strange force. The transformation of the wanderer into a ghost is achieved through the loss of names. In Ulysses’ Gaze (as in, Η Άλλη Θάλασσα [The Other Sea], whose filming was interrupted by Angelopoulos’ sudden death), this loss translates as the reduction of the characters’ names to a single initial. However, the process leading to the dissolution of identity began long before. From one film to the next, a sort of generalised homonymy is put into place: ‘Alexander’, first and foremost, but also ‘Eleni’, ‘Voula’ or ‘Spyros’ indifferently designate characters of different ages and roles. A second parallel movement, the disappearance of language itself – the Greek language – seems to be set in motion in Voyage to Cythera. Although the father in The Travelling Players, a refugee from Asia Minor, could still tell the story of his exile to the camera, in Voyage to Cythera, the old man who returns, can only stammer two Russian words to describe the aroma of his childhood home: ‘rotten apple’. This loss of the language is evident in Ulysses’ Gaze. Since the Greek filmmaker is exiled in the United States, he only has English at his disposal. In Angelopoulos’ last film, The Dust of Time, the process of erasure seems to come to an end. The lost language of the homeland seems to be hollow – an absence that no one cares about. All of the characters are Greeks who were exiled in Russia, then in America, and who now only speak English. Henceforth, tragedy is only spoken in the ‘victors’ monolingualism’ (Nichanian 2007: 217–18). English becomes the language of oblivion. Angelopoulos explains that his first memories as a spectator date back to the Civil War. The filmmaker’s father was kidnapped by communist guerrillas, and his family had no news of him until the end of the war. Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) was playing at the open-air cinema next to the family’s home. Of this first memory of the cinema, Angelopoulos retained only one scene. When the hero is to be executed, he disappears offscreen, but his shadow remains in the frame as the echo of the hero’s cry, ‘I don’t want to die!’ resonates. ‘Cinema entered my life,’ writes Angelopoulos, ‘as a shadow projected on a wall and a cry’ (cited in Ciment 1995: 61). If this memory is the origin of his vocation to cinema, it is probably because this scene which depicts a process of disappearance confers a palpable form to precisely what the images do not show; that is, the disappearance of the father. The missing image in Curtiz’s film was substituted by a spectral image,

230  s y l v i e ro lle t gnawed at by the absence of the condemned man who was already at the gates of death. However, the extraordinary force of this scene comes from the fact that it activates a suspension of time. The hero is already no longer part of this world at the moment his shadow and voice haunt the frame. Instead of real death (death that results in a pure and simple disappearance), the cinema seems capable of delaying the definitive erasure and sheltering, if not the image of death, at least that of its ‘double’. Cinema becomes the language of the interdiction of grief. Nonetheless, The Dust of Time seems to indicate that this same language is on the verge of disappearing. At first, the film seems strangely to return to the codes of classical cinema with its international cast of characters (Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz, Michel Piccoli, Irène Jacob), close-up shots and Englishlanguage dialogue. Yet this borrowed classicism is systematically contradicted by the discontinuity of the narrative as well as the inexplicit allusions to the catastrophes of twentieth-century history (the Greek Civil War, the Gulag, the Holocaust and so on). Above all, it is literally impossible for the ‘poster face’ actors to ‘act’. The film seems to ‘speak’ the classical language of cinema as if it were a dead language. Faced with the failure of politics and the defeat of the tragic form, cinema can only oppose the interdiction of grief with ‘bearing witness’. However, this term is to be understood in the sense that Agamben uses it: ‘We may say that to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead’ (1999: 161).

NOTES   1. See Bordwell (1997a: 11–26) and Jameson (1997: 78–95).   2. In French a ‘revenant’ is a ‘ghost’. The term plays on the double meaning of the verb revenir whose literal meaning is ‘to return’ or ‘to come back’ but which can also mean ‘to haunt’.   3. Jacques Derrida’s expression is an oxymoron that plays upon the antinomy between a-poros (pathless) and ex-perience (crossing).   4. Some motifs are also drawn from Greek, pagan and Christian legends. Megalexandros associates, in this way, the heroic legend of the conqueror, the myth of Dionysus’ eternal rebirth and the Christian figure of Saint George. While they are superimposed, the figures and themes borrowed from various narratives do not exactly become unrecognisable – they employ a different process of recognition. The cited myths thus come to represent something else, or even to express something unspoken that quotation forces them to confess.   5. This idea is present in the Greek language itself, which refers to the Civil War as a ‘war within lineage’ (εμφύλιος πόλεμος).   6. It is, says the filmmaker, the ‘cultural baggage that every Greek has carried since birth’ (Ciment 1975: 4).

an ‘ u n t i mel y ’ hi stor y  231   7. With the exception of the son, Orestes, none of the characters have names. Therefore, we must designate them by the tragic figures to which they refer: Agamemnon, Electra, Clytemnestra, etc.   8. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, only his dog, Argos, recognises him. Similarly, the old resistance fighter is recognised by his own dog when he returns to his village . . . thirty years after leaving.   9. In Book XI of The Odyssey, rather than being underground, the nekyia is described as a ‘window’ or passageway between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. 10. While Angelopoulos’ text does use the terms of Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion found in The Odyssey, it transposes them in the future. 11. ‘In memory of the nameless is dedicated historical construction’ (Benjamin, MauriceMonnoyer 1991: 356). According to Hesiod, the mass of nonumnai, the ‘nameless’ is that of the unburied dead, refused from the world of the living and the memory of men. Returned to original chaos, left to wander endlessly at the gates of Hades without being able to cross its threshold, they are definitely doomed to inhumanity. 12. The term ‘rhythm’, as Émile Benveniste shows, derives etymologically from the verb ῤεῖν (to flow) and designates (as opposed to other terms such as σχῆμα, μορφἠ, είδος) a form that has no definitive consistency, but a fluid and modifiable one. See Émile Benveniste ([1966] 1971: 327-35).   In this sense, according to Louis Marin it is ‘a flow that neither name nor figure could stop in order to produce its concept or provide its theme’ (2001: 266).

C H A P TER 15

Angelopoulos and the Time-image Richard Rushton

T

heo Angelopoulos began his film career as a sombre political modernist. His early films offer biting critiques of Greece’s past and present, yet always with the distant hope that Greece’s future could be prosperous, and that the faults of its recent past could be remedied by a potentially glorious future. The earlier films do have melancholic endings, but in their melancholy the endings are signals or appeals for change: they are attempts to transform melancholy into hope. This outlook soon began to change, and the seeds of a more deep-seated pessimism were sown in Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980). Any sense of a worthwhile future that could be built by acknowledging the past came to an end with Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984). There, the past is left behind, but it also seems that nothing more can be learned from it: the past is laid to rest. Here, the past is laid to rest in a way that no longer makes the past the foundation of the future. At the same time, however, because the past is no longer a condition of the future, the future is itself freed from the shackles of the past. With a future that is freed from the shackles of the past, a new kind of optimism finds its way into Angelopoulos’ films. A clear sense of the transformation in the way the past is envisaged can be gained by way of Angelopoulos’ contrasting use of a nomadic acting troupe, first of all in Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), then by way of their reincarnation in Τοπίο Στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988). As Andrew Horton has noted, in the former film, even though a sense of tragedy marks most of the film’s events, there is nevertheless a sense of ‘muted triumph’, especially in the troupe’s decision near the end of the film to start up again and continue to perform. Here, then, the dead can be remembered and honoured, and the future can be invented by virtue of their memory (Horton 1997: 124). By contrast, when the players ‘return’ in Landscape in the Mist they are ‘used up’ and irrelevant: culture and history no longer matter (Horton 1997: 158). Voyage to Cythera is itself a film that is all about banishing the past, something

236  r ic h a r d r u s h to n that Angelopoulos has himself made clear: it is a film that ‘exorcises the past’ in order that Greece will no longer be bound to that past (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 41). It is a film about banishing all of the dreams – especially those dreams of the Left – that had turned to ruin and which, for Angelopoulos, are no longer relevant for contemporary Greece. Angelopoulos claims that the filmmaker-son (Giulio Brogi) of Voyage to Cythera ‘uses the imaginary journey of the film he makes to free himself from the past’ (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 47). Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986) also shows us a man, Spyros (Marcello Mastroianni), tormented by the past, even if we, the viewers of the film, are never shown or told the precise nature of that torment. His only responses to that past are despair, resignation, chaos and death. Hope, along with the past as much as the future, has abandoned him. (The character of Spyros and his crisis in The Beekeeper was, according to Andrew Horton, a response to the 1979 suicide of Nikos Poulantzas, though no explicit reference to this is provided by the film (cited in Kolovos 1990: 172).) Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have, from different theoretical perspectives, accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos’ films. Bordwell notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism (Bordwell 2005: 145). Angelopoulos himself backs up such claims, declaring that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism: ‘Art is once again anthropocentric,’ he declared (cited in Grodent [1985] 2001: 49). For Jameson, this change is a clear regression, both formally and politically: Formal regression is . . . to be found and documented in the return of all these later works to a framework organised around an individual protagonist, an individual hero or narrator, and it is a regression which thereby annuls the innovations and formal conquests that Angelopoulos’ earlier films had made by way of the construction of their unique collective ­narratives. (Jameson 1997: 89) Alongside their repudiation of a collective protagonist, the later films also fall into a mode that Jameson describes as ‘representational narrative’ (Jameson 1997: 90).1 Angelopoulos himself talked about how the aspirations of the Left in Greece came to an end some time during the late 1970s, almost as though the only people who had kept the leftist dream alive were the colonels themselves who had presided over the military rule of Greece between 1967 and 1975. Once they were overthrown, the Left lost both its momentum and its dreams, and the leftist cause was betrayed and abandoned even by those who had invested the most in it. Megalexandros shows us this: Alexander is a liberator

ange lo p o u lo s and t h e t i me- i mage   237 turned tyrant. The only plausible course to take was that of a turn to the self. Again Angelopoulos is very clear on such issues: The battle is always the battle of the self, the self against everything that is unusual, unjust and incalculable. The individual must always fight against everything in this life, because there is the illusion that there is a meaning, a goal. But there is no meaning, no usefulness. The battle is life itself. I no longer deal with politics, with generalizations. I no longer understand them. (cited in Bachmann [1997] 2001: 111) And yet, even as he embraced the notion of a self that battles against everything, Angelopoulos also refused to abandon the perspective of collective memory. Ultimately this might be the chief tension of his works: how can the ‘battle of the self’ be reconciled with ‘collective memory’? My own work is based on what we call collective memory, more than collective individual memory, on collective historical memory, mixing time in the same space, changing time not through a flashback that corresponds to a person but to a collective memory, and this was accomplished without a cut. (cited in O’Grady [1990] 2001: 71) On the one hand, in the later films, Angelopoulos appeals to the sanctity of a self that is abandoned to itself in the world, while on the other hand he also wants to retain a belief in the destiny of the kind of collective vision that forms the focus of the earlier films: that is, of the ways that memory can be marshalled collectively in order to construct a new kind of future. And we can note in Angelopoulos’ claim above – his explicit reference is to Landscape in the Mist – the effect of a ‘collective memory that unfolds in the space and time of a single shot’, his most enduring stylistic trademark, and one that is as relevant for the early films as much as the later ones. In what follows I account for Angelopoulos’ transition from ‘politics’ to ‘humanism’ by way of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the time-image. Deleuze’s categories allow the distinctions between the early films and the later ones to be clearly identified, for Deleuze offers subtle differentiations between notions of the past, time and memory. The key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a recollection-image, and that which he terms pure recollection. While the early films (from Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) to Megalexandros) are constructed by way of recollection-images, the later films offer what Deleuze calls pure recollection. These two ways of approaching recollection offer contrasting conceptions of the past and of time, and thus offer markedly different ways of conceiving of history.

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RECOLLECT I ON - I MAGES AND P U RE RECOLLECT I ON What can we do with the past? Such might be the central concern asked by the films of Angelopoulos. And the common sense answer is: we can learn from it. Certainly this is the approach Angelopoulos takes in his early films, the moral of which might be that injustice prevails when the truth of the past is covered over, hidden. Reconstruction is an elegy for those who abandoned Greece; in other words, it is an appeal to the people of Greece to face the wounds of the past, to ‘come clean’ about them, not to abandon them. When the wife and her lover in Reconstruction refuse to take the blame for the murder of the husband but instead insist that it was the other who was responsible – the wife accuses the lover while the lover accuses the wife – we might take this as Angelopoulos’ way of insisting that we must all take the blame for the sins of the past. The Travelling Players, more than any other of the films, is an attempt to get ‘inside’ history, to lay it bare with enormous weight, to portray the past as a shadow that colours all of the present. Yet it is in Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) that the pattern of these early films is most pronounced. There, a figure from the past – the living-dead body of a civil war partisan – becomes ‘unhidden’: that which should have remained dead, buried and forgotten, suddenly returns to haunt the living. Angelos Koutsourakis has deftly explained the Brechtian and Marxian inspirations for Angelopoulos’ strategies here, for The Hunters ‘aspires to reveal the prioritization of historical/political forces over actions of the individuals’ (Koutsourakis 2012: 175). The cinematic techniques employed – especially the transitions between different periods of history that occur within the same shot, a hallmark of Angelopoulos’ style – are designed to mark the influence of the past upon the present, to convince the viewer that what is happening in the present cannot be separated from what has happened in the past. If the past is forgotten or covered up, then its weight will become a burden so that the present – and the future – will be thrown off course. And such is the scale of Angelopoulos’ lessons from Brecht: the destiny of the present and the future will only be realised if the truth of the past is confronted, when the past is ‘unhidden’. If Greece can face up to this hidden past, only then will it begin to thrive, and rediscover itself as a proud nation. Such strategies are perhaps not as innovative as they might seem, for Angelopoulos is offering something akin to a collective ‘return of the repressed’, a return brilliantly embodied in the uncovered corpse that refuses to die. This return of the repressed has a very specific aim, which Koutsourakis points out: ‘to foreground the collective guilt on the part of the Greek bourgeoisie’ (2012: 176). On this count, then, the truth of the past has very specific lessons to teach: if the sins of the past are covered over and buried – as they are at the end of The Hunters – then those sins will continue

ange lo p o u lo s and t h e t i me- i mage   239 to return in ways that will wreak havoc upon the present. For the most part it is the oppression of communist and leftist forces that surfaces again and again in the films of this period. During this period, the political establishment in Greece would not even acknowledge that there had been a Civil War; rather, the Civil War period was dismissed as an insurrection led by disreputable radicals (and thus referred to as the ‘Bandit War’). The point, of course, is that if the sins of the past were openly confronted and recognised, then the present and the future would be entirely different. And that is nothing less than the point of The Hunters (and Angelopoulos’ other films of this period): to try to persuade Greece to examine its past, to face up to the truths it has buried, above all to recognise the brutal oppression of leftist and democratic sympathisers during the twentieth century, and thus to embark on a new Greek future, especially now (in 1977) having awoken from the dark years of military rule. Thus, the major directive of these films is for Greece to go back into the past, and there is no doubt these films tend to be expressions of what Deleuze calls the time-image (Deleuze 1989). As is well known, Deleuze makes a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image in cinema, where first of all the movement-image sees perception related to action, so that the actions of a hero in a movement-image film are responses to what the hero has seen. By contrast, films of the time-image feature a relationship between perception and memory: what the hero sees is no longer related to action; rather, it sends the hero back to the past, into memory. Using Deleuze, Sohi and Khojastehpour have noted this aspect of Angelopoulos’ films (though their focus is on Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα [Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995] and Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει [The Weeping Meadow, 2005]), stating that Angelopoulos ‘fuses the past in the present as if the past were a part of the present’ (Sohi and Khojastehpour 2010: 63). They then go on to claim that Angelopoulos ‘does not film recollections of the past. He wants the past to live in the present’ (2010: 64). It is the relationships between the past and the present, between memory and recollection, that go to the heart of Angelopoulos’ oeuvre. Discerning precisely what is meant by ‘making the past a part of the present’ or ‘making the past live in the present’, as Sohi and Khojastepour note, is central to Angelopoulos’ concerns. As I have already claimed, there is a distinction between the earlier films, which are based on recollection-images, and the later films, which feature pure recollection. But of what, precisely, does this ­distinction consist? First of all, in the early films, the past emerges as a function of the present. That is, from the perspective of the present, we are taken back into the past, but only insofar as that past is related to the present. Thus, in The Hunters, the dead body of the partisan emerges from the past as a function of the present: it declares to the present that the truth of the past must be uncovered and

240  r ic h a r d r u s h to n known in order for the present to also be fully known; to ‘hide’ the past will mean that the present is also hidden from itself. Or in The Travelling Players, each layer of history can only be understood from the perspective of the present; that is, one layer is always related to another, from 1922 to 1944, or from there to 1949 and 1952. Likewise, the impossible search for the ‘truth’ of the past in Reconstruction is a function of the present: it is because the truth of the past has been renounced that Greece in the present has lost its way; that is why its small villages are deserted, why so many workers have fled to Germany, and so on. These relations between the past and the present are nevertheless remarkable in Angelopoulos’ early films. Deleuze makes somewhat complex claims for these kinds of formations, whose characteristic forms are the uses of flashbacks in the films of Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve [1950], The Barefoot Contessa [1954], A Letter to Three Wives [1949]). In those films, the past and memory are not pre-constituted. Rather, the past and memory are only formed as consequences of the present. What Deleuze then claims is that these films show us the birth of memory. Everything about the past and memory thus becomes a function of the present. But it also becomes a function of the future, so that the passage from the past, through the present and into the future is charted. In short: from the present moment, a character is taken back to the past in order to discover how the present ‘came to be’. But this going back into the past is also then stored up so as to be used as a reference for the future. Thus, for Mankiewicz, it is in the present that we make a memory, but only in order that we will be able to make use of it in the future (see Deleuze 1989: 50–5). The past is a function both of the present and of a future to come. Thus, in All About Eve, Eve Harrington (Ann Baxter) will use her knowledge of Margo (Bette Davis) and Karen (Celeste Holm) to try to swindle their husbands away from them and to further her own career, while Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) will also use the background knowledge he has garnered in turn against Eve. Here, characters learn and know the secrets of the past that they can use as weapons in the future. This too is the function of the past in Angelopoulos’ early films: we are taken back to the past in order to discover how the present ‘came to be’. This knowledge of the past can then be stored up for future use. These are all examples of what Deleuze calls a recollection-image. By contrast, pure recollection, Deleuze contends, emerges when the recollection-image fails. When one cannot recollect, when recollection fails, there emerges  pure recollection. In other words, for pure recollection, one is confronted by something, but cannot discern what it is. One can only ask: what is that? First, such a pure recollection emerges in Landscape in the Mist: the giant sculpted hand that is drawn from the water by a helicopter. In front of this image one can only ask: what is that? Angelopoulos himself admits it: ‘I

ange lo p o u lo s and t h e t i me- i mage   241 couldn’t really tell you the significance of the stone hand pulled out of the Thessaloniki harbor’ (cited in, Strauss, Toubiana [1988] 2001: 63).2 If in The Hunters the living-dead body is soon recognisable as a definable ‘thing’ from the past, or if the layers of past in The Travelling Players are for the most part signalled by banners or symbols which reveal their historical significance, then the stone hand of Landscape offers no such marker of historicity. Rather, we, as much as the film’s characters who stare in astonishment at this spectacle, are merely amazed and confused. The result is none other than pure recollection: to look back, to try to make connections, to delve into one’s memory. The force of this move in Angelopoulos’ films reaches its apogee in Ulysses’ Gaze, a film composed around the search for three missing reels of film, the so-called ‘first ever Balkan film’. The reels themselves are almost impossible to develop, as though they are shards of the past that will forever be shielded from the gaze of humankind. And so, fittingly, at the very end of Ulysses’ Gaze, when the character called A. (Harvey Keitel) at last sees the developed reels, Angelopoulos does not let the film’s viewers see them. For us, these film reels remain unseen and unknown, and the past remains open only to what we might imagine it to be. In short, for this aspect of pure recollection, the past is opened up. The past is not specified or determined: it remains open. Not only is the past opened up, but the present and the future are also prised open: what is happening in the Balkans and Sarajevo (a senseless war) does not need to happen and does not need to have happened; a different past can give rise to a different present and a different future. Such is Angelopoulos’ plea, and A.’s plea too in Ulysses’ Gaze. A second kind of pure recollection occurs by way of another of Angelopoulos’ most iconic images: the gigantic, broken apart sculpture of Lenin which passes along the Danube on a barge in Ulysses’ Gaze. The gesture takes its place in a long line of ‘farewells to the past’ for Angelopoulos (farewells that began most emphatically with Voyage to Cythera). What is most pronounced in this instance is that the figure of Lenin, so recognisable from the past, is now ‘out of time’. Lenin – along with communism and the dreams of socialism – can no longer be connected with the present: an icon from the past that is instantly recognisable has now lost its sense of purpose or relevance. This ‘loss of a connection to history’ should in no way be seen as negative. On the contrary, Angelopoulos’ whole point is that Greece – especially those Greeks associated with the Left – needs to rid itself of this history, to say farewell to the past. Only if one learns to forget can a new future then be invented. And the way to do this is to find new pasts: this is precisely what is at stake for Deleuze’s conception of pure recollection, and those stakes are taken up by Angelopoulos in his later films. For a new future to emerge, a new past must be discovered.

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T H E I NVENT I ON OF TH E P AST These, therefore, are the two theses that guide Angelopoulos’ later films: firstly, to declare that the past remains open, that it has not been determined for all time; and secondly, therefore, that the past can be rediscovered and reinvented. Yvette Biro has noted this in her commentary on Voyage to Cythera. In that film, according to Biro, there is an intertwining of objective historical moments with personal memories. ‘On one side,’ she writes, ‘the action unfolds according to a clear and easy-to-follow chronology; however, this chronology does not prevent another movement. This one is vertical, representing the subjective time of imagination or, rather, the atemporality of the imaginary’ (Biro 1997: 74–5). Thus, in Voyage to Cythera Angelopoulos makes a crucial break: it is no longer objective history that is the key to the future. Rather, what now intervenes into and cuts across objective history is personal memory. In all of the films that follow it will be personal memory rather than objective history that occupies the centre of Angelopoulos’ films: the ‘battle of the self’ is now his main concern. This transformation also changes Angelopoulos’ approach to the past. Biro continues by noting the ways that Angelopoulos’ approach to the past changes with Voyage to Cythera: ‘Here, the historicity of time, the fusion of past and present cease’ (Biro 1997: 75). Where now can we place the past in Angelopoulos’ films? Has the fusion of past and present ceased? If that is the case, what can be made of Sohi and Khojastehpour’s assertion that Angelopoulos ‘fuses the past in the present as if the past were a part of the present’ (Sohi and Khojastehpour 2010: 63)? We can only understand these claims if that past, as Biro contends, is virtual-subjective-imaginary and not actual-objective-real. Such is the logic of Angelopoulos’ ‘turn to the self’. And that is the overall message of Angelopoulos’ films after Megalexandros: collective history or collective memory only gains its significance if that history is filtered through the experience of subjective memory. What else can be the point of The Weeping Meadow? There, the collective, objective history of Greece from 1919 until the end of the Civil War is refracted through the memory of a single soul: Eleni (Alexandra Aidini). And Weeping Meadow is perhaps the most overtly focalised of all of the later films, for all those films are organised by way of the dialectic between ‘objective history’ and ‘personal memory’. Angelopoulos states: My feeling . . . is that the past is an integral part of the present. The past is not forgotten, it affects everything we do in the present. Every moment of our lives consists of the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, all of them blending together into one. (cited in Fainaru [1996] 2001: 98)

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Figure 15.1 The Weeping Meadow

The key point here is to work out precisely what Angelopoulos means by the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, and the fact that these elements all blend together. One direction in which to take such claims is in the direction of what Deleuze calls the time-image, for the time-image consists quite precisely in the blending together of past and present, real and imaginary. For Deleuze, all films create circuits between the actual and the virtual, where the actual is generally equated with the ‘real’ and the virtual with the ‘imaginary’. Additionally, what Deleuze calls ‘the actual’ functions – generally speaking – in the present with – again, generally speaking – the virtual operating in the past by way of memory. The difference between movement-images and time-images is located here: where the movement-image makes clear distinctions between past and present, virtual and actual, in contrast, the timeimage makes relations between past and present, actual and virtual, real and imaginary, indiscernible. The result is that one can no longer be sure where the past ends and the present begins, nor can one be certain what is real and what is imaginary, or what is actual or virtual (see Rushton 2012: 87–91). For both regimes of images the past is ‘in’ the present, but for the movement-image, the past is relatively fixed so that its operations on the present are also fixed. The formula of the movement-image is thus: the present is like this because the past was like that. One of the aims of films of the movementimage is to ensure that clear distinctions are forged between the virtual and the actual: in order for the ‘truth’ of history to be laid bare, any false or imaginary histories must be banished, they must be shown to be false. As a result, all will become actual: the virtual will be shown to have been imaginary, while the real will be affirmed as actual.

244  r ic h a r d r u s h to n This is precisely the operation performed by The Hunters: the members of the hunting party are determined to deny the truth of history and to perpetuate a ‘false’, imaginary history: the collusions of the Civil War, the oppression of the Left, Greece’s compromises and concessions to foreign powers. They are thus content to bury the living-dead body of the partisan. And Angelopoulos’ point is clear: the hunters are clinging to a false history; their view of history is entirely imaginary, virtual. Angelopoulos’ task in The Hunters is to reveal to us that Greece has been clinging to an imaginary history, a virtual heritage which has enabled the ruling classes, epitomised by the hunters themselves, to wield power on the basis of false claims; that is, the ruling classes have come to power on the basis of keeping the truth of history hidden, so that instead a false, imaginary history has taken its place. Angelopoulos’ early films utterly resist this hiddenness of the past so that the truth of history can instead be brought out into the open, like the undead partisan who emerges from his hidden state to be exposed in the open air. In this way, Angelopoulos’ desire is for the true history of twentieth-century Greece to be made, in Deleuze’s terms, actual: the early films insist that a clear distinction is made between Greece’s imaginary-virtual histories (the distorted ‘official’ histories fostered by the corruptions of the Greek state) and real-actual histories (the truth of the oppression of the Left, foreign collusion and so on). When these virtual lies are exposed as imaginary and false, then true history can arise to take its place. To uncover the truth of the past, to dispose of virtual or imaginary histories in order to posit the one true history: such is the task of Angelopoulos’ early films. The next step would be to replace that imaginary past to ensure that the past is no longer imaginary or virtual but rather to affirm that it is real and actual, that the atrocities of the Civil War and the oppression of the Left did take place and that such truths of the past can explain the problems and shortcomings of the present. But Angelopoulos finds, by the time he makes Megalexandros, that he cannot do this, that merely uncovering the ‘imaginary’ nature of the past is not enough. Rather, new pasts need to be discovered. The later films take a very different approach to the past. In these films the past becomes malleable, pliable, open to the imaginary and the virtual; the past and the present ‘blend together’. But this is only possible because any sense of a collective, objective-actual past is dismantled. In the later films it is the subjective-virtual memories of Angelopoulos’ protagonists that open up the past and in which the past (or multiple pasts) can be discovered. For these films, then, the idea is to find a past that is worth having. What is at stake is what Nietzsche would call a ‘revaluation of values’, a destruction of the kinds of ‘universal history’ put in place by the classical films of the movement-image (see Deleuze 1985: 148–50 and Deleuze 1983: 80–1)3. Angelopoulos plays this out across his works: the later films try to bring about a revaluation of values by approaching history differently. No longer

ange lo p o u lo s and t h e t i me- i mage   245 is there the possibility of uncovering a universal history – a universal history so cherished by the Left in Greece as elsewhere. Rather, an entirely different approach to history is advocated. It is an approach that Deleuze calls ‘a new mode of story’ (1989: 150). For this new mode of story, fiction (what used to be known as story) is no longer opposed to the true, which is to say that a false or virtual history (histoire) can no longer be opposed to a true and actual history. Rather, what emerges in the time-image is what Deleuze calls the ‘storytelling’ function: ‘What is opposed to fiction is not the real; . . . it is the storytelling function . . . in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster’ (1989: 150). Deleuze continues (his ­reference is to the ­documentaries of Pierre Perrault): What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his subjective and objective aspects. It is the becoming real of the character himself when he begins to ‘make fiction’, when he enters into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends’ and so contributes to the invention of his people. The character is inseparable from a before and an after, but he reunites these in the passage from one state to another. He himself becomes another, when he begins to tell stories without ever being fictional. (1989: 150)

ELEG Y FOR H I STOR Y ‘What words could we use to make a new collective dream come true?’ In Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991) this is the concluding line of the disappeared politician’s (Marcello Mastroianni) sensational bestselling book, Despair at the End of the Century, written in the early 1980s, when the collective dream of communism or socialism appeared already to be at an end. Each of the later films seems to have a similar motto (we shall approach them one at a time), and the above statement could certainly stand as one motto for the later films. The older collective dreams of communism and socialism have passed, so the challenge of the present is to find a new collective dream. This might entail an entirely new birth of the human, an erasure of humanity’s past forms: as the ex-wife (Jeanne Moreau) of the disappeared politician says, ‘I could see he was becoming another man’. So too for the refugees in the border town: because they are ‘without papers’, it is impossible definitively to say who is who: they can become new people. For the Greek officials who refuse to allow the refugees to cross the border in Greece, this lack of identity is a problem, a deficiency that renders such asylum seekers less than human. However, the perspective Angelopoulos brings to the plight of the refugees is to make them more than human: rather

246  r ic h a r d r u s h to n than being the detritus of the present, they are instead the people of the future, the people to come, the ‘invention of a people’, as Deleuze says, the birthplace of a new sense of the human. To do this, of course, the histories of these people are erased and new histories or new pasts take their place. That is the ex-politician’s challenge to objective history: to refuse it, to make a new past, one in which he has a different family, a daughter who gets married and so on. To open up a new past is to also open up a new future, so that at the end of The Suspended Step, there are a range of possible futures: did the ex-politician cross the river? Did he leave the town on a bus? Did he leave the camp with a group of workers? Or did he merely walk across the border? All of these are possibilities of the future, openings onto the future that have arisen out of this man’s reinvention of the past. ‘We dreamt of another world . . . We were cast aside by history’. Such are the reflections of the characters in Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) who have been reunited at the end of the millennium. The characters had lived and fought through the Civil War before being cast far and wide (to Siberia, to Austria, to Italy, to the United States and so on). Via the journey undertaken by the film director (Willem Dafoe) in which he tries to piece together the history of his mother and father as well as his own past, we enter precisely into that conflict between ‘objective history’ and ‘personal memory’ that becomes the mark of Angelopoulos’ films. Against the backdrop of moments of ‘monumental history’ – the end of the Civil War, the death of Stalin, the resignation of US President Nixon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the celebration of the turn of the millennium in 1999 – are the conflicts, dreams and disappointments of a range of characters. And it is not the ‘monumental’ aspects of history that are foregrounded. Rather, the crucial moments are ones of personal memory: the separation of Spyros (Michel Piccoli) and Eleni (Irène Jacob) at the end of the Civil War; the 1974 departure of Jacob (Bruno Ganz) and Eleni to the USA (Jacob had wanted to go to Israel); Eleni’s search for Spyros and her son against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Nixon, and the lamentations of a lost future in 1989 and 1999 (‘We dreamt of another world’). Alongside this is the filmmaker’s own estrangement from his daughter, or the fact that the matter of objective histories always implicates the personal. The film ends with the hope of the creation of a ‘people to come’: the young daughter, also called Eleni, refuses the strictures and impositions of her father to instead embrace a new sense of the human offered to her by her grandparents. ‘To the world that hasn’t changed despite our dreams’: such is the toast A. (Harvey Keitel) presents to his friend (Yorgos Mihalakopoulos) mid-way through Ulysses’ Gaze. A.’s travels throughout the film have been geographical – from Florina, Plovdov, Bucharest, Belgrade, and on to Sarajevo – but at the same time they have been temporal, as his trajectory through these territories is littered with his own flashes of memory: again, the emphasis is

ange lo p o u lo s and t h e t i me- i mage   247 on the tension or coalescence of ‘objective history’ and ‘personal memory’. In the  end, A.’s friend, Ivor Levy (Erland Josephson), will die, as will his daughter Naomi (Maia Morgenstern). Such are the tragedies history bequeaths to the present, for they are both casualties of the Balkan conflict that constitutes the ‘present’ of Ulysses’ Gaze. But the past is bequeathed to A. by way of the three missing reels of the Manakis brothers that had been developed by Levy – he discovered the chemical combination necessary to develop the reels. In this way, history – a ‘piece’ of history, the reels of film – is resuscitated for the present. And this is nothing less than the rediscovery of a people: ‘a captured gaze from the beginning of the century set free at last at the end of the century’. And no doubt we see the drama of Odysseus itself played out, wherein the ‘return’ of Odysseus to his beloved homeland is akin to the discovery of the ‘first gaze’ that A. himself watches at the end of Ulysses’ Gaze: it is in the flicker of the film that A. discovers himself and his future. The same had occurred for Odysseus himself: ‘it is in the mirror of Penelope’s eyes, as they reflect back to him his own image intact that Odysseus fully recovers his heroic identity and finds himself again in the place that is his’ (Vernant 1999: 24). For Angelopoulos, it is by way of the cinema that a return to the self will be discovered – ‘you make a film in order to perceive with greater clarity what it is that is not clear in your consciousness’ (cited in Bachmann [1997] 2001: 109) – as much as a hope for the future: ‘I would like to believe the world will be saved by the cinema’ (cited in Strauss and Toubiana [1988] 2001: 64). And finally, for Landscape in the Mist: ‘During their journey the two children undergo a deep initiation, and they learn to believe in their own world’ (Angelopoulos 2011: 120). How can one fail to read in Angelopoulos’ reflections here the echo of Deleuze’s own call for cinema to restore our ‘belief in this world’ (Deleuze 1989: 188)? What Deleuze means with this claim is that it is the task of cinema to dismantle the world as it is currently conceived, in order that it can be reborn in such a way that humanity will have its belief in this world restored. And what else can be the trajectory of the two children in Landscape in the Mist other than this? To leave behind the world they have known – the ‘real’ world, the crumbling world of contemporary Greece – in order to create for themselves a new world, a world in which their belief will be restored – a world that looks from the point of view of the current world as though it were an ‘imaginary’ world: an imaginary father in Germany, a landscape in the mist. And of course, we can see the ‘landscape in the mist’ at the end of the film as the coming-into-being of the small strip of film discovered by the motorcycle rider, Orestes – ‘look, beyond the mist, there is a tree’ – then given by him to the young boy. The fantasy or dream set in place by the strip of film comes ‘true’ by the film’s end, as though it is this piece of film that allows the children to discover a ‘belief in this world’.

248  r ic h a r d r u s h to n These children show us the future and its hope, even as they weave their way through the despair of the past. And this time the past – objective history – is the past of Angelopoulos’ own films: the travelling players who are now ‘used up’, not to mention the wedding party that occurs halfway through the film which is surely an evocation of the extraordinary scene from The Travelling Players (they sing ‘In the Mood’, a melody that emerges in Travelling Players and Cythera); and the woman from Reconstruction whom the children come across at a police station (‘He’s the one who tied the rope,’ she declares); the truck driver (Vassilis Kolovos) who rapes the young girl is surely also reminiscent of characters from The Hunters, as much as the living-dead horse which is splayed in front of the children evokes the living-dead partisan of the earlier film. And yet, the children free themselves from these pasts, they turn their backs on objective history as much as they forge their own pasts, pasts that they invent by way of personal memory (the ‘memory’ of their father in Germany). This ability allows them to hope for a different kind of future. And so Landscape in the Mist ends, and the future begins: ‘In the beginning there was chaos, and then there was light . . .’ That light, of course, is the light cast by the cinema.

NOTES 1. Jameson has recently reconsidered these arguments in the Chapter published in this volume. 2. Angelopoulos claimed elsewhere: ‘If this scene was shot by Ken Loach, the hand would point to a specific direction. If it was shot by Tarkovsky, again he would point to a particular direction. I cannot point somewhere specifically. I cut the index finger. I have the feeling that the finger is cut’ (Cited in Torrell 2000: 63). 3. Deleuze’s key point of reference is Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (Nietzsche 1997).

C H A P TER 16

Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze Smaro Kamboureli

[I]t is impossible to have peace and normality not because the Balkan peoples could not in principle have much better relations with one another, but because the interests at stake in the Balkans are too great to permit such a development. The way I see it, the roots of the problem go way back in time and all the various conflicts were encouraged, at one time or another. There is a joke I often tell which I heard on my first trip. Before the war a foreign journalist went to Bosnia and was walking about in a town which had a mixed population – i.e. Muslims, Serbs and Croats – and at some point he went where we all go. There was a large public urinal in the centre of the square and he headed towards it, but just as he reached it someone passed him and made the sign of the cross. He stood surprised for a moment, then someone else went by, crossing himself in the Catholic manner but with the same degree of respect before the urinal – and then a Muslim passed, making the analogous Muslim gesture. The journalist asked someone and was told that in the twelfth century there used to be an Orthodox church on this spot. In the fourteenth century it became a mosque and when the Austro-Hungarians arrived it became a Catholic church. Tito, to erase all that, demolished it and built a public urinal. Theo Angelopoulos (1995: 17)

C U LT U RAL MEMOR Y AS FL UI D ARC H I VE

T

he joke that Theo Angelopoulos relates in the epigraph above offers a quick gloss on the symbolic economy of cultural memory in Bosnia, the context within which Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), the second film in his ‘Trilogy of Borders’, unfolds. Cultural memory in some

250  s m a r o k am b o u re l i regions is an officially authorised imperative, but in former Yugoslavia, as the joke suggests, remembering the past is curtailed by a contrary imperative, a state-sanctioned policy to forget the cultural particularities of the ethnic communities cohabiting in the area. The conversion of a sacred space located in the middle of the public square into a urinal points to a dialectical relationship between cultural memory and the state. Yet while the urinal appears to a foreign onlooker to be a secular site in the present, it paradoxically elicits religious veneration. It thus operates as a monument embedded in a zone where time seems to have stopped, such that the different temporalities it condenses are experienced simultaneously. It may offer physical relief to the men visiting it, but as a secular site that also serves the state apparatus’ attempt to eliminate memory by de-sanctifying the original structure, it does not abate the impulse to memorialise what stood in that location. With secularism disrupted by the manifestation of the sacred, the urinal’s public, albeit ironic, monumentalism speaks to the recalcitrance of different and competing kinds of cultural memory. That here cultural memory asserts itself by means of both repetition and difference further disturbs the homogeneous image of the building that Tito’s political machine has c­ onstructed, thus rescinding the linearity and singularity of history. This double trope of repetition and difference provides evidence of the ‘Balkan recidivism’ that Vangelis Calotychos critiques, ‘a collective neurosis’ manifested in the compulsion ‘to repeat [history’s] errors time and time again’ (Calotychos 2013: 60). The ethnically and religiously diverse Bosnians’ resistance to state-endorsed cultural amnesia in Angelopoulos’ joke exemplifies that, even when there is an indictment against it, cultural remembering persists, and does so in a fashion that stresses the hybrid and conflicting content embedded in it. While the Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians pay obeisance to their respective religions when they walk by the urinal, surely they also remember their cultural groups’ losses and gains over the course of history. This twin mode of cultural memory – at once repressed and in circulation – points to its function as a living archive and, consequently, to the historical and political vagaries that contribute to its cumulative and palimpsestic structure. It is precisely this fluid nature of archives, their simultaneous persistence and variability, which Ulysses’ Gaze invites the viewer to consider. Through the aesthetic tropes and complex ideological vision that have become the trademarks of Angelopoulos’ cinematography, Ulysses’ Gaze dramatises not only that the history embodied in cultural archives must be heard in the plural but also that the imperative to remember and who, as well as how one, remembers, must be seen as the result of complex discursive forces. Far from attempting to resolve the contradictions of what is being remembered, a common impulse that would inevitably result in homogenising and therefore further mystifying the past, Angelopoulos sets out to represent in this film at once the

m e mor y u n der s i ege   251 arduousness cultural memory inspires, the ambivalence it comprises, and the paradoxical capacity it exhibits to both attest and resist the enduring power of the originary narratives it summons. The obsession with the archive of cultural memories in Ulysses’ Gaze thus operates in the Derridean mode of ‘archive fever’: a ‘passion’ for archives akin to ‘sickness,’ a ‘compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire . . . to return to the origin’ (Derrida 1995: 91). Yet this impulse remains unfulfilled, for at the same time that the archive becomes open, it shows itself to be ‘unavailable for translation . . . shielded from technical iteration and reproduction’ (1995: 90). It is this double function of the archive that constitutes the obsession with it as an incurable malady, what Derrida calls both the trouble de l’archive and the mal d’archive, the former condition stemming from the latter. Because we are, as he says, ‘en mal d’archive: in need of archives’ (1995: 91), we cannot run away from the troubling knowledge that the archive never fully yields its secrets, hence the trouble it causes. It is in this sense that the archive is not just a thing of the past; the feverish search for it ‘opens out of the future’ (1995: 68), thus both activating and serving as the antecedent of the kind of journey the Ulysses’ Gaze protagonist undertakes.

T H E C I NEMAT I C F I RST GA Z E AND T HE D I S P ERS I ON OF   DIAS P OR I C ORI G I NS Ulysses’ Gaze traces the return journey of a nameless Greek-American filmmaker, listed in the film’s credits as A. (Harvey Keitel), to Greece through the war-torn Balkans in the early 1990s. Flooded with memories – some from his own past, others from the repository of the region’s cultural memories – A. traverses the Balkans with a single goal in mind: commissioned by the Film Archives in Athens to make a documentary on the historical filmmaker brothers Yannakis and Milton Manakis, he seeks to locate their archive in the hope that it contains three reels of a film they never developed. Considered to be the Lumière brothers in the Balkans, they were the first to document the region in photographs and film at the start of the twentieth century. It is not a coincidence that Angelopoulos has A. undertake this journey at a time in the Balkans when one’s neighbours and relatives turn into one’s worst enemies. Early in the film, A. intimates that the Manakis brothers’ practice as photographers and filmmakers captured cultural memory in a manner that disputes the atavistic logic of ‘ethnic absolutisms’ (Gilroy 1993: 3). Ulysses’ Gaze begins with a series of cinematic quotations from the Manakis oeuvre before the credits start rolling. Black and white, and in the jerky movement of a hand-held camera typical of the early period of silent films, this opening footage of old and young peasant women weaving is from the Manakis brothers’ film, Οι Υφάντριες (The Weavers), their first, t­wo-minute-long

252  s m a r o k am b o u re l i documentary that features their 114-year-old grandmother, Despina.1 In voice-over, the dominant mode through which he speaks in Ulysses’ Gaze, A. situates the documentary: ‘Weavers in Avthela, a Greek village, 1905. The first film made by brothers Milton and Yannakis Manakis. The first film ever made in Greece and the Balkans. But is this a fact? Is it the first film? The first gaze?’ A cinematic gesture that both pays homage to the first filmmakers in the region and announces the self-reflective mode of Ulysses’ Gaze, it introduces Angelopoulos’ film as a cinema of history and a history of cinema in the Balkans. Through the trope of a film-within-a-film cinema becomes the privileged discourse and medium through which the limits of identity are tested. This concern with cinema, history and self-reflection is further reinforced by A.’s emphasis, albeit introduced in an interrogative mode, on the concept of origins. That cultural memory and origins work in tandem yet can also fail to intersect at times because they are not necessarily reducible to each other becomes apparent in the placement of The Weavers: appearing before the film proper starts, the Manakis’ documentary is cast as the ur-moment of cinema in the Balkans, a literal archive of the past but also the beginning of cinematic language in the region. Yet, with A. throwing into question The Weavers’ claim to be inaugurating Balkan cinema, the notion of origins lies open, becoming the temporal wound that marks his journey. The second cinematic quotation that appears at the beginning of Ulysses’ Gaze helps re-situate this wound by recasting origins. This time the concept is rendered in terms of a subject’s diasporic homecoming, specifically through the double trope of departures and arrivals, as well as its requisite crossing of borders. Non-visual but verbal, the quotation is in the voice of the character playing the missing politician (Marcello Mastroianni) in Angelopoulos’ Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), presented in Ulysses’ Gaze as A.’s own film: ‘Lost your way again . . . How many borders must we cross to reach home?’ The scene when the voice-over is heard marks A.’s arrival in Florina, a town in the northern Greek province of Macedonia. Florina is the place where A.’s family was forced to relocate from Constanza after the Second World War, when the communist regime in Romania turned against the bourgeoisie. Although A. recognises his family’s now abandoned and dilapidated house, Ulysses’ Gaze obfuscates his origins. When he takes a woman walking past him (Maia Morgenstern) for a woman with whom he had been in love, the line he addresses to this spectre from his past, ‘I wish I could tell you I returned, but something is holding me back’, separates homecoming from origins. As his father (Yorgos Kontsas) says, in a fifteen-minute flashback sequence shot, one of the longest in the film that enacts A.’s family history, the family has been in the diaspora for ‘generations.’ Their origin is an imagined nation that survives through cultural practices and language, as is evidenced, for example, in the code-switching of A.’s speech

m e mor y u n der s i ege   253 from English to Greek. Indeed, assuming A.’s family had settled in what is now Romania during the period of the Ottoman Empire, there was no Greek state as such then. Greece, as Stathis Gourgouris puts it, was a ‘dream nation’ (1996: 41) at the time, a state to be born, in part, as a result of the financial and political endeavours of Greeks who belonged to the long-established ‘trade’ and ‘victim’ diasporas in Europe and the Black Sea region, two of the categories of diaspora that Robin Cohen identifies (2008: 7). In keeping with the ethnic warfare that plagues the Balkans in the present tense of Ulysses’ Gaze, homeland figures as a dispersed space. It remains the ‘subtext’ that ‘diaspora embodies’ (Brah 1996: 190), but it is also ‘decouple[d]’ from diaspora, so that ‘homeland . . . become[s] a homing desire’ (Cohen 2008: 9). By querying the destination, that place of return to which the diasporic trope points, Angelopoulos deconstructs the singularity that is traditionally attributed to origins. Ulysses’ Gaze suggests that home and nation are not always aligned: that they are, in fact, often at odds with each other. Showing that the Balkans have long been a region where people of different ethnic backgrounds moved and settled in the midst of other ethnic groups, Ulysses’ Gaze exposes the ‘insanity’ of trying to establish new national borders against the fluidity of diasporic movements and memory. Angelopoulos thus demonstrates that a diasporic subject’s return to the homeland does not necessarily involve a reentry into an unambiguously delineated space, or into a history that can appease the diasporic subject’s abjection or need for belonging. When A.’s family is forced to relocate in 1950, neither A. nor his parents answer the question posed by a relative: ‘Are you glad to be going to Greece?’ It remains rhetorical, belying the nostalgia purportedly characterising diasporic subjects. Instead of seeing its relocation to Greece as a homecoming, A.’s family laments its loss of the only home it has known – a home in the diaspora, diaspora as home – and grieves for the fact that Constanza will be evacuated of its diverse population that includes, among others, Jews and Armenians. The dozens of refugees and illegal immigrants stranded in a snow-covered desolate landscape that A. sees later in the film while crossing the Greek-Albanian border, offer yet another image of this kind of dispersion, one, however, that further problematises diaspora. If A.’s middle-class family’s forced relocation is marked by trauma, the trauma evoked by these economic migrants is of a different scale and order. Lest the viewer thinks that it is simply a ‘homing desire’ that brings A. back to Florina after an absence of twenty-five years, it becomes clear at the start of Ulysses’ Gaze that what has occasioned his homecoming is an invitation to attend the screening of one of his films. That Florina’s religious authorities have declared this film to be blasphemous further unsettles A.’s relationship with Florina as a place in which he may feel at home. Bearing candles and chanting, the local religious community is holding a procession under the watchful eyes of the police to protest the screening.2 When A. enters this

254  s m a r o k am b o u re l i scene, he and his hosts find themselves under siege; they keep retracing their steps, for every time they turn a corner they come across the protesting crowd, a forewarning of the staggered trajectory A.’s journey will follow. By placing this scene early in the film, Angelopoulos contests the essentialist assumption that the pull the mother country exerts on its diasporic subjects relies on a filiative bond that remains intact. Instead, the film’s opening avers that A.’s return is motivated by the discursive network of relations that link his diasporic subjectivity with that of a cinematographer. As he keeps repeating, returning to Florina is only a ‘pretext’: ‘Florina is the first stop’. It is later in Ulysses’ Gaze that A., on a train that takes him from Monastiri, through Skopje, to Bucharest, discloses what has compelled him to return. He has come back as a filmmaker in the hope of overcoming the artistic and personal crisis he has been going through after an experience he had two years earlier on the island of Delos. Looking for appropriate locations to shoot a film, he witnessed an ‘ancient olive tree toppling over’, and a bust of Apollo emerging from that rip in the earth. But when he repeatedly employed a Polaroid camera to photograph the scene, he was shocked to discover that it ‘hadn’t registered a thing’. The photographs were ‘black negative pictures . . . as if my glance wasn’t working, same empty squares, holes’. It is after this ‘disturb[ing]’ experience that he identifies the Manakis brothers’ first gaze with his ‘own first glance, lost long ago’, an experience that prompts him to accept the Athens Film Archive’s proposal to direct a documentary on their work. The revelation of what launches A.’s journey accounts for the reasons why Ulysses’ Gaze begins with the Manakis brothers’ film. The complex visuality representing the Manakis’ lives and work in Angelopoulos’ film reinforces this.3 The black-and-white footage of The Weavers that opens Ulysses’ Gaze dissolves into a monochromatic grey screen that, in turn, becomes a hazy blue, the blue of the Thessaloniki port and sky, but also of oneiric memory-time, a scene that continues the Manakis cinematic motif. The action that takes place on the promenade unfolds in double time both visually and temporally: it is set in the past, winter 1954, when Yannakis Manakis (Thanos Grammenos) is trying, with a camera on a tripod, to capture a blue boat sailing away; but it also unfolds in A.’s present time in Thessaloniki where he has come to gather information from Yannakis’ apprentice. The overlap of the past and the present is mediated through this (nameless) apprentice who relates to A. what happened on that winter day. The result is what Gérard Genette calls ‘simultaneous narrative’ (1980: 217), a narrative that ‘condenses’ (1980: 157n) two different events, one from the past and one from the present, in effect what monumentalises the urinal in the epigraph’s joke. The apprentice’s recollection of the past is, then, endowed with a performative function, for his act of narration in the present instantaneously dramatises what he narrates about the past. The

m e mor y u n der s i ege   255 apprentice and A. wear contemporary clothing, in contrast to Yannakis, who is dressed in the style of the 1950s. When the camera shifts to focus on A., the condensed narration and its visual elements are maintained, for we continue to see the blue boat sailing away. It is during this visually and technically stunning scene that we hear Yannakis’ apprentice sharing with A. information that is going to determine the course of the latter’s journey: It was the winter of 1954. Yannakis saw a blue ship moored over there in the harbour of Thessaloniki . . . He had set his heart on photographing the boat as it left the harbour. One morning the ship sailed away . . . He died that same evening. As I wrote to you, he kept rambling on about three undeveloped reels, a film which for some reason was never developed since then, since the beginning of the century. I didn’t think much of it at the time. As the apprentice nears the end of his narrative, we hear for the first time what will become the film’s musical leitmotif, composed by Eleni Karaindrou, and this, together with A.’s words, ‘The three reels, the three reels . . . the journey’, signals the beginning of his quest. This moment constitutes a juncture that marks A.’s shift from the homogeneous time that the condensed narrative creates to a moment when he realises that the missing reels hold within them what Walter Benjamin calls ‘a messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past’ (Benjamin [1940] 1969: 262–3). Hoping that this original footage may represent ‘a lost innocence’ about ‘the new era, the new century’ the Manakis brothers ‘attempted to record’, A. sets out on his journey practising a research imagination that juxtaposes archival memory with how cultural memory is embodied and performed in the present. The emphasis on what has already been ‘lost’ – the ‘lost’ reels and A.’s own ‘first glance, lost long ago’ – may appear to forestall the outcome of his search before it has barely begun, but it is the first gaze itself, that which generates memory, that A. is interested in retrieving. Because A. positions himself at once as a member of the Greek diaspora and as a cinematographer, this gaze shares the condensed structure of the blue boat scene, thus reflecting some of Angelopoulos’ recurring concerns, such as diaspora and nostalgia (Grodent [1985] 2001: 43), a ‘search for lost things’ (O’Grady [1990] 2001: 69), and cinema as ‘a form of life’ (Bachmann [1997] 2001: 35), and echoes one of his earlier films, Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984). More specifically, it signifies the ‘selfregard’ displayed by diasporic subjectivity, ‘the complicated result of the self’s negotiations with the observing collective conscience’ (Chow 1998: 64), but also the primacy of the image and the instrumental role of the gaze for a filmmaker.

256  s m a r o k am b o u re l i The first gaze may draw A. back to the past contained in the Manakis archive but, significantly, this past is not equivalent to the diasporic subject’s return to origins. Devoid of the kind of ‘fascist’ idealism that often accompanies one’s attachment to origins (Chow 1998: 16–17), it sets A. off on a journey towards a hybrid and fluid destination, represented by, among other things, the Danube river he sails on and the different figures he impersonates.

Y ANNAK I S AND M I LTON MANAK I S : CONTESTED I DENTI T IES Some background about the lives of Yannakis (1878–1954) and Milton (1882– 1964) Manakis4 is required here in order to understand the historical importance of their oeuvre and its relevance to Ulysses’ Gaze. Not only did they produce 12,500 photographs, about 70 films, and a large number of postcards which document the peasant and urban life of an area that included what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as well as Istanbul, but they also recorded turning points in the Balkan region’s political history. Their lives overlapped with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and so they became inadvertent witnesses of the various insurgent movements and wars in the Balkans at a time when national borders and ethnic and national identities were being reconfigured. As sources show, and as Milton Manakis explains in the documentary shot by the Yugoslavian government in 1956 – parts of which are shown in Ulysses’ Gaze – the subjects they documented ranged from folkloric events, weddings and local fairs to official appearances of Romanian and Greek kings and riots of prisoners; from key figures of the Greek and Bulgarian revolutions against the Turks to Mehmet V’s arrival as the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in Thessaloniki, to the Neo-Turks of Kemal Ataturk’s movement and, later, Tito. Their film that documented the discovery of the body of Metropolitan Emilianos of Grevena, assassinated by the Neo-Turks, and his funeral (1911) was distributed and shown widely in Europe, as well as among the diasporic Greeks in the United States. Obviously, it is the historical value of the Manakis photo and film archive that lies behind Angelopoulos’ interest in the two brothers, but their life trajectories, which encompass the political exigencies of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the Balkans, bolster the significance, as well as the ambivalence, characterising their work as an act of witnessing. Greek Vlachs, born in Avthella, a mountainous village in the prefecture of Grevena, Greece, they were sponsored by educational grants provided by the Romanian government to attend Romanian schools. Despite the turmoil in that period, Milton remained relatively politically neutral throughout his life: he got along

m e mor y u n der s i ege   257 as much with his fellow Greek Vlachs as with the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, Germans and Slavic Macedonians, and belonged to such associations as the Jewish Humanistic Brotherhood, the French-Serbian League and the Yugoslavian Union. The older brother’s life path, however, does not reflect what we might call Milton’s cosmopolitanism. Trained as an arts teacher in Romanian schools, Yannakis was susceptible to Romanian propaganda, perhaps because of the financial benefits it afforded him. He thus found himself embroiled in various compromising roles, especially after he got onto the payroll of the Romanian educational system and began participating more directly in the propagandist endeavours of Romanian consuls and school superintendents in the years 1904–6.5 Though it was Yannakis who, upon seeing their first movie camera in Bucharest in 1905, did not rest until he acquired one, it was Milton who is credited as the creator of most of the photographs and films comprising the brothers’ archive. Following the 1939 fire that destroyed their movie theatre, the first one in Monastiri, a site that A. visits, the two brothers declared bankruptcy (Chistodoulou 1989: 126–7). Milton, who had stopped making films in 1927 (Christodoulou 1989: 115), kept their photo studio in Monastiri operating until 1961 (Chistodoulou 1989: 137), while Yannakis, who remained a Greek citizen his entire life, returned to Thessaloniki in 1939 to teach in the Romanian School of Commerce (Chistodoulou 1989: 136). It is their house, turned into a museum after Milton’s death, which A. goes to visit in Monastiri. Although Ulysses’ Gaze resists divulging details about their background, it still represents the brothers’ life trajectories as emblematic of the vicissitudes of cultural memory in the region. A. may not be interested in determining their national identities – as he says to the archivist (Maia Morgenstern) whom he encounters at the Manakis Skopje museum, ‘I’m not trying to prove anything’ – but the Manakis brothers’ hybrid, and thus highly contested, identities are a haunting presence in the film. This becomes apparent when A. reaches the Bulgarian border where he, taking on Yannakis Manakis’ identity, is arrested. Once again, the action unravels in double time. Blindfolded, he is led to an interrogation room where an official recites the charges – conspiracy and terrorism against Bulgaria and its German ally – and sentences both brothers, Milton in absentia, to death. This 1915 scene (the date provided in Angelopoulos’ script) dramatises a historical incident that echoes the circumstances that led the Bulgarian authorities to charge Yannakis with espionage as a result of finding ‘three guns and 100 grams of explosives’ in their photography studio (Christodoulou 1989: 62; my translation). Just when he is about to be executed, Yannakis’ death sentence is converted to exile in Plovdin/ Philopoupolis until the end of the war. The shift to World War I in this scene, along with A.’s impending arrival in Sarajevo where this war started, is a reminder that the spectres of the past

258  s m a r o k am b o u re l i have already been haunting the present. While this historical episode in the Manakis brothers’ life serves to recollect the past in Ulysses’ Gaze, the simultaneity encapsulated in the scene depicts it as an instance that reproduces the old nationalist and ethnic ideologies in the 1990s. Yet another example of a condensed cinematic narrative in Ulysses’ Gaze, what transpires during this scene submits to the viewer cultural memory as a living archive, an archive that is inscribed in the present tense. ‘I don’t understand’, is A.’s reply to the lengthy indictment he is delivered, his blindfold further evoking his affective response to his experience of how history is replayed around him. Conjuring his own lost gaze, as well as that of the Manakis brothers, and thus what is also buried in the archives of the past, the blindfold both conceals and gestures towards the effect produced by the dialectical structure of cultural memories. It is the effect engendered by the cultural archive that endows embodied history with the power to re-emerge as a spectre that can either wield violence or, as seems to be A.’s hope, exorcise the ferocity of nationalist passions. As an incarnation of archival history in this scene, A. reminds us of the violence Derrida identifies in the ‘archive itself’: ‘it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion’ (Derrida 1995: 7). What constitutes this unnaturalness is the archive’s inherent contradiction, namely, that its ‘conservation drive’, what characterises ‘archive fever’, is accompanied by a ‘radical finitude, . . . a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression’ (1995: 19). In this context, A.’s lack of understanding at once bemoans the abiding force with which national doxa and ethnic passions are archived in cultural memory, how history repeats itself, and declares an interest in recuperating what history’s unravelling has mislaid, repressed, or rendered vanished. The Manakis’ visual archive, then, documents the complex and traumatic record of the Balkan past, but also has a proleptic function in that it stores the future of the violence in the present.

ARC HI VE FEVER AS MALAD Y AND P ASS I ON If A.’s search for the Manakis brothers’ undeveloped reels follows a circuitous route, it is not only due to the Homeric aspects with which A. is endowed. Rather, it is also because developing these reels has proven to be a challenge, a process that requires discovering the old chemical formula the Manakis brothers employed. This entails a technological leap to the past: to see the first gaze one has to devise first a new, yet paradoxically old, way of seeing. A.’s recuperative project involves continuity and rupture at the same time that it is inflected by a materiality that draws attention to the various technologies that shape both origins and the gaze. If the first gaze is the medium that both preserves and brings to light cultural memory, it is not a coincidence that A. locates the reels in Sarajevo while the city is under siege. The remediation that

m e mor y u n der s i ege   259

Figure 16.1 Ulysses’ Gaze

first gaze necessitates not only resists easy consumption but also involves a movement through ruins and remains. What A. sees when he arrives in Sarajevo – empty streets, bombed buildings, abandoned vehicles, smouldering ruins, a person here and there huddled in fear of the snipers and carrying cans of precious water or fuel – bring him face to face with the ashes of the present, thus validating his desire to recover a vision that may reveal a way out of the impasse competing cultural memories have reached in the present. Although the loss of memory that the undeveloped reels represent may be seen as a release from the ruins of history that cultural memory embodies and triggers, Sarajevo under siege conveys a somewhat different message. Ulysses’ Gaze does not attempt to offer any utopian solutions about the bloodbath and traumas of the Bosnian War; instead, it draws attention to the dangers of fetishising cultural memory, and lays bare that what memory discloses is not ineluctably emancipatory. Distinguishing between ‘immediate memory which is readily accessible’ and ‘anti-memory’ which ‘is imagined as buried or even repressed remembrance’, Richard Werbner states that ‘anti-memory may serve the ends of the nation-building regime, of the state in the making, or it may become the defensive or subversive drive of subalterns asserting themselves against the  state or its dominant elites’ (1998: 74). Sarajevo under siege materialises the crisis that occurs when these two kinds of memory collapse into each other; it performs the affective dissonance that emerges from memory when it becomes fossilised and fetishised, a metaphorical as well as literal ‘burial-place where lost identities are mourned, in a desperate attempt to keep their atrophied representations alive’ (Werbner 1998: 30). The three different funeral processions – Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim – that reach, under A.’s distressed gaze, a Sarajevo cemetery at the same time epitomise this: three different congregations, but all three mourning similar losses, losses that have been

260  s m a r o k am b o u re l i caused at once by the virus of amnesia and mnemonic fever. Resonating with Angelopoulos’ joke, this scene anticipates the carnage A. is about to witness. The Sarajevo Cinémathèque is the final destination of the undeveloped reels’ own odyssey. Ivo Levi (Erland Josephson), the archivist and technician at the Cinémathèque, has applied himself to the task of discovering the chemical formula required to develop the reels with great fervour: ‘I spent endless nights in the old lab listening to the fluids, the sound of their flow . . . I had to concentrate on saving the archive. It was our memory. I had to save it’. Trying to persuade Levi to resume the project, which he has abandoned because of the war, A. tells him that he does not ‘have the right’ to preserve these films as valuable, yet undeciphered, archives: ‘It’s the war, insanity, all the more reason . . . you’ve got no right’. Levi’s reply, ‘What am I if not a collector of vanished gazes?’ shows him to be a kindred spirit, someone who suffers from the same archive fever that has propelled A. to seek the missing reels in the middle of a war that caused yet another genocide in the twentieth century. Being Jewish, Levi hardly needs to be told of the imperative to remember. But archive fever, as has already been mentioned, is at once malady and zeal – it ‘can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble . . . It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away’ (Derrida 1995: 91) – and so it holds a threat of violence. That the pivotal moment of A.’s quest takes place in the lab of a semidestroyed Cinémathèque, that the first glance demands intensive mediation before it yields its meaning, and that, above all, Levi, who finally releases what he calls the Manakis’ ‘captive gaze’, is killed soon after – all of this suggests the aporetic nature of the archive’s meaning. A relic of another era, the Manakis brothers’ first gaze may represent at a certain level a symbolic guarantee of the region’s transcultural character, but it offers no wager for a better tomorrow. While the archive as a vanished gaze resists consumption, it threatens to consume those whose gazes it captivates. It seems that in order for the archive to manifest itself, someone has first to vanish. While Levi is waiting for the developed film to dry, he invites A. to take a stroll with him and his family. Obscured by fog, and thus offering the snipers no visible targets, Sarajevo appears to be temporarily a safe place again. When the city comes alive, so do the remains of Western culture. Actors perform Romeo and Juliet, the city’s youth symphony – consisting of Serbs, Croats and Muslims (Angelopoulos 1995a: 102) – plays Vivaldi, and the citizens under siege recover their bourgeois habits – strolling leisurely, greeting each other, pausing to watch or listen to the free performances. But this semblance of normality is brutally interrupted. The cover of fog this time fails to protect the Levi family; they are killed one by one in cold blood by a group of men, their identities concealed by the thick fog. The ironic interplay in this scene between visibility and invisibility turns A. into a witness of atrocity but one

m e mor y u n der s i ege   261 who, blindfolded, as it were, by the fog, is denied a view of what transpires. He may be on the brink of encountering the first gaze, becoming an eyewitness of what the Manakis brothers recorded, but his own act of bearing witness is invariably skewed by a kind of blindness. Evoking his experience in Delos, his gaze is rendered blank. The same belatedness that keeps the Manakis brothers’ drying film unseen in the Cinémathèque deprives him of vision yet still grants him insight. This penultimate sequence of scenes ends with A. wailing in despair, thus eradicating any illusions the viewer might have that A.’s journey is one of recuperation. If, in Ulysses’ Gaze, oppressors and oppressed, killers and killed, malefactors and their casualties are represented in a manner that resists easy identification, it is not because Angelopoulos lapses into cultural or historical relativism. Rather, he suggests that the villains in the present tense of the film might have been victims once. If there are no immaculate subjects in history, what possible value can the Manakis brothers’ first gaze hold? Perhaps this is the reason why, when A. returns to the lab to watch their released film, the viewers of Ulysses’ Gaze do not get to see it. No longer a lost archive, it figures as yet another film within the film, but its gaze is held in abeyance. Whatever the meaning it holds, it lies in its belatedness that professes a reluctance to keep up with time. It may have revealed the need to devise a new method of dealing with historical materiality and ethnic differences, but since it is deprived of an afterlife as an archive there is no clear answer as to what this new method entails. What is certain is that if the future to come is to be different from the present, it cannot come in the name of the already established order of knowledge. This is not to be taken as a refutation of the power of cultural memory. Rather, A.’s expectation to encounter the dawn of a new episteme in an old film can only occur in dialogue with what has come to pass; forgetting is no option. Yet because the complicity that links cultural memory and history’s wrongs avows the errant condition shared by both, forgetting the old ways becomes an essential part of moving forward. This complicity, the viewer of Ulysses’ Gaze is invited to surmise, holds the seed of a promise that may usher in a new beginning in the name of love. Ulysses’ Gaze ends with what appears to be another quotation, a soliloquy A. delivers that echoes Odysseus’ declaration of love made to Penelope. Gazing straight at the camera, A. promises to a beloved that he ‘will’ return but ‘with another man’s name’. But A.’s beloved, like the Manakis brothers’ first gaze, is present only by virtue of her encoded absence; she exists only as a figure of apostrophe. Given that A. has already admitted his inability to love – ‘I’m crying because I cannot love you,’ he says to the Skopje archivist after they become lovers – love can hardly be seen as the antidote to the violence he has witnessed. Moreover, promising to come back as ‘another man’ yet one still recognisable because of their shared memories, he remains caught between difference and sameness.

262  s m a r o k am b o u re l i Casting the figure of the beloved exclusively into the passive role of a listener – ‘between lovers’ calls, I will tell you about the journey all night long . . . the story that never ends’ not only exposes Angelopoulos’ blind spot about gender roles that permeates virtually his entire oeuvre but also translates the future tense of A.’s speech into a future past. What is different in his rendering of Odysseus’ character is that, unlike Odysseus who returns to his housebound wife only to leave again, A. vouches to stay for ‘all the nights to come’. It is his bearing gifts of stories that assures his homecoming will last for more than one night. As long as there are stories to tell about ‘the whole human adventure’, gazes to share, he will stay at home. Nevertheless, his assumption that the beloved will have no stories to share with him points, once again, to the blinders that have obscured his gaze: an instance of forgetting and a kind of malady that curtail the hope inscribed in his telling. Consequently, his homecoming, far from suggesting a ‘“new humanism”’ (Horton 1997a: 197), repeats some old (and not so old) ways. Still, the homecoming A. envisions does not necessarily cancel out the way in which Ulysses’ Gaze radically questions origins. Instead, looking as he does at the camera while delivering his lines, A. addresses not so much the figure of the beloved as cinema itself. As his final words attest, he averts his gaze from the theatre of war to recollect the familiar terrain of his home – what can only be a home in diaspora – and a beloved figure, but since that figure conjures only absence and silence, it is to the camera’s own gaze that he truly returns. Indeed, his declaration of love is disassembled by the Manakis’ film whose message is decoded but not shared, ultimately alluding that, perhaps, the only place where A. is at home is the cinema. The last image, as well as gaze, in the film is that of A. brooding. The brooder, as Benjamin suggests, is someone who ‘not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditation of the thing. The case of the brooder is that of a man who has arrived at the solution of a great problem but then has forgotten it. And now he broods – not so much over the matter itself as over his past reflections on it. The brooder’s thinking, therefore, bears the imprint of memory’ (Benjamin [1940] 1999: 367). Ulysses’ Gaze suggests that cinema, as a particular form of telling, serves as a form of public witnessing that relies on the witness’s gaze being at once engaged with and detached from what the camera captures. Having at last watched the Manakis brothers’ first gaze, A.’s archive fever may have passed but his act of seeing offers no immediate remedy either for the repression or for the dissemination of cultural memory. The fact that Ulysses’ Gaze refrains from showing that first gaze to the viewer mirrors A.’s own forgetting of it. The distance between what A. has witnessed and his project to share it with the figure of the beloved can only be bridged by a remedial discourse, his cinematic gaze, a gaze that will push further away the silent and absent beloved, in effect replacing her by the viewer.

m e mor y u n der s i ege   263

NOTES 1. Although I have consulted various sources and websites that refer to the Manakis brothers, for this detail, as well as other references to their work and lives, I am primarily indebted to Christos Christodoulou’s book on the two brothers. I am grateful to John Papargyris who located and sent me this book. 2. This is a direct allusion to similar problems Angelopoulos encountered when shooting The Suspended Step of the Stork in Florina. During the film’s shooting, as Angelopoulos says, ‘the Bishop of the town had excommunicated us because he thought we were an envoy of Satan, the Devil . . . I decided to shoot [Ulysses’ Gaze] there . . . with the people of the town . . . & this time the Bishop didn’t intervene, he let us shoot & so it was our first small victory’ (cited in Bielskyte 2011). It should also be noted that the reactionarism of the protesters’ group in Ulysses’ Gaze has nothing in common with the portrayal of collective responses in Angelopoulos’ films in the 1970s in which protest is usually motivated by Marxist concerns that seek to undo the status quo in order to effect change. 3. ‘In surimpression over The Weavers, other films by the same Manakis brothers are shown in succession . . . the last one being Thessaloniki’s Fire, 1917. The Weavers dissolves over the last scene of Thessaloniki’s Fire, 1917 that shows part of the city’s promenade and the sea’ (Angelopoulos 1995b, 17–18, my translation). 4. The Manakis brothers’ last name appears in different variants in official documents and the media of the time – Maniaki, Manakia, or Manaka – but Manakis, the variant employed by Angelopoulos, is the most frequently used and the one recorded in death certificates. 5. Predictably, given the history of the region, the two brothers’ oeuvre has itself become an instrument of national politics. While Greek historians and filmographers consider them to be Greek Vlachs, in the FYROM they are claimed as ‘promoters of the Macedonian identity’ (http://www.cybermacedonia.com/manaki.html), while Marian Tutui, of the Romanian Film Archive, sees them exclusively as Romanian (http://aqshf.gov.al/ uploads/2.___Manakia_Bros_Pioneers_of_Balkan_Cinema_Claimed_by_Six_Nations. pdf).

I would like to thank Phoebe Economopoulos for her help with tracing some sources, and acknowledge the Canada Research Chair program in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature for making it possible to research and write this chapter.

C HA P TER 17

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

In my film, time is the central theme1

Theo Angelopoulos

The dust of time into which all our works eventually disappear Jonas Mekas

I

n February 2005, Theo Angelopoulos came to the Cinémathèque in Bergen, which screened a retrospective of his work. During an interview session before Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986) he said something that has stayed with me: ‘Everything that has existed will always exist. Nothing fades away, nothing dies’. Everything that has existed will always exist. Experiences. Actions. Feelings. Suffering. Love. Ideas. Thoughts. People. The discursive tenor of the director’s statement is philosophical, or perhaps poetic, but it seems that it is also embodied by his film aesthetic, which functions to bracket temporality itself. There is the impossible spatial coexistence of objects that belong to different pockets of history, as in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), and there is the strange sense – in many of his illustrious long takes – of the weight of a never-ending present growing so substantial that linearity collapses entirely, time stepping away from itself. If Andrei Tarkovsky is the sculptor of time, Angelopoulos is the sculptor of presence. Originally Angelopoulos conceived what turned out to be his last work as just one film, but he was later – due to the scope of the raw material – persuaded to restructure it as a trilogy. Its third and final instalment, Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea), remained in production when Angelopoulos, crossing a busy road, was hit by a motorcycle near Piraeus in January 2012. The premature death of the auteur is steeped in dark irony, given the fact that it was a speedy vehicle that ended the life of this prominent exponent of slow cinema.

a ng e lo p o u lo s and t h e i mage of d u rat ion   265 This cinema, it has often been remarked, is also one that is steeped in history. His entire oeuvre seems committed to a deep exploration of the poetics of memory. In Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) and Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008), he continues this engagement with the question of the lingering presence of the past, only now this project is reframed in terms of his own statement that ‘what used to be History becomes an echo of history’ (Horton 1997b: 109). The first two chapters of this aborted trilogy concern a Greek woman whose life spans most of the twentieth century. These films give us history on a smaller scale, something that might be called interstitial or decentred history. Several of the defining features of the director’s work resurface in these films; both thematically – the journey motif, the state of being in exile, the concern with Greek national identity, the enigma of spirituality, the significance of borders, the homecoming, culture in a state of decay; and stylistically – the use of the temps morts, the long take, tableaux compositions, narrative ellipsis, dedramatisation, location shooting, the foregrounding of landscape, the accentuation of off-screen space, dorsality, inexpressiveness, the empty shot, recessional staging, the planimetric, camera movement, and depth of space (Bordwell 1997). Films like Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) and Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) are like pictorial fugues that render the historical through figuration, not narration. The director’s main interest seemingly lies in capturing history in the interstices, between the tiny cracks in the architecture of narration. The films thus allegorise a profoundly singular and subjective memory of historical experience, and the films’ tableaux images become tropes of mourning that envelop the viewer

Figure 17.1 The Dust of Time

266  A s b j ør n grø ns tad in stillness and melancholy. Duration itself, as the passing of time, is made tangible through the work performed by the temps morts. Annette Kuhn has suggested that what she calls memory texts constitute a genre unto themselves, and all of Angelopoulos’ cinema can be understood as memory labour in this sense. Memory work, Kuhn writes, ‘makes it possible to explore connections between “public” historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and “personal” memory’ (Kuhn 2002: 5). The remarks Angelopoulos made before that screening at the Cinémathèque in Bergen must have been more than just casual chatter, because the first words we hear in what would be his last feature, The Dust of Time, are quite palpably an iteration of those remarks. As the camera pans unhurriedly toward the ‘Cinecittà’ entrance gate in the film’s opening shot, a voice-over that almost certainly belongs to Willem Dafoe declares that ‘[n]othing ended. Nothing ever ends. I returned to where I let the story slip into the past. Losing its clarity under the dust of time, and then, unexpectedly, at some moment, it returns, like a dream. 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. Images play a pivotal role in this memory work; as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, ‘[t]he presence in which the representation of the past seems to consist does indeed appear to be that of an image’ (Ricoeur 2004: 5). But the relation between memory and visual experience is reciprocal, for, as one theorist so succinctly puts it, ‘sight without memory is blind’ (Iampolski 1998: 2). The machines of visibility are thus inextricably entwined with memory as a particular form of epistemological labour. It is not just coincidental, then, that the first image we see in The Dust of Time is of Cinecittà Studios, a site so emblematic of the vitality of the visual imagination. The link between film and memory has also been suggested by Henri Bergson, apparently himself not a great fan of the cinema, who emphasised the mnemonic potential of the new medium: As a witness to its beginnings, I realised [the cinema] could suggest new things to a philosopher. It might be able to assist in the synthesis of memory, or even of the thinking process. If the circumference [of a circle] is composed of a series of points, memory is, like the cinema, composed of a series of images. Immobile, it is in neutral state; in movement it is life itself. (Abel 1988: 22) Freeing the images from this immobility, what cinema achieves is not just temporal progression, flowing images, but also, more importantly, the quality

a ng e lo p o u lo s and t h e i mage of d u rat ion   267 of duration. In its consistent foregrounding of duration as both aesthetic effect and experiential mode, Angelopoulos’ films 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’. While the former has long been associated with Angelopoulos’ cinema, the latter still remains largely unexplored, perhaps because it plunges us into an area that feels more recondite and mystical. But, as I will try to show below, the two senses of duration – the technological/mediational, and the philosophical – are evidently interrelated. What Andrew Horton referred to (in one of the pioneer English-language studies of Angelopoulos) as ‘the continuous image’ postulates in effect a conceptual division between the content of an image and our experience of its duration. Angelopoulos’ ‘deliberate effort both to stretch out a shot and to leave it uninterrupted means’, Horton writes, ‘that he calls on the audience not only to follow what is going on but to be aware of the process of the unfolding of a moment or moments as they occur in time and space’ [sic] (Horton 1997a: 8). His is a cinema that – ambitiously yet impossibly – endeavours to visualise a rather abstract state, which is that of duration. That effort, furthermore, is bound up with another attempt at materialising the immaterial in the director’s work, which is the persistent predilection in his films for what Susan Sontag once called ‘a resonating or eloquent silence’ (Sontag 1966: 11). For silence to work as an aesthetic device, Sontag is quick to point out, it must be dialectical, not absolute, as its existence must be a catalyst for some kind of phenomenological change. In Angelopoulos, silence accompanies and accentuates this sense of duration. But what particular effects do these inscriptions of silence and duration engender in the context of the underlying philosophy of this form of slow cinema? I would like to return for a moment to Ricoeur’s formulation above, particularly his suggestion that the image in which the representation of the past is enfolded constitutes a ‘presence’ (Ricoeur 2004: 5). While a general notion of presence has become prevalent in some areas of visual theory – ­consider for instance Keith Moxey’s assessment that it has ‘entered the precinct of the humanities and made itself at home’ (Moxey 2008: 131) – its passage from the conceptual to the material has perhaps been less discussed. In the domain of slow cinema, however, and that of Angelopoulos specifically, this idea of presence (as markedly different from both representation and meaning) at least comes close to acquiring a formal embodiment to complement its more theoretical dimension. Silence and duration are vital elements in this regard, as are all the stylistic trademarks that inform Angelopoulos’ inimitable approach. Key among these are the long take and the temp morts, concepts that I will return to in a little more detail below. But first I want to propose that we may deepen our awareness of the way in which Angelopoulos’

268  A s b j ør n grø ns tad cinema works by considering the theoretical insights from some of the critics that have been drawn, each in their own distinct ways, to what one might call a philosophy of presentism. As we recall, the notion of presence fell on hard times with the emergence of poststructuralism in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology; yet, in recent years, and after successive visual and affective turns, the term presence has been revitalised and reconceptualised by thinkers as diverse as Hans Gumbrecht, Jean-Luc Nancy and, perhaps more implicitly, Martin Seel and Giorgio Agamben, to name some of them. In his book Aesthetics of Appearing, Seel, for instance, regards aesthetic perception as a special case of attentiveness to the transitory, a fastidious alertness which makes the subject capable of sensing an object ‘in the palpable repleteness of its aspects’ and ‘in its unreduced presence’ (Seel 2005: 25). Such a rarefied form of perception, however, cannot work without duration, which in a way comes to constitute the condition of possibility for perceptual acts of this kind – that is, perceptions enabled by the durational qualities of the work and thus capable of absorbing both its ‘presence’ and its ‘repleteness.’ According to Gumbrecht, the information surplus of the digital age has created a desire for being, for actual presence (as opposed to the restless search for meaning on our tablets and devices, which is always a continuously deferred presence): the more we approach the fulfilment of our dreams of omnipresence and the more definite the subsequent loss of our bodies and of the spatial dimension in our existence seems to be, the greater the possibility becomes of reigniting the desire that attracts us to the things of the world and wraps us into their space. (Gumbrecht 2004: 139) Gumbrecht’s remark is redolent of the economies of attention that Elissa Marder problematises in her work on temporal disorders. On this account, the pressures of modern life instigated in part by temporal technologies produce symptoms of disorientation, a fraught and increasingly anxious relation to time. Marder, in fact, considers that modernity ‘has lost touch with other ways of keeping time’ and that it thus may not be so much a historical period as ‘a way of experiencing time’ (Marder 2001: 4). The argument is of course Benjaminian; it reminds us of his book on Baudelaire in which he reflects upon the ways in which the increase of external stimuli in the modern period may lead to a kind of existential atrophy by narration being displaced by information, information in turn by sensation (Benjamin [1935] 1983: 113). For Marder, while modern technologies facilitate new ways of recording events, it has nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, become more difficult to incorporate these events into life as it is lived. Literature, then, is seen as the medium that might be able to reinstate a sense of temporal continuity from which the modern subject gradually has become estranged.

a ng e lo p o u lo s and t h e i mage of d u rat ion   269 Whether construed in terms of a traumatic temporality (Marder) or as an excess of information and meaning (Gumbrecht), the fragility of duration and the threat which that fragility poses to a deeper experience of presence seems to be implicit in both these accounts. Angelopoulos’ cinema, I would suggest, inspires the kind of intensified perception and attention Seel talks about, predominantly although not exclusively through the deployment of the long take and the temp morts. While always themselves unfailingly modern – and this is no insignificant point – his films emphatically depart from the frenetic rhythms of modernity and supermodernity.2 Offering up slow images, they correspondingly promote a poetics of slow seeing. As these signature tableaux compositions invite a contemplative mode of viewing, they also, uncannily, appear to contemplate us, the viewers. It is through this particular dialectic that they generate their profound sense of presence, a phenomenological effect encoded into the unconventionally aestheticised forms of duration of the late modernist, a type of artist described by Fredric Jameson as ‘one who manages to invent a new style after stylistic innovation has been pronounced exhausted’ (Jameson 1997: 78). In Angelopoulos’ case, this style finds its fullest realisation in his two last films. The Weeping Meadow, which has been seen as a ‘pure distillation’ of the filmmaker’s concerns (Anon. 2005: 28), begins in 1919 as the Lavdakides family – refugees from the Red Terror in Odessa – arrive near Thessaloniki. The weather is cold and damp, and the exiles slowly emerge as if out of the starkness of the land itself, in a scene that has the aura of an originary moment, a proclamatory whisper, and an act of creation ex nihilo. A film about grief and mourning, among other things, The Weeping Meadow chronicles the hardships of Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), an orphan girl, and her relationship with the members of her adopted family over almost half a century. She becomes the lover of Alexis (Nikos Poursanidis), an accordionist and her stepfather Spyros’s son, gives birth to twins that are subsequently taken away from her, and marries Spyros (Vassilis Kolovos) when his wife dies. But Eleni and Alexis elope. They join a band of travelling musicians led by a violinist, Nikos (Yorgos Armenis), and go searching for their lost twins, whom Spyros had given away. As is usually the case with this filmmaker, however, narrative is secondary to the graphic qualities of the films’ monumental, almost living and breathing image compositions, a notion appositely condensed by a film blogger’s observation that ‘[t]he still image posted above [the stately funeral procession of small vessels sporting black flags to mourn the passing of Spyros] is just one of thirty or forty that could be stripped from its context and hung on a gallery wall’ (Anon 2005). One of the most spectacular of those images is that of the slaughtered sheep hanging from a tree, intended as a chilling message to Alexis and Eleni for violating the norms of their ­community.

270  A s b j ør n grø ns tad It might be argued that The Weeping Meadow is not so much a movie in the conventional sense as a kind of portfolio of mesmerising tableaux, configurations suggestive of animated paintings, still images to which has been added one crucial property: duration. While often nothing much happens, the sombre shots go on for quite a long time. But it is precisely this relative inactivity within the frame – what critics have referred to as the director’s dedramatised style (sometimes attributed to the influence of Jancsó’s cinema) (Bordwell 1997: 13) – which allows presence as a phenomenological effect to materialise in the image, or rather, as image. But the concept of presence acquires a further meaning within this aesthetic, because Angelopoulos’ images do not merely capture presence. Through the way in which they unfold, they also enact a presentation, of a world, of memory, of time and history. In this, films like The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time appear close in spirit to the musings of Jean-Luc Nancy in his book with Abbas Kiarostami. Here Nancy puts a new spin on the loss of meaning in modernity, a theme demonstrably related to Marder’s reflections about the crisis of temporality, which he sees not as disastrous but on the contrary as a promising possibility. With reference to Heidegger’s phenomenology, Nancy suggests that the loss of a sensible world is actually an enhancement, as a world deprived of signification and meaning is what facilitates the appearance, the opening up, of the real to us. Cinema, for Nancy, should not aspire to reflect back to us a preconceived world, nor should it struggle to represent the loss of a meaningful world (a task often attributed to modernist art, literature and film); rather, cinema should just present the world itself: The evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look through which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma (which is admittedly not its solution), a world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping, without fixed moorings or suspension, a world shaken, trembling, as the winds blow through it. (Nancy 2001: 44) Nancy’s statement is vaguely reminiscent of André Bazin’s argument concerning ‘the mummification of change’. It is temporality, which is to say duration, that enables presence and makes its effects possible. In turn, it is presence as a phenomenological quality that makes possible the unfolding (and unlocking) of the world with all its enigmas. Thus, the temps morts of slow cinema designates something in excess of just empty shots or empty time. As Leo Charney says, film ‘puts the empty moment to work’ (Charney 1998: 34). What the long take and the temps morts attempt is no less than a visualisation of that which cannot be visualised: presence. The reason I emphasise this notion of presence – and in the context of the work of thinkers such as Gumbrecht and Nancy specifically – is that it

a ng e lo p o u lo s and t h e i mage of d u rat ion   271 may lend itself productively to understanding Angelopoulos’ enigmatic and perhaps ultimately unfeasible contention that ‘nothing ever ends.’ Events are ephemeral and finite; they do come to an end. Yet might they somehow still retain their presence, a lingering afterlife? Is Angelopoulos’ maxim just his way of invoking memory? And if so, does memory mean something different to him, something akin to aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne’s concept of ‘time states’ wherein past, present and future time blend into one another to create a new dimension? (Dunne 1927). Or does the filmmaker’s insistence on intransience and durability entail something altogether beyond the sphere of memory? There might be clues to an aporia such as this in Angelopoulos’ thirteenth and final feature, The Dust of Time, which, like its precursor, revisits several of the themes and preoccupations that have animated and to some extent defined the director’s entire corpus of films: the weight of (Greek) history, European identity in politically tumultuous times, the meaning of belonging and of home, migration, borders, the experience of deracination, and the persistence of love as an ineffaceable human quality. The film also displays the imbrication of individual (or interstitial) history and macro-history, as the multi-generational conflicts at the heart of the work take place against the backdrop of key events of the mid-to-late twentieth century such as the Gulag, the death of Stalin in 1953, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the centre of this swansong is the American filmmaker, A. (Willem Dafoe), who is shooting a movie about the eventful and onerous lives of his parents Eleni (Irène Jacob) and Spyros (Michel Piccoli), while also dealing with the disappearance of his daughter as well as his failed marriage to Helga (Christiane Paul). Fleeing Greece after the Civil War in the 1940s, in which the royalist army, backed by Britain and the United States, defeated the communists, Spyros ends up in America, Eleni in the Soviet Union. Like in The Weeping Meadow Angelopoulos concentrates on her story, in particular her complicated relationships with the two men in her life, Spyros and Jacob (Bruno Ganz). When the former tries to get her out of the Soviet Union, he is thrown into jail and she gets sent to Siberia. After being apart for decades, they subsequently reunite in the United States. The film’s diegetic content drifts between different layers of history, and its spatio-temporal continuity is continually challenged by sudden shifts that fragment its narrative structure, inviting criticism from viewers that assume – perhaps correctly – that the director seems uninterested in narrative or character (Micklethwaite 2009). That The Dust of Time is very much part of an ongoing work, never to be completed, is evident not only in the reappearance of a familiar subject matter and a remarkably consistent aesthetic, but also in the enduring emphasis on the process of filmmaking. Working with an ensemble of frequent collaborators – scriptwriter Petros Markaris, cinematographer Andreas Sinanos (who also shot his previous film), composer Eleni Karaindrou and actor Bruno

272  A s b j ør n grø ns tad Ganz, to name a few – Angelopoulos makes one of his principal protagonists a director in search of something tantalisingly elusive, as he also did in Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), the first part of his ‘trilogy of silence’) and Ulysses’ Gaze (where the filmmaker is also American and called A.). Based at Cinecittà studios, the façade of which is also the first thing we see in the film, Dafoe’s A. is first seen dodging messages from an assistant (‘I don’t want to hear anymore’) and then, as the credit sequence unfolds, he kneels down to scrutinise frames from his footage. These scenes set in the narrative present are intercut with shots from inside a train and from a movie theatre in Kazakhstan showing a newsreel of Stalin. It is in the latter scene that we see Eleni being approached by Spyros, who has returned for her. Overwhelmed by his surprise appearance, she leaves the theatre hastily, only to be pursued by Spyros, who catches up with her on a tram headed for the city square. There, the news that Stalin has died is announced to a gathering throng of people, in what is one of the film’s main set pieces. Panning luxuriously towards the right as the multitudes draw nearer to the square, Angelopoulos then interposes a shot of the reunified couple inside the tram, before the camera reverts back to the crowd and, in a characteristic long take, very slowly withdraws from the scene as it records the subdued spectacle of its dispersal. There is then an abrupt cut back to Dafoe, again trailed by his aide, as he walks in on an ­orchestra rehearsal. A little earlier, in the shot from the train, we can hear one of the passengers telling his fellow traveller ‘[r]emember, from now on you’re playing with time,’ an intradiegetic remark that doubles as a kind of meta-commentary on the substance and method of the film itself. Duration is its very texture, temporality its basic, irresolvable problem. The spaces of the action span many locations and cities, from Rome to Cologne, Athens, Berlin and Temirtau, but in a certain sense the prevailing landscapes in the film are those of time and memory. By now it might become clear that the aphorism of Dafoe the fictional director and of Angelopoulos the real director, ‘nothing ever ends’, can also be read as a declaration regarding the continuous and seamless recirculation of the filmmaker’s own films and filmic obsessions, motifs and tropes. Art never ends. Or, more to the point, the aesthetic re-imagining of time and experience never stops. In this process, which evidently is not unique to this filmmaker but which nonetheless finds a peculiarly salient expression throughout his work, the images may be said to cause their own time, something similar, perhaps, to what Keith Moxey sees as the ‘anachronic’ or ‘aesthetic’ time of works of art (Moxey 2013: 3). The eternal present that is an effect of Angelopoulos’ dialectics of duration – his deliberate conflation of the sheets of time – evokes the work of another post-representational thinker alongside Nancy and Gumbrecht. This is the continental philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In an article on the films of Guy Debord, and especially in a passage that deals

a ng e lo p o u lo s and t h e i mage of d u rat ion   273 with the concepts of repetition and stoppage, the Italian scholar discusses the powers of potentiality that he finds intrinsic to cinema as a temporal apparatus: Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew; it’s almost a paradox. To repeat something is to make it possible anew. Here lies the proximity of repetition and memory. Memory cannot give us back what was, as such: that would be hell. Instead, memory restores possibility to the past. This is the meaning of the theological experience that Benjamin saw in memory, when he said that memory makes the unfulfilled into the fulfilled, and the fulfilled into the unfulfilled. Memory is, so to speak, the organ of reality’s modalization; it is that which can transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real. If you think about it, that’s also the definition of cinema. (2002: 316) Angelopoulos’ redistribution of content from his previous work performs just such an act of repetition, a restoration of possibility to the past. It is this movement of ceaselessly circling back to that which once was that imbues his cinema with its elegiac tenor, for the memory that renders ‘the real into the possible and the possible into the real’ in Angelopoulos is swathed in layers of cultural debris: shattered television sets in a hotel in Rome; a room in Siberia crammed with busts and statues of Stalin; an apartment wall in Berlin covered by pale posters of pop culture icons like Jim Morrison and Lou Reed. The wreckage of the memory of the twentieth century as it gives itself to be seen in The Dust of Time suggests Agamben’s notion of stoppage. ‘To bring the word to a stop,’ he writes, ‘is to pull it out of the flux of meaning, to exhibit it as such’ (Agamben 2002: 317). Here we come close to Nancy’s idea of presence as an absence of any preconceived meaning. Is it too far-fetched to imply that The Dust of Time, like Angelopoulos’ other films, resembles what Agamben calls a ‘pure means’ and ‘a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes visible?’ (2002: 318). This would appear to chime neatly with the director’s own refutation of the suggestion that his images contain symbols of any kind (Angelopoulos 2005). No symbols, no objects, but an image of presence stirred by duration. A whole book could be written about what I propose to call Angelopoulos’ meteorological aesthetics (after all, this is a filmmaker who was known to cease shooting if the weather got too nice), but in bringing this essay to a close, I merely want to refer to a couple of scenes in which the landscape and the weather figure prominently as material instantiations of presence, as embodied modulations of processes of appearance and duration. The first is when Eleni is reunited with her son, still played by a too-old looking Dafoe (which makes the scene another example of the spatio-temporal incommensurability we have noted elsewhere in the director’s filmography), on the US-Canadian border

274  A s b j ør n grø ns tad as their surroundings are almost completely engulfed by a dense layer of fog. The other is towards the very end of the film, when in a quite beautiful and sensuous slow-motion sequence Spyros and his granddaughter are running in the falling snow, on the first day of the new millennium, faces turned towards the camera as their gestures and gazes seem to acknowledge the possibility of a boundless future that also contains the past. Both sequences are linked to countless others in Angelopoulos’ cinema – one, for instance, being the emergence of the immigrants at the beginning of The Weeping Meadow. It is as if nestled inside these images of appearance, sustained by the movements of and incremental changes in the weather, is the presence of the future itself, or more accurately, future presences that weigh in on the diegetic present. What is revealed in such moments, I suggest, is the ‘palpable repleteness’ and ‘unreduced presence’ of an image of duration, an image that holds within itself a temporal order divorced from the constraints of the past-present-future patterning of experience (Seel 2005: 25). The title of the film possibly alludes to the way in which ‘the dust of time’ clouds our memory, but this confusion matters less, Angelopoulos seems to be saying, than the creative remobilisation of the shards of the past in the imagining of the future. The closing images concretise just such a repurposing of fragments from the past, as Dafoe’s words are heard again in voice-over, as at the very beginning of the film. There, what he said, among other things, was ‘I returned to where I let the story slip into the past’. The words that conclude this story are these: ‘Outside it was snowing. The snow was falling silently on the city that was still sleeping. On the deserted streets, the waters and the canals, on all the dead, and the living, on time passed, and time passing, on the universe’. If this sounds familiar, consider the following quotation: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’ (Joyce 1914: 278). The words of the Dafoe character seem to channel the well-known ending of James Joyce’s short story, ‘The Dead’, which comes across as a highly appropriate epitaph for the career of Angelopoulos himself, skilled artisan of duration and devoted maker of time-images.

N o te s 1. The director is here discussing his 1998 film Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998), but the statement could apply equally to most of his filmography. As he has repeatedly maintained that all his films are but different chapters of the same work, the singular form used in his quotation seems fully relevant. 2. The latter term I borrow from Marc Augé, who in his book Non-Places uses it to describe an ‘excess’ or ‘overabundance’ of events, spaces, and identities in the contemporary, globalised world (1995: 20-5).

AFTERWORD

Theo Angelopoulos’ Unfinished Odyssey: The Other Sea Andrew Horton

We went past many capes many islands the sea leading to the other sea, gulls and seals.

George Seferis

T

he film Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea) was to be Theo Angelopoulos’ concluding film for the trilogy that began with Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2003) and continued with Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008). But early during the 2012 filming of The Other Sea he was struck by a motorcycle on the set of his film in Piraeus and died several hours later. In these few pages I wish to share both the nature of this unfinished odyssey he was filming and my personal experience with this tragically interrupted project. But first we should acknowledge the importance of ‘unfinished’ and ‘interrupted’ to his over-thirty-eight years of filmmaking. British critic Peter Bradshaw put it well at the time of Angelopoulos’ passing when he wrote about his death on the set of his then current film: This very fact has an enormous irony and poignancy: so much of his work is about the unfinished story, the unfinished journey, the unfinished life, and the realisation that to be unfinished is itself part of the human mystery and an essential human birth right and burden. (Bradshaw 2012) Bradshaw has captured the spirit and reality of this memorable Greek filmmaker, and his words gesture towards the focus of my essay, for I had personally known Theo – as I shall refer to him – since the early 1970s in Athens when I was both a film critic for The Athenian English-language magazine at the time and a film and literature professor at Deree College. Over the years I came to admire and appreciate his films so much that I published two books and numerous essays and articles on his films and was honoured that on many of my cinematic study tours of Greece that I have

276  a nd r e w h o rto n

Figure A.1 Andrew Horton and Theo Angelopoulos on set for The Other Sea

led since 1980, he and Phoebe Economopoulos, his partner (they were never officially married) and producer, would meet with my students to discuss his films. Ironically, however, for so many years of being in touch and getting to know him and his memorable films, I had never actually been on the set for any of the his films in production. But I had a chance to be on the set as Theo began putting together The Other Sea in 2011. He was aware that beyond being a film scholar familiar with his films, I was an award-winning screenwriter and author of internationally popular books on screenwriting including Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay. Both he and his talented script translator, Elly Petrides, were happy for me to read various versions of the script that, by late 2011, had already gone through over ninety drafts. Then came the total surprise when Theo asked if I would read the latest version and give my ‘honest commentary.’ I was suddenly touched and, well, hesitant! What could I say about so esteemed a filmmaker, whom even Martin Scorsese has called ‘a masterful filmmaker’ (cited in Horton 1997a, back cover). My brief notes were passed on to Theo, and he wrote an appreciative message stating that not only would he think about my suggestions for the next rewrite, which he did, but he also surprised me by saying, ‘Not only can you come to see my shooting of the film but also you will be my guest during the stay’ (Angelopoulos personal note). This was in January 2012, and I arranged my schedule to be in Athens for a week to be on the set while Theo was shooting his film.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   277

the other sea : GEORGE SEFER I S , H OMER AND ODY SSEY S PRESENT AND PAST Phoebe has perceptively observed that ‘Theo was a storyteller, not a filmmaker’ (personal interview). Of course, as the chapters in this collection make perfectly clear, he remains one of the most admired filmmakers ever. But Phoebe’s remark helps us to focus on Theo’s use of cinema to tell stories that go beyond what we see on the screen, developing connections with Greek history, mythology and culture. Start with the title, The Other Sea. Yes, many of Theo’s films echo and reflect journeys that are modern odysseys in all the ways that recall both Homer’s epics and contemporary personal voyages. But the title The Other Sea is taken from a poem by the Greek poet George Seferis (1900–71) who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1963 and who, like millions of other Greeks, was born in Turkey and forced, in the 1920s, to emigrate to Greece. Theo’s screenplay begins with: We crossed . . . the sea that leads to the other sea . . . Mythistorima #4 ‘Argonauts (Seferis 1995) The implication, of course, is that these lines would appear on screen at the opening of the film. Theo is signalling what he has expressed in many of his films and particularly in the first two of this trilogy: that Greeks, given their history, culture and mythology are continually setting off on journeys to ‘other seas’. To fully appreciate Theo’s nod to Seferis, it is important to read the entire poem from which those lines are taken, ‘The Argonauts’: And a soul if it is to know itself must look into its own soul: the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror. They were good, the companions, they didn’t complain about the work or the thirst or the frost, they had the bearing of trees and waves that accept the wind and the rain accept the night and the sun without changing in the midst of change. They were fine, whole days they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes breathing in rhythm

278  a nd r e w h o rto n and their blood reddened a submissive skin. Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes as we were passing the deserted island with the Barbary figs to the west, beyond the cape of the dogs that bark. If it is to know itself, they said it must look into its own soul, they said and the oars struck the sea’s gold in the sunset. We went past many capes many islands the sea leading to another sea, gulls and seals. Sometimes disconsolate women wept lamenting their lost children and others frantic sought Alexander the Great and glories buried in the depths of Asia. We moored on shores full of night-scents, the birds singing, with waters that left on the hands the memory of a great happiness. But the voyages did not end. Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks with the solemn face of the prow with the rudder’s wake with the water that shattered their image. The companions died one by one, with lowered eyes. Their oars mark the place where they sleep on the shore. No one remembers them. Justice. Seferis captures a sense of life and particularly Greek life as he knew it: a personal voyage, but also a voyage shared with others, with both ‘great happiness’ and pain, death and finally, dark irony: ‘No one remembers. Justice’. But it is also important that Seferis starts the poem, in its opening five lines, with that Greek Socratic ‘Know thyself’ approach. Life’s voyages are not just through geographical locations but also through our inner lives and memories as well. Theo’s films have always reflected a complete sense of what journeys and odysseys mean for his Greek characters as they struggle to know themselves and their culture, as they struggle through the hard times that history past and present has brought to Greece.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   279

ANGELO P O U LOS ’ FEMALE OD Y SSE Y S I N T H E TR I LOG Y In Theo’s final trilogy, the implied odysseys continue to be central to each film. In The Weeping Meadow, we have hundreds of Greeks in 1919 who had been forced to live in Ukrainian Odessa, who are returning ‘home’ to their personal Ithacas in Greece. Theo embraces a sweep of history shown visually but he also focuses on a young orphan, Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) who must discover her own life; she returns to Greece in a changing ‘Ithaca,’ the transformation of which plays out through World War II and the Greek Civil War ending in 1949. As Michael Atkinson notes in his review of the film: ‘The story is never fed to us pre-chewed, but instead occurs continuously on- and off-camera, passing before us like the steam engines that incessantly interrupt scenes’, as Eleni evolves from being a near-comatose teenager having given up illegitimate twins. And then as time passes we observe her fleeing her own wedding as a bride not to Alexis (Nikos Poursanidis), who loves her and helps her escape, but her old stepfather (Vassilis Kolovos). ‘It’s Homeric filmmaking, uniquely worthy of the word’ (Atkinson 2005), comments Atkinson perceptively. It is worth emphasising Theo’s focus on a female central character for this opening film of the trilogy, because most of his previous films build their narratives around male figures. Think, for instance, of Spyros (Marcello Mastroianni) in Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986), Mastroianni and Gregory Karr in To Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), A. (Harvey Keitel) in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Alexander (Bruno Ganz) in Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998). But, with this trilogy, Theo opened his odysseys to the perspectives of strong women. This is true of Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) as well, even though it is framed with attention to a male, A. (Willem Dafoe), an American filmmaker with Greek roots, who goes on a journey to discover his own past while making a film about his search. A.’s odyssey takes him into the complicated lives of his parents whose own odysseys were painfully shaped by the defeat of the Greeks left during World War II and the subsequent Civil War. A.’s mother, Eleni (Iréne Jacob) becomes the central character as we learn she was thus shipped to the Soviet Union with A.’s father, Spyros (Michel Piccoli), who later moved to the United States. But Eleni’s odyssey is even more complicated for she also has a relationship with Jacob (Bruno Ganz) a Jewish man who eventually commits suicide with Eleni dying soon afterwards. Thus, this second odyssey focused on an ‘Eleni’ character, as Theo himself notes: Is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the

280  a nd r e w h o rto n vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present. (Angelopoulos, Trilogy II: The Dust of Time: Synopsis) These first two films of Theo’s trilogy are led from a female point of view, both with central characters named Eleni. Together these films take on Greek history of the twentieth century and push beyond the borders of Greece into the Balkans, Europe, the former Soviet Union, as well as the United States and Canada, thus creating global odysseys. We now turn to The Other Sea as a journey of yet another Homeric Helen/ Eleni but this time named E. and set up as the daughter of P., the Deputy Mayor of Piraeus, the port city of Athens. Theo sets his final film for the trilogy  in a contemporary Greece, which is full of political unrest, strikes, unemployment, the presence of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan and beyond, all of which occupied the historical context wherein the film entered production. E. is a young actress who has joined a troupe that is to perform Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in an abandoned factory in Piraeus while various strikes against the Athenian and Greek governments occur on a daily basis. E.’s Odyssey is thus the journey to find a better life than she has ­inherited in Greece and from her father, who is not only a troubled politician, but is also involved in the illegal trafficking of hundreds of Afghanis through Greece for human slavery. Add to this the opening scene of the script that is a flashback to 1990 in Istanbul when her mother is shot and killed while trying to leave E.’s father, P., and we have in the mother’s character yet another Greek woman who wanted more than a troubled Greek male could offer. The Other Sea as a title thus reflects E.’s journey and romance as she finally decides to leave Greece with her Iranian lover and fellow actor, Selab. The narrative is very much a father – daughter story of love and conflict that completes the trilogy that, in The Weeping Meadow, is strongly a mother – son story (with Eleni bearing the pain of one of her sons killed in the Greek Civil War), and, in The Dust of Time, is similarly a mother – son tale (A., the filmmaker, comes to understand his mother, Eleni). We will examine Theo’s development of the whole script but it is important here to capture the ending as E. leaves P., her father, and Greece: E. goes through the gate and advances towards the open gangway with the same uncertain steps. The hoarse sound of the ship’s siren, a final call, spreads over the port. The girl reaches the ship. Before she embarks, she turns to look at her father. P. has remained there behind the gate, standing motionless, a tragic

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   281 figure. The sound of the windshield wipers going back and forth and the rain. Faint, almost like a veil of mist. Father and daughter look at each other for the last time. A farewell. Then E., unable to bear it any longer, turns and quickly boards the ship. As soon as she crosses the gangway, she breaks. She raises her head, closing her eyes. She remains there at the entrance of the gangway with her eyes closed, a solitary figure ready to fall apart. The ship moves away from the dock, churning up the waters noisily in its wake. The gangway behind E. is raised slowly and the girl starts to disappear behind it. Clearly what Theo presents is not the Homeric coming together of father (Odysseus) and son (Telemachus) to reclaim their home and life together as Odysseus is reunited with his wife, Penelope, after twenty years of war and wandering. The trilogy thus ends with daughter and father on separate paths as the father is described as a ‘tragic figure’ and E. has made her decision to leave him and Greece, though she too is ‘a solitary figure ready to fall apart’. And then the script ends with P.’s suicide. Before closely observing the whole script, however, we should look at Theo’s one-page synopsis of the script, posted to his website in late 2011, for it offers us the overall ‘story’ and approach to this conclusion of the trilogy. Synopsis: The days before New Year’s in the great port of the country that is suffocating as a result of the financial crisis. On the roof of a factory occupied by striking workers, a nude striker throws his clothes down to the crowd that has gathered below to protest the layoffs. E., daughter of P., the city’s Deputy Mayor has joined a company of actors that is trying, with the participation of the strikers from the factories, to put on Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, reacting with this timely play to the suffocating situation that surrounds them. Her father owns a big auto repair shop in the city and at the same time runs an illegal operation trafficking immigrants from Greece to Italy hidden among the cargo in trucks. The nude striker finally jumps into the void. His funeral at night triggers a series of episodes. A huge protest rally during which as the result of the heavy rain the casket with the deceased is taken to the immigrants shantytown for shelter and then the flight of all to the ruins of a nearby factory where E. is sexually attracted to a young immigrant, Selab, who is also one of the actors in the play.

282  a nd r e w h o rto n The next day the police throw out the strikers and empty the factory. P. who bears the scars of his young wife abandoning him years ago when E. was a little girl, invites his daughter to a fashionable night club on New Year’s Eve so that they can both celebrate her birthday and drunkenly lets himself go in a solitary dance. On New Year’s Day, the opening night of the Opera the company of actors with E. have been rehearsing all this time does not take place. The police bars entry to the theater for fear of rioting by the crowd that has gathered in the square and throws out of a back door all those who managed to get in. Late at night the actors exit the theater and disperse. P. has become aware from the little love poems he finds in his daughter’s room of her relationship with Selab and after finding out from the Afghani who works in his gas station that his daughter’s young lover is leaving the next day in one of the trucks along with his friend Ali, fears that he is losing his daughter. That same night he arranges with one of his trusted truck drivers the murder of the young Iranian. Meanwhile the bulldozers level the immigrants’ settlement, an event that triggers massive rioting in the city which is divided into two camps. Terrified, the immigrants hide here and there in the dark corner of the city they call the Triangle of Death. E. discovers Selab hiding and their relationship is passionately consummated just as the Afghani who works in the gas station warns Ali that Selab is in danger. On her return home and from messages on her father’s voice mail, E. senses that Selab is in danger and rushes to the port just as the ship bound for Italy is getting ready to sail. The trucks with the young immigrants hiding inside them have passed the gate. E. can do nothing. Ali is mistakenly killed when he switches places with Selab who now sails away. E. reacts violently and is arrested. Late at night P.’s lawyer secures her release and she returns home. Now she knows it is her father who gave the order. When, later on, P. goes up to talk to her, aware that she knows, she is no longer at home. P. takes to the streets in search of her. He ends up at the departure pier in the port and waits inside his car. E. roams the city with her backpack slung over her shoulder. She goes to the spot where the company of actors has arranged to meet. They take their leave of her with the finale of the Threepenny Opera. Then, alone, she sets out for the port after telling her old friend, the director of the play, that she doesn’t know where she’s going. Perhaps to the other sea . . . In front of the gate through which the trucks bound for Italy enter, she sees her father. It is raining.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   283 Her father gets out of his car. He knows it’s all over. Crying, E. boards the ship which starts moving away from the dock. A shot is heard. P.’s gun on the pavement and his face covered with blood. E.’s ship heads towards the open sea. The day breaks. I offer eight observations on Theo’s synopsis: 1. The first line sets up that Greece as a whole is ‘suffocating from the financial crisis’, thus Theo goes beyond the individual stories, to that of Greece in significant trouble. It is worth noting that most of Theo’s films take place in what he has always called ‘the Other Greece’ of the countryside, small villages or isolated areas beyond Athens. He chose to set this ‘conclusion’ to the trilogy in Athens and its port, Piraeus, specifically. We could say that in The Other Sea he is taking on ‘the Other Athens’ beyond what tourists come to experience. 2. The second paragraph mentions the ‘suffocating situation’ and not only introduces the strong conflict between the striking workers in the Piraeus factory and our main character E. (an actress in the troupe putting on Brecht’s Threepenny Opera); we are also introduced to an old unemployed worker who stands nude on the rooftop and who soon grabs everyone’s attention by committing suicide, plunging to his death before the crowd of strikers and actors.   Note how in tune with the times Theo was in composing his script, for there were a number of such suicides occurring in Athens at the time, including one several months after Theo’s death, in which a 77-year-old pensioner killed himself in front of the Greek Parliament building (Anast, Squires 2012). In my discussions with Theo about his script he made it absolutely clear that this concluding part of the trilogy was a return to Greece and all the crises it was undergoing that were deeply hurting everyone, irrespective of their political beliefs. It’s also important to note that in the later versions of the script, Angelopoulos included a scene of a woman being mugged to reflect the worries ordinary Greeks have felt with the rising crime rate in Greece caused by aliens. 3. Theo admitted in our discussions that having E. be part of a theatrical group that is continually interrupted by current problems in the streets of Athens was a nod back to his early film Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975). In that surprisingly popular film released while the Junta was still in power, a group of actors travelling through rural Greece from 1939 to 1952 are ­performing the popular nineteenth-century Greek folk melodrama, Golfo, the Lover of the Shepherdess, but they are constantly interrupted by the reality of the Italian and German invasions of Greece and thus World War II, followed by the horrors of the Greek Civil War ending in 1952. The Other Sea is not only a wrapping up of Theo’s trilogy but a ­reflection

284  a nd r e w h o rto n of his whole career, as culture and history, art and reality cross paths ­constantly and often in unexpected moments. Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with the memorable music by Kurt Weill unites these Greek actors as both performers and protesters against the Greek current crisis with one of the most prominent leftist plays from the modernist European theatre canon. 4. The subsequent scenes show the corpse of an unemployed man who has committed suicide being carried away to the shantytown of Piraeus. This leads to E’s romantic and sexual attraction to the young Iranian actor, Selab, with all of the cross-cultural and contemporary implications such a relationship offers. This evokes a line from The Suspended Step of the Stork, which takes on changing national borders in northern Greece and says so much about what Theo explores in the personal relationships in his films: ‘how many borders do we have to cross to return home’. For while E.’s father is trying to make money selling illegal immigrants passing through Greece, E. has crossed so many ‘borders’ and falls in love with the first real human she encounters. 5. Theo uses New Year’s Eve as both E.’s birthday and as P.’s last chance to try and connect with his daughter; the latter suffers still from the loss of his wife who abandoned him twenty years ago. 6. Personal tension builds as P. finds out about E.’s relationship with the illegal immigrant. At the same time the larger social conflict increases. Riots erupt because the theatrical group is not allowed to premiere The Threepenny Opera. 7. E. and Selab consummate their love, and he departs on the ship for Italy while Ali is murdered by being mistaken for Selab and E. discovers it is her father who ordered this to happen, and thus she leaves her home and hits the streets. Each film in Theo’s trilogy captures such betrayal as well as expressions of real love, as each Eleni pursues her own personal odyssey. 8. Theo merges art and reality once more as E. participates in the performance of The Threepenny Opera before making her decision to go to ‘the other sea’ which her father observes, and which leads to his suicide at the ending of the film. Note that E. does not state she is off to join Saleb and live with him. She states she does not know where she is going.  Theo thus leaves the narrative open ended.  E. and Saleb may well meet up crossing the other sea but they may not. Similarly P.’s suicide can be read not only as a gesture of his personal sense of failure as a husband (his wife, after all, abandoned him), father, politician, businessman and as a Greek, but I suggest it can also be seen as freeing E. further for her future, since her father will no longer be an obstacle.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   285

I NS I DE the other sea SCREEN P LA Y AND P RODU CTI ON Numerous filmmakers have made their work a ‘family’ business, such as Francis Ford Coppola with his film- and music-video-directing son, Roman Ford Coppola, and his daughter, Sofia Coppola, an award-winning director. But Theo Angelopoulos had the most complete family ‘involved in a ­production’ that I have ever come across. For as The Other Sea went into production, his partner Phoebe was once more his producer and each of his three daughters were involved. Eleni was making the documentary about the filming of The Other Sea to be added to the DVD, Anna was involved in casting and Katrina took charge of set design. Theo was certainly following his tradition of using known international actors to star in his films, as established through his use of Marcello Mastroianni in The Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of the Stork, Harvey Keitel in Ulysses’ Gaze, and Bruno Ganz in Eternity and a Day, and The Dust of Time. Cast as P., the father of E for The Other Sea was Italian actor/director Toni Servillo. Cut to the final script that is listed as version #100. Elly Petrides who has translated many of Theo’s scripts and those of many other Greek filmmakers over the years makes it clear that Theo continually adjusted, added and subtracted from his scripts. Petrides has stated that as Greece sank into deeper economic and political troubles, Theo’s revised versions of the script increasingly added the contemporary situations (Personal interviews). The strong scenes of The Threepenny Opera actors joining the homeless strikers in a Piraeus shantytown, for instance, was added long after the first versions of the script. I have already discussed that Theo wanted the film to begin with the George Seferis’ ‘The Other Sea’, with all the implications of odysseys included. But even his one-page synopsis does not set us up for the strong ‘flashback’ opening scene that grabs us (the viewers), much like Alfred Hitchcock’s approach of having a murder in the opening scene. More specifically, the whole film is set in Athens, in the ‘present’ (thus 2012), but the opening flashback is to 1990 Istanbul, in a scene that was only added a few weeks before production began (Petrides). Istanbul 1990. New Year’s Eve. A grey day on the Golden Horn (Altın Boynuz) estuary (Haliç). A water taxi arrives at Leander’s Tower (Kiz Kulesi), on the small islet at the southern entrance of the Bosporus strait. A beautiful young woman springs out and runs inside the building. It is New Year’s Eve and preparations for the locals and foreigners who will be coming here to celebrate the New Year are in full swing. The waiters are setting the tables.

286  a nd r e w h o rto n A musician is rehearsing on the piano. The maitre d’ of the restaurant is speaking in English on the telephone with a group that is arriving that evening ‘Welcome to Istanbul’. The only customer there is a young man who is sitting in the back. There is a suitcase next to him. On seeing the young woman entering the man turns. They exchange a glance and the girl backs away still panting and out of breath. She disappears in the toilets located in an adjacent area. The man gets up. He pays. The girl turns on a faucet as though she wants to wash her hands and when she hears footsteps approaching, she backs away. The man’s reflection appears in the mirror. It goes past and disappears in the same direction as that taken by the young woman. A passionate erotic discourse is heard OFF-SPACE between the two young people. The girl whispers to the man to follow her but to wait a bit before he does. She runs out again. At the entrance to the building she is startled. She freezes. The water taxi is no longer there and she sees her suitcase on the deserted dock. She walks towards it to pick it up and at that moment she sees a water taxi similar to the one that brought her speeding towards her. Thinking it is her taxi she waves her hand to stop it. It approaches . . . The girl walks towards it intending to board but the vessel does not stop. It speeds past. Three shots and the girl collapses on the dock near the suitcase soaked in blood. No mention of this murder is ever specifically made again, but by mid-script we come to recognise the woman as E.’s mother and thus P.’s wife who had left them when E. was five years old. We recognise her from a photograph E. keeps in her room. And clearly the scene has the mother ready to leave with another man in a boat and thus for ‘another sea’ herself. Theo does not go into any direct confrontation or identification of P. as responsible for his wife’s murder, but implies that P. arranged for Selab to be murdered only for Ali to be mistakenly shot instead. That P. has been haunted by the loss of his wife Eleni is made evident halfway through the script when he takes E. out on New Year’s Eve to celebrate her birthday. New Year’s Eve is also the night that Eleni was murdered, as the opening scene makes clear. Tension thus erupts between P. and E.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   287 P. The last time you and I danced together was then . . . He hesitates. His agitation grows. P. Then . . . In Istanbul . . . He falls silent. Then . . . P. You were turning five . . . E. turns pale. P. appears to be hurting. P. It was New Year’s Eve like tonight . . . He tries to smile. P. We were having a celebration for you . . . He corrects himself. P. I was having a celebration for you . . . Brief silence. P. That night . . . she left . . . she walked out on us . . . your Mom . . . E.’s hands drop to her sides. She shouts . . . E. Dad! She goes back to their table visibly shaken. P. follows her. P. raises his glass for a toast. E.’s reaction is violent. She appears to be suffering. She grabs her father’s hand trembling. The glass with the drink smashes into a thousand pieces on the floor. E. We promised one another we’d never talk about that again ever! He bows his head. He sits down. She sits down as well. Two waiters have rushed up to pick up the broken pieces of glass. As E. becomes more aware that her father is both in the business of selling Afghanis and other illegal immigrants packed in vans to European countries and, then, as she later learns that her father has tried to have Selab murdered, we sense she knows even without actually saying so, that he may well have had her mother murdered. Given the kinds of changes he often made while shooting and editing, we

288  a nd r e w h o rto n will not know how Theo’s final film would have evolved from the script as written in the 100th version he was using for the production. But I wish to add several observations about the power of Theo’s script beyond the points I’ve already made about having the conflict between E. and her father P. set against a Greece in deep crisis. Scene 24 in the script captures the crisis as the actors enter the abandoned factory where dozens of homeless strikers have built fires and stripped naked to dry their clothes soaked from the pouring rain outside. And they have the casket of the old unemployed worker who had committed suicide jumping off the building in the room as well. But beyond strikers and actors there are also dozens of illegal immigrants. Anyone who has enjoyed the visual power of Theo’s films can imagine how powerful this scene could be on the screen: Now all the immigrants have started to undress. To get naked. They too spread their clothes near the fires they have lighted. Outside the rain won’t let up. Selab also gets undressed casting his eyes every so often on the wall that hides E. The girl removes the last of her clothing, spreads it near the fire. She  squats on her knees to dry off shivering. She is still gasping for breath. But the religious leader of the immigrants who is the only one who has not removed his clothes, is having a fit of hysteria. He whirls around like a madman shouting. He is incensed by the presence of a woman there, even though invisible behind the wall. Two of his men run up to him to calm him down. But he shoves them violently aside and charges towards the office where E. is. He sees her naked. He continues to yell and curse in his language. Hussein runs to calm him down but he is beside himself. The girl is stunned. She doesn’t know what to do. She is naked and defenseless. She is ashamed, frightened. Theo here exposes how figuratively ‘naked’ they all are in the current Greek crisis. Similarly, Theo has used songs and lines from The Threepenny Opera that resonate with Greece’s contemporary situation. In this scene reality and theatre cross paths once more as the Piraeus police have come in to stop the production of the play as it is in progress. E. manages to finish one song, thus making her contribution as Orestes calls for the curtain to fall.

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   289 The police officers are taken by surprise. JENNY You may tip me with a penny and I’ll thank you very well. And you see me dressed in tatters, and this tatty old hotel. What is going on is so unexpected that the Chief of Police doesn’t know how to deal with it. JENNY But you’ll never guess to who you’re talking. No. You couldn’t ever guess to who you’re talking. But one of these nights, there will be screams from the harbour And they’ll ask what can that screaming be? And they’ll see me smiling as I do the glasses And they’ll say: how she can smile beats me. Jenny’s voice soars like a cry that fades. JENNY And a ship, a black freighter All its fifty guns loaded Has tied up at the quay. . . Bright red in the face and with his hands behind his back the Chief of Police starts advancing menacingly towards the stage. Jenny stops abruptly. For a while only the music is heard. Afterwards a brief silence. Then E. takes a step forward, picking up the skirt of the white wedding gown. She looks at the Chief of Police and finishes the song where Jenny left off. E. Now you gentlemen can wipe that smile off your face ‘Cause every building in town is a flat one This whole fricking place is down to the ground. . . The sound of Orestes’ anxious voice is heard from the stage loudspeakers over the empty theatre. ORESTES Curtain! The curtain is lowered slowly as though it is the end of a performance. The actors, who have remained on stage all this time, silent, disappear behind.

290  a nd r e w h o rto n

TOWARDS A CONCL U S I ON AS OD Y SSE YS CONT IN U E We who had nothing will school them in serenity. Remember that at were beginning to dered by Odysseus Athena  stepped in, Odysseus:

George Seferis

the end of Homer’s Odyssey, new bloody conflicts form as the relatives of the dozens of suitors murand Telemachus were ready to demand revenge. But sending them running with terror and commanded to

Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, master of exploits, hold back now! Call a halt to the great leveler, War! Don’t court the rage of Zeus who rules the world!’ (The Odyssey of Homer, 485) Alas, Athena does not step into the final scenes of The Other Sea, and so Theo’s script finishes with E. sailing to ‘the other sea’, her father having committed suicide and no solution being suggested for all of Greece’s complex political and economic problems. The final scene of the script is: The old man has remained motionless there, near the car outside the gate of Pier 7, watching the ship with his daughter sailing away. He retreats a few steps. He leans against the door of the Jeep which was left open. He almost falls. He gets in. The windshield wipers, forgotten, are still going back and forth. P. collapses on the seat with a vacant expression in his eyes. The ship sails out of the harbour with a final hoarse whistle and heads for the open sea. A shot is heard. P.’s head falls sideways. His left hand hangs out of the open door letting a gun drop to the sidewalk, smoke still coming out of the barrel. The windshield wipers continue going back and forth monotonously as though measuring time. 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. Phoebe captured his spirit in making this ‘concluding’ film when she notes that:

Unf i n i s h e d O d ys s e y : the other sea   291 Theo felt Greece was dying but at the same time he felt being a Greek is a choice you make. You choose to be Greek or not. This is like the Greeks of the past who, if they call themselves Greek must live with the whole Greek heritage. (Personal interview) The Other Sea begins as we have noted, with the quote from Seferis’ ‘Mythistorema’ poems, but does Theo reflect the closing line of this Seferis series as well: ‘We who had nothing will school them in serenity’? I feel that my years of knowing Theo and his films make me agree with Phoebe that as a storyteller Theo wanted, as she comments: To tell the story of the human condition that could be felt, heard and seen in a way that it would go directly into the stomach of the viewer of the film, and each viewer must digest it and make his or her own story out of the film he or she has seen. (Personal interview) And Theo made it clear that this ‘human’ focus was at the centre of his exploration of Greece and Greek culture past and present. He did say, ‘What do I want to happen? I simply want our life here to become more human. We need to return to those places to find much of what is still important and authentic to our lives’ (cited in Horton 1997a: 206). All of these points considered, the final question is, of course, will The Other Sea be completed as a film? Phoebe has made it clear that there are no specific plans to continue shooting the film since less than a quarter of the film had been shot by the time Theo died, and not all of the funding had been secured for production. And yet the family feels strongly, I am told, that if The Other Sea were to be resumed as a project, it would have to be Theo’s daughter, Eleni, as the director, since she is also a filmmaker and knew her father’s approach to filming his stories so well.

Theo Angelopoulos’ Filmography

forminx story

Greece 1965. Unfinished.

Η Εκπ ομπ ή/ b r o a d c a s t Greece 1968. 23 minutes. Black and white, 35 mm. Written, directed and produced by Theo Angelopoulos. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Cast: Thodoros Katradamis, Lina Triantafyllou, Mirka Kalantzopoulou, Nikjos Mastorakis. Awards: —— 1968. Critics’ Award in Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Α ναπ αράστασ η / r e c o n s t r u c t i o n Greece, 1970. 110 minutes. Black and white, 35 mm. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos in collaboration with Stratis Karras, Thanassis Valtinos. Production: Yorgos Samiotis. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Editing: Takis Davlopoulos. Set decorator: Mikes Karapiperis. Executive producer: Christos Paligiannopoulos.

f ilmogra phy  293 Cast: Toula Stathopoulou, Yiannis Totsikas, Michalis Fotopoulos, Thanos Grammenos, Petros Hoidas, Yiannis Balaskas, Theo Angelopoulos, Christos Paligiannopoulos, Yorgos Arvanitis, Mersoula Kapsali. Awards: —— 1970. Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Critics’ Award, Thessaloniki Film Festival. —— 1971. Georges Sadoul Award as Best Film of the Year Shown in France. —— 1971. Best Foreign Film Award, Hyeres Film Festival. —— 1971. Special mention FIRESCI, Berlin.

Μ έ ρ ες του ’36/ d a y s

of

’36

Greece, 1972. 130 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos, Stratis Karras. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Music: Yorgos Papastefanou. Editing: Vassilis Spyropoulos. Cast: Yorgos Kuritsis, Kostas Pavlou, Petros Zarkadis, Christoforos Nezer, Christos Cheimaras, Takis Doukakos, Vassilis Tsaglos, Yiannis Kantilas, Thanos Grammenos. Awards: —— 1972. Best Director, Best Cinematography Awards, Thessaloniki Film Festival. International Film Critics Association (FIPRESCI) Award for Best Film, Berlin Film Festival.

Ο Θίασος / t h e

travelling players

Greece, 1975. 230 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Yorgos Papalios. Written and directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Costumes: Yorgos Patsas. Music and music supervision: Loukianos Kilaidonis. Selection of texts and songs: Fotis Labrinos. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou. Cast: Eva Kotamanidou, Aliki Georgouli, Stratos Pahis, Petros Zarkadis, Maria Vasileiou, Vangelis Kazan, Kuriakos Katrivanos, Grigoris Evagelatos, Yiannis Furios, Nina Papazafeiropoulou, Alekos Boubis, Kostas Styliaris, Kostas Mandilas, Yorgos Kantiris. Awards: —— 1975. International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Cannes.

294  f i l m o g ra phy —— 1975. Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Greek Critics Association Awards, Thessaloniki Film Festival. —— 1975. Interfilm Award, Forum Berlin Festival. —— 1976. Best film of the Year, British Film Institute. —— 1970–80. Italian Film Critics Association: Best Film in the World. —— 1975. FIPRESCI: One of the Top Films in the History of Cinema. —— 1976. Grand Prix of the Arts, Japan. —— 1976. Best Film of the Year, Japan. —— 1976. Golden Age Award, Brussels. —— 1976. Figueira das Fass, Portugal.

Οι Κυνηγοί/ t h e

hunters

Greece, 1977. 165 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Theo Angelopoulos O.E., Institut National de l’ Audiovisuel (France), Z.D.F. (Germany). Produced by Theo Angelopoulos and Nikos Angelopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, with the participation of Stratis Karras. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Music and music supervision: Loukianos Kilaidonis. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Costumes: Yorgos Ziakas. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou. Cast: Vangelis Kazan, Yorgos Danis, Christoforos Nezer, Stratos Pahis, Nikos Kouros, Ilias Stamatiou, Mary Chronopoulou, Eva Kotamanidou, Bety Valassi, Aliki Georgouli, Takis Doukakos, Vassilis Tsaglos, Dimitris Kaberidis. Awards: —— 1978. Golden Hugo Award for Best Film, Chicago Film Festival. —— 1978. Turkish Film Critics Award.

Ο Μ εγαλέξ αν δρος/ m e g a l e x a n d r o s Greece, 1980. 210 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: R.A.I. (Italy), Z.D.F. (Germany), Theo Angelopoulos and Greek Film Centre. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Produced by Nikos Angelopoulos. Executive producer : Phoebe Economopoulos. Executive producer (R.A.I.) : Lorenzo Ostuni. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos and Petros Markaris. Music: Christodoulos Halaris. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis.

f ilmogra phy  295 Costumes: Yorgos Ziakas. Sound: Arguris Lazaridis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou. Executive Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Cast: Omero Antonutti, Eva Kotamanidou, Mihalis Yiannatos, Grigoris Evagelatos, Thanos Grammenos, Tola Stathopoulou, Fotis Papalabrou, Christoforos Nezer, Miranta Kounelaki. Awards: —— 1980. Golden Lion and International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Venice Film Festival. —— 1980. Award Cinema Nuovo, Venice Film Festival.

Χω ριό Έ νας Κάτ οικος/ o n e

village, one villager

Greece, 1981. 20 minutes. Colour, 35 mm (documentary). Production: Y.EN.ED. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou.

Αθ ή να, επ ιστρο φή στ η ν Ακρόπολη / a t h e n s , return to the acropolis

Greece, 1983. 43 minutes. Colour, 35 mm (documentary). Production: Trans World Film, ERT, Theo Angelopoulos. Written and directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Texts: Kostas Tahtsis. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Music: Manos Hadjidakis, Dionyssis Savopoulos, Loukianos Kilaidonis Sound: Thanassis Georgiadis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou.

Τ α ξίδ ι στα Κύθη ρα/ v o y a g e

to cythera

Greece, 1984. 137 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Greek Film Centre, Z.D.F. (Germany), Channel 4 (France), R.A.I. (Italy), ERT. Produced by : Yorgos Samiotis. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos.

296  f i l m o g ra phy Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Costumes: Yorgos Ziakas. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis. Editing: Yorgos Triantafyllou. Cast: Manos Katrakis, Giulio Brogi, Mary Chronopoulou, Dionyssis Papayannopoulos, Dora Volanaki, Athinodoros Proussalis, Michalis Yannatos, Vassilis, Despina Geroulanou, Tassos Saridis. Awards: —— 1984. Best Screenplay and International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI) Best Film Awards, Cannes Film Festival. —— 1984. Critics’ Award, Rio Film Festival. —— 1984. Best film, best screenplay, best performance by an actor in a leading role, best performance by an actress in a leading role, Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Ο Μ ελισσοκόμ ος / t h e

beekeeper

Greece, France, 1986. 122 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Greek Film Centre, MK2 productions (Paris), ER, P.A.I. 3, I.C.C., Theo Angelopoulos. Executive producer : Nikos Angelopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, with the participation of Dimitris Nollas, Tonino Guerra. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Costumes: Yorgos Ziakas. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Sound: Nikos Ahladis. Editing: Takis Yiannopoulos. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nantia Mourouzi, Serge Reggiani, Jenny Roussea, Dinos Iliopoulos, Nikos Kouros.

Τ οπ ίο στην Ομίχλη / l a n d s c a p e

in the mist

Greece, France, Italy, 1988. 126 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Greek Film Centre, ERT, Paradis Film (Paris), Basic Cinemato-grafica (Rome), Theo Angelopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis.

f ilmogra phy  297 Costumes: Anastasia Arseni. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis. Sound: Marinos Athanasopoulos. Sound: Yiannis Tsitsopoulos. Cast: Tania Palaiologou, Michalis Zeke, Stratos Tzortzoglou, Eva Kotamanidou, Aliki Georgouli, Vangelis Kazan, Stratos Pahis, Kuriakos Katrivanos, Grigoris Evagelatos, Yiannis Furios, Nina Papazafeiropoulou, Ilias Logothetis, Vassilis Kolovos, Dimitris Kamperidis, Gerasimos Skiadaresis. Awards: —— 1988. Silver Lion Award for Best Director, Venice Film Festival. —— 1989. Felix (Best European Film of the Year) Award, Golden Hugo Award for Best Director, Silver Plaque for Best Cinematography, Chicago Film Festival.

Τ ο Μ ετέωρο Βή μα τ ου Πελαργού / t h e

suspended

step of the stork

Greece, Italy, 1991. 143 minutes. Colour, 35mm. Production: Theo Angelopoulos, Arena Films (France), Vega Films (Switzerland), Erre Produzioni (Italy). Produced by Bruno Pesery, Theo Angelopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Production design: Mikes Karapiperis. Sound: Marinos Athanasopoulos. Editing: Yiannis Tsitsopoulos. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Jean Moreau, Gregory Karr, Ilias Logothetis, Dora Chrysikou, Vassilis Bougiouklakis, Dimitris Poulikakos. lumière et compagnie/ulysses

France, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, 1995. 57 seconds. Production: Theo Angelopoulos Film Production. Camera: Sarah Moon. Assistant Director: Margarita Manta. Cast: Nikos Charalampous. Assistant Producer: Margarita Gorgiou.

Τ ο Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα / u l y s s e s ’ Greece, France, Italy, 1995. 176 minutes. Colour, 35 mm.

gaze

298  f i l m o g ra phy Production: Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Mega Channel, Paradis Film, Générale d’images, La Sept Cinema, Canal +, Basic Cinemato-grafica, Instituto Luce, R.A.I, TeleMünchen, Concorde Films, Herbert Kloider, Channel 4. Executive producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Executive producer (Paris): Marc Soustras. Producers: Giorgio Silvagni, Eric Heumann, Dragan Ivanovic-Hevi, Ivan Milovanovic Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, with the participation of Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Production design: Yorgos Patsas, Miodrac Mile Nicolic. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos. Sound: Thanassis Arvanitis, Marton Jankov-Tomica, Yiannis Haralampidis. Editing: Yiannis Tstsopoulos. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern, Erland Josephson, Thanassis Veggos, Yorgos Michalakopoulos, Mania Papadimitriou. Awards: —— 1995. Grand Jury Prize and International Critics’ Prize, Cannes Film Festival. Felix of the Critics (Film of the Year 1995).

Μια Αιωνιότητ α και μια Μέρα/ e t e r n i t y

and a day

Greece, France, Italy, 1998. 130 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Paradis Film, Intermedias S.A., La Sept Cinema, Canal +, Classic SRL, Instituto Luce, WDR and ARTE, Associate Producer Martin Wiehel. With support from Eurimages – Council of Europe. Executive producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris. Production design: Yorgos Ziakas, Costas Dimitriadis. Costumes: Yorgos Patsas. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cinematography: Yorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos. Sound: Nikos Papadimitriou. Editing: Yiannis Tsitsopoulos. Cast: Bruno Ganz, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Isabelle Renauld, Achileas Skevis, Despoina Bebedeli, Alexandra Ladikou, Alekos Oudinotis, Nikos Kouros, Nikos Kolovos, Iris Chatziantoniou. Awards: —— 1998. Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival. Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

Τ ριλογία I : Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει/ t r i l o g y i : the weeping meadow

Greece, France, Italy, Germany, 2003. 170 minutes.

f ilmogra phy  299 Colour, 35 mm. Production : Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT S.A., Attica Art Productions (Athens), BAC Films S.A., Intermedias S.A., ARTE France with the participation of : Canal + (Paris), Classic SRL, Istituto Luce SpA with the participation of : R.A.I. CINEMA (Rome), NETWORK MOVIE Reinhold Elschot Peter Nadermann, ZDF/ARTE Meinolf Zurhorst with the support of the Eurimages Fund of the Council of Europe. Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni. Cinematography : Andreas Sinanos. Music : Eleni Karaindrou. Production design : Yorgos Patsas, Costas Dimitriadis. Costumes : Ioulia Stavridou. Editing : Yorgos Triantafyllou. Sound : Marinos Athanasopoulos. Cast: Alexandra Aidini, Nikos Poursanidis, Yorgos Armenis, Vassilis Kolovos, Eva Kotamanidou, Toula Stathopoulou, Michalis Yannatos, Thalia Argyriou, Grigoris Evagelatos. chacun son cinéma: une déclaration d’amour au grand écran/to each his own cinema

France, Greece 2007. 3 minutes and 12 seconds. Production: Cannes Film Festival, Elzévir Films. Written and directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Director of Photography: Andreas Sinanos. Editing: Yiannis Tsitsopoulos, Yorgos Helidonis. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Jeanne Moreau. Texts from Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). Extracts from Theo Angelopoulos’ The Beekeeper (1986). Production Management: Eric Vassard.

Τ ρ ιλογία I I : Η Σκόνη τ ου Χρόν ου/ t r i l o g y time

ii: the dust of

Greece, Italy, Germany, Russia, 2008. 125 minutes. Colour, 35 mm. Production: Theo Angelopoulos Film Productions, Greek Film Centre, Greek Ministry of Culture, ERT S.A., NOVA, Studio 217 ARS, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Lichtmeer Film, Filmstiftung Nordhein Westfalen, Deutscher Filmforderfonds (DFFF), ARD Degeto, Classic SRL, Regione Lazio / FI.LA.S SpA, MiBAC – Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali. With the support of the Eurimages Fund of the Council of Europe.

300  f i l m o g ra phy Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris. Cinematography: Andreas Sinanos. Sets: Andrea Crisanti, Dionisis Fotopoulos, Alexander Scherer, Konstantin Zagorskij. Costumes: Regina Khomckaya, Francesca Sartori, Martina Schall. Editing: Yiannis Tsitsopoulos, Yorgos Helidonides. Sound: Marinos Athanasopoulos, Jerome Aghion. Sound mix: Costas Varibopiotis. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz, Michel Piccoli, Irène Jacob Irène, Christiane Paul, Costas Apostolidis, Tiziana Pfiffner, Alexandros Mylonas, Norman Mozzato, Reni Pittaki, Alessia Franchini, Valentina Carnelutti, Chantel Brathwaite, Herbert Meurer, Yshakov Sviatoslav.

sous ciel

(ceu

inferior)

Brazil, 2011. 5 minutes. Production: Leon Cakoff, Renata de Almeida, Caio Gullane, Fabiano Gullane, Debora Ivanov, Gabriel Lacerda. Producer: Mostra Internacional de Cinema de São Paulo, Gullane. Music: André Abujamra.

Η Άλλη Θάλασσα / t h e

other sea

Greece, Italy, Turkey, 2012. Unfinished. Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Executive Producer: Anna Angelopoulos. Written and directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Collaboration in script: Petros Markaris, Rea Galanaki. Photography: Andreas Sinanos. Costumes: Yorgos Ziakas. Sound: Marinos Athanasopoulos, Aris Athanasopoulos. Assistant directors: Panagiotis Portokalakis, Alexandros Labridis, Eleni Angelopoulos. Cast: Toni Servillo, Eirini Stratigopoulou, Yiannos Perlegas, Andreas Konstantinou, Vassilis Koukalani, Enke Fezollari, Niki Sereti, Dimitris Piatas, Julia Souglakou, Marilena Rozaki, Elisabeth Moutafi, Lena Papaligoura, Manos Vakousis, Antigone Koukoulakou. Production Manager: Takis Katselis. Production Consultant: Costas Labropoulos.

Notes on Contributors

T H E ED I TORS Angelos Koutsourakis is a University of Queensland postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Communication and Arts. He is the author of Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (2013). He is currently working on a monograph on Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema. Mark Steven is a research fellow in modernist film at the University of New South Wales. His recently completed doctoral thesis was titled ‘Red Modernism: Poetry, Communism, and the American Avant-Garde’. He has published on literature and film, including the co-edited Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2012).

Th e a u t hors Maria Chalkou holds a PhD in Film Theory and History (University of Glasgow). She is a founder and the principal editor of the online academic journal Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Head of the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. Recent publications on Chinese art and visual politics have been published in New Formations and Theory Culture and Society. Her co-edited book Inert Cities: Globalisation, Suspension and Visual Culture was the result of a collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, and she is currently collaborating through a Leverhulme Network Grant on issues of childhood, nationhood and cinema. Her forthcoming monograph (funded by the ARC in Australia) deals with the issues of migration and childhood in world cinema. Caroline Eades is Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Du mythe au cinéma (2014) and Le Cinéma post-colonial français (2006). Hamish Ford is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time (2012) as well as multiple essays on film and philosophy.

302  no t e s o n co ntr ibu to rs Dan Georgakas has been one of the editors of Cineaste film quarterly since 1969. He is author or editor of thirteen books dealing with various historical topics. These books include Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1975), New Directions in Greek American Studies (1992) and The Encyclopedia of the American Left (1998). He has taught film courses at New York University, Columbia, the University of Oklahoma, Empire State College, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Queens College. He is co-editor of The Cineaste Interviews (1983), The Cineaste Interviews 2 (2002), and Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (1985). He has written entries and articles for numerous film reference books, has programmed film festivals, and has written on cinema for publications such as Cineaste, Film Quarterly, Moviemaker, The National Herald and the Utne Reader. Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University Of Bergen, where he is also founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture. He is the author of Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2012). His most recent book is the co-edited collection, Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014). He is also a founding editor of the journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture.           Andrew Horton is Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of twenty-seven books on film, screenwriting and cultural studies including, Screenwriting for a Global Market: Selling Your Scripts from Hollywood to Hong Kong (2004), Henry Bumstead and the world of Hollywood Art Direction (2003), Writing the Character Centered Screenplay (2nd edition 2000) and Laughing out Loud: Writing the Comedy Centered Screenplay (1999). He has written numerous books and essays on Greek cinema and culture including The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (1997; 2nd edition 1999), The Last Modernist: the Films of Theo Angelopoulos (1997) and Selected Short plays of Costas Mourselas (1975). His film scripts include Brad Pitt’s first feature film, The Dark Side of the Sun, and the awarded Something in Between (1983, Yugoslavia, directed by Srdjan Karanovic). Fredric Jameson is the author of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which won the MLA Lowell Award, The Seeds of Time (1994), Brecht and Method (1998), The Cultural Turn (1998), and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002). His recent works include The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Representing Capital (2011), and The Hegel Variations (2010). Among Professor Jameson’s ongoing concerns is the need to analyse literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology. He received the 2008 Holberg Prize for his scholarship. Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her books include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (2000) and Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies (2013). Vrasidas Karalis is a Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Sydney. He has published widely in Modern Greek studies and he is the author of A History of Greek Cinema (2012). Alexander Kluge is a political philosopher, author, filmmaker and co-writer of the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962). He has directed some of the most challenging pieces of

no te s on con tr ibu tors   303 cinematic modernism within the twentieth century. His best-known films are Yesterday Girl (1962), Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed (1967), Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1970), The Patriot (1979) and The Power of Feelings in Everyday Life (1983). His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity (2008), is perhaps his most ambitious. Surpassing nine hours of viewing, News is a strange total work of art, rare in our century. The idea that foments the screening of this film is, in many ways, to analyse the status of the political in our present condition. Julian Murphet is Professor in Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales and the Director of the Centre for Modernism studies in Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (2009), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (2002), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (2005), co-editor of Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2012), Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and Literature and Visual Technologies (2003), and has penned many scholarly articles and book chapters on topics such as modernism, postmodernism, race, geography, film and literary theory. Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for External Affairs at Brunel University London, where he also directs the MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society. In addition, he is the Chair of the Freud Museum London. He has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In the area of film studies, he has previously written on Lars Von Trier and on the work of the Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez. Nagisa Oshima (1932–2013) was an influential Japanese filmmaker and scriptwriter. He has won numerous awards in film festivals throughout the world, and amongst his films are Night and Fog in Japan (1960), Death by Hanging (1968), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Empire of Passion (1978) and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983). Nektaria Pouli was trained as a psychologist at the University of Crete, Durham University and University College London. She currently teaches courses in Psychology at St Mary’s University, South Bank University and the Open University, and she has published in the areas of addiction studies and health psychology. Sylvie Rollet is Professor in Film Studies at the University of Poitiers and has previously taught at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She is jointly responsible for ‘Theatres of Memory,’ an interuniversity research program on the cinema. She is the author of Une éthique du regard : le cinéma face à la Catastrophe, d’Alain Resnais à Rithy Panh (2011) and « Voyage à Cythère » : la poétique de la mémoire d’Angelopoulos (2003). She has also edited Théâtres de la mémoire, mouvement des images (2010) and Angelopoulos au fil du temps (2007). Richard Rushton is Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Politics of Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory (2013), Cinema After Deleuze (2012), and The Reality of Film (2011), as well as numerous articles and chapters on film and philosophy, including a co-edited special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research dedicated to the films of Catherine Breillat (2010). Robert Sinnerbrink is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011) and Understanding Hegelianism (2007, reprinted by Routledge in 2014). He has also published numerous articles on the philosophy of film, aesthetics and critical theory.

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Index

Achmatova, Anna, 189 Adorno, Theodor, 112, 142 Agamben, Giorgio, 225, 230, 268, 272, 273 Aidini, Alexandra, 144, 242, 269, 272 Akerman, Chantal, 47, 49 Aldrich, Robert, 24 Alexander the Great, 112, 130–1, 136, 137 Althusser, Louis, 115 Altman, Robert, 160 Thieves Like Us, 162 anarchism, 17, 126, 129, 131–3, 135, 137, 138–9, 160, 168, 205 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 160 Anderson, Perry, 145 Andersson, Roy, 47 Angelopoulos, Anna, 285 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 4, 16, 29, 45–63, 81, 82, 83, 96, 99, 106, 107, 155, 161, 180, 188 Blow-Up, 52, 61 Chronicle of a Love Story, 47, 48, 62 L’avventura, 45, 49, 61 L’eclisse, 54, 59 Red Desert, 56 Zabriskie Point, 54 Antonutti, Omero, 72, 131, 168 archives, 18, 84, 93, 187, 249–63 Arendt, Hannah, 220 Aristotle, 73 art cinema, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 55, 57, 89, 141, 155, 172, 173 Art Review, 24 Arvanitis, Yorgos, 32, 132 Atkinson, Michael, 279 Auerbach, Erich, 103, 104 Augé, Marc, 274

auteurism, 15, 16, 17, 29–31, 37, 65, 80, 81, 83, 106, 121, 129, 138, 161, 162, 170, 172, 364 Bachmann, Gideon, 51–2 Badiou, Alain, 5, 188 Balkan War, 15, 86, 90, 99, 241, 249, 251, 259 Baloukos, Stathis, 116, 118 Balzac, Honoré de, 216 Bardot, Brigitte, 33, 34 Barthes, Roland, 65, 66, 217 Baudelaire, Charles, 194 Bava, Mario, 29 Baxter, Ann, 240 Bazin, André, 62, 104, 106, 162, 190, 270 Beatty, Warren Reds, 159 Becker, Wolfgang Good Bye Lenin!, 151 Beethoven, Ludwig, 142 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 33–4 Benjamin, Walter, 70, 73, 77, 80, 83, 89, 93, 189, 189, 217, 225, 231, 255, 262, 268, 273 Benveniste, Émile, 231 Bergan, Ronald, 203 Berger, John, 117 Bergman, Ingmar, 29, 39 Through a Glass Darkly, 28 Wild Strawberries, 33 Bergson, Henri, 89, 266 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 2, 19, 40, 155 1900, 120 Conformist, 120 La Commare Secca, 69

318  i nd e x Beugnet, Martine, 189 Biro, Yvette, 189, 242 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron, 190 Bogart, Humphrey, 34 Bond, James, 26–7, 37 Borders, 15, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 100, 103, 105, 108, 122, 146, 151, 153, 154, 171, 180, 191–205, 206–18, 220, 223, 226, 228, 229, 245, 252, 253, 256, 257, 265, 271, 280, 284 Bordwell, David, 7, 9, 19, 37, 38, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 60, 62, 65, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90, 96, 106, 112, 114, 127, 128, 163, 173, 180, 183, 189, 230, 236, 265, 270 Botelho, João, 5 bourgeoisie, 6, 9, 72, 75, 77, 82, 110, 141, 142, 150, 159, 160, 238, 252, 260 Bradshaw, Peter, 275 Brah, Avtar, 253 Brando, Marlon, 138 Brecht, Bertolt, 5, 16, 56, 64–79, 83, 95, 111, 115, 119, 125, 128, 141, 146, 172, 222, 236, 238, 268, 269, 280–1, 283, 279, 285 Kuhle Wampe, 67 Threepenny Opera, 68, 146, 280–5, 288 War Primer, 67 British Film Institute, 2 Brogi, Giulio, 108, 205, 223, 236 Brooks, Richard The Professionals, 27 Brosens, Peter, 2 Bruegel, Pieter, 67 Buñuel, Luis, 24, 77 Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 166 Las Hurdes, 160 Los Olvidados, 160 Burch, Noël, 76 Burgoyne, Robert, 176, 180 Butler, Judith, 213 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 101, 112 Cacoyannis, Michael, 35–6 Zorba the Greek, 32, 35, 36 Cahiers du Cinéma, 24, 25, 29, 31, 35 Cain, James M. Postman Always Rings Twice, 101 Calotychos, Vangelis, 19, 250 Campanile, Paquale Festa A Maiden for a Prince, 28 Cannes Film Festival, 1, 19, 24, 40–1, 85, 194

capitalism, 47, 52, 66, 106, 107, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152–5, 172, 202 Carr, Gregory, 8, 201 Casetti, Francesco, 106, 173 Castañeda, Claudia, 213 Cavafy, C. P., 175, 182 Cervantes, Miguel de, 173 Don Quixote, 173 Cézanne, Paul, 110 Chabrol, Claude Nada, 138 Chalkou, Maria, 16, 122 Charney, Leo, 217, 270 Chaucer, Geoffrey 190 The Canterbury Tales, 190 Chen, Kaige, 2, 19 children, 18, 181, 187, 206–18 Chirico, Giorgio de, 105 Chow, Rey, 255, 256 Christodoulou, Christos, 257, 263 Ciment, Michel, 185, 189, 191, 205, 221, 22, 224 Cinema Novo, 6, 116 Cinémathèque, 29 classicism, 101, 160, 161, 162, 171, 230 Clément, René Is Paris Burning?, 33 Cohen, Robin, 253 collectivity, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 72–4, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84–5, 89–93, 95, 96, 99–113, 114, 115, 118–19, 121, 123, 124, 141, 144, 147–8, 150, 152, 154, 159–73, 187, 188, 191, 193, 217, 220, 222, 236–7, 242, 244, 245, 250, 255, 263 communism, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 42, 47, 53, 54, 57, 61, 82, 85, 92, 93, 100, 103, 116, 126, 135, 139, 148, 166, 167, 171, 172, 177, 219, 239, 241, 245, 252, 271 Connery, Sean, 26 Constantine I, 10, 11 Constantine II, 14 Constantine, Eddie, 26 Contemporary Cinema, 23, 122 Coppola, Francis Ford, 40, 285 Godfather, 120 Coppola, Sofia, 285 Corman, Roger Masque of the Red Death, 26 Costa-Gavras Z, 58, 129 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves Silent World, 28 World Without Sun, 31

in dex  319 Cuarón, Alfonso Children of Men, 155 Curtiz, Michael Angels with Dirty Faces, 229 Cvetaeva, Marina, 189 Czech New Wave, 35 Dafoe, Willem, 48, 143, 230, 246, 266, 271, 279 Dalaras, Yorgos, 194 Dalianidis, Giannis Blue Beads, 32, 36, 38 Danis, Yiorgos, 77 Davies, Terence Distant Voices, Still Lives, 123 Davis, Bette, 240 Debord, Guy, 272 Deleau, Pierre-Henri, 1 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 62, 88–9, 213, 220, 237, 239, 235–48 Demertzis, Konstantinos, 12 Democratic Change, 23–38 Demy, Jacques Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 220, 221, 225, 230, 251, 258, 261, 268 dictatorship, 2, 6, 11–12, 60, 75, 99, 100, 115, 116 Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk, 17–18 Donen, Stanley, 40 Dos Passos, John, 32 Douzinas, Costas, 153 Dovhzenko, Alexander, 116 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 24, 51 Dudow, Slatan Kuhle Wampe, 67 Dunne, J. W., 271 Durgnat, Raymond, 53, 54, 55, 56 Eades, Caroline, 17, 190, 221 Economopoulos, Phoebe, 8, 275, 277, 285, 290, 291 Eisenstein, Sergei, 32, 34, 65, 66, 67, 78, 106, 107, 138, 148, 159, 160 Battleship Potemkin, 2, 119, 139 Que Viva Mexico, 119 Strike, 109 El Greco, 78 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris, 177, 189 Eliot, T. S., 68, 175 Elliot, Andrew, 176 Elly Petrides, 276, 285 Emilianos of Grevena, 256 Endfield, Cy Zulu, 33

epic, 2, 17, 33, 75, 85, 95, 101–3, 105, 106, 108, 114, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 136, 144, 150, 176, 180, 182, 187, 190, 220, 222, 223, 227 ethics, 6, 80–96, 162 Eurozone, 15, 143, 145, 153–4 Evangelatos, Grigoris, 132 Everett, Wendy, 19, 199, 205 exile, 7, 57, 58, 90, 99, 100, 103, 108, 109, 111, 112, 135, 142, 144, 154, 170, 171, 177, 179, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 211, 214, 219, 220, 221, 223, 228, 229, 257, 265, 269 Faccinto, Victor, 40 fascism, 6, 12, 13, 29, 47, 48, 61, 74, 75, 76, 93, 99, 103, 112, 115, 139, 144, 152, 167, 222, 256 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, x, 4, 5, 77 Faulkner, Joanne, 213 Faulkner, William, 32, 68, 146, 175, 176 Fellini, Federico, 99, 106, 107, 160 8 ½, 107 La Dolce Vita, 107 financial crisis, x, 15, 99, 140–7 Fleming, Ian, 26 Ford, Hamish, 16, 62 Ford, John Cheyenne Autumn, 27 France Culture, 69 Franco, Francisco, 139 Frears, Stephen Dangerous Liaisons, 2 French New Wave, 116 French-Serbian League, 257 Freud, Sigmund, 121, 127, 192, 199, 205, 221, 222 Friedkin, William The Exorcist, 147 Furie, Sidney J. The Appaloosa, 27 Furios, Yiannis, 75, 165 Galt, Rosalind, 9, 155 Ganz, Bruno, 149, 155, 187, 196, 230, 246, 271, 272, 279, 285 Gaudreault, André, 185 Genette, Gérard, 254 Georgakas, Dan, 17, 78, 126 George II, 11, 12 Georgiadis, Vasilis The Seventh Day of Creation, 36 Georgouli, Aliki, 93, 222

320  i nd e x Ghobadi, Bahman, 2 Giddens, Anthony, 83 Gilroy, Paul, 309 Gionis, Dimitris, 38 Godard, Jean-Luc, 4, 29–31, 37, 50, 51, 68, 69, 99, 119, 161 A Married Woman, 29 Alphaville, 29 Breathless, 67 Contempt, 29 Masculin Féminin, 29 Passion, 172 Pierrot le Fou, 29 Tout va bien, 160 Weekend, 162 Golfo, 2, 31, 74, 92, 120, 135, 283 Gourgouris, Stathis, 253 Grammenos, Thanos, 87, 254 Greek Civil War, 2, 13–14, 43, 47 57, 99, 100, 110, 135, 190, 197, 211, 219, 222, 223, 229, 230, 238, 239, 242, 244, 246, 271, 279, 280 283 Greek Communist Party, 11, 12, 13, 37, 126, 135 Greek Weird Wave, 146 Griffith, D. W. The Voice of the Violin, 138 Grigoriou, Grigoris Good Morning Athens, 38 Grivas, Alexis, 24 Grivas, Georgios, 12 Grodent, Michel, 193, 194, 204, 205 Grønstad, Asbjørn, 18. Grootenboer, Hanneke, 215 Groys, Boris, 150 Gumbrecht, Hans, 268, 269, 270, 272 Gunning, Tom, 66, 183, 190 Guynn, William, 176 Haneke, Michael, 47, 62 Hathaway, Henry Nevada Smith, 27 Hauff, Reinhard, 40 Hawks, Howard, 7 Hegel, G. W. F., 70, 100, 102–3, 105, 106, 163, 169, 214 Heidegger, Martin, 104 Hemingway, Ernest, 27 Henau, Gorik de, 194 Herzog, Werner, 1 Hitchcock, Alfred, 166, 285 The Trouble with Harry, 127 Rope, 173 Hitler, Adolf, 12, 57

Hollywood, 2, 7, 27, 29, 41, 47, 48, 53, 55, 58, 81, 106, 117, 119, 126, 141, 172, 175, 176, 183 Holm, Celeste, 240 Homer, 17, 112, 176, 190, 258, 277, 279, 280, 281, 289 Odyssey, 33, 86, 103, 175, 182–3, 187, 221, 222–4, 231, 290 Horton, Andrew, 7, 18, 19, 26, 28, 30, 45, 58, 59, 62, 64, 73, 78, 81, 95, 112, 124, 128, 130, 134, 137, 140, 146, 176, 181, 189, 192, 203, 204, 205, 217, 235, 262, 267 Hou, Hsiao-Hsien, 40, 47 Iampolski, Mikhail, 266 Ichikawa, Kon Tokyo Olympiad, 34 individualism, 6, 80 92, 107, 118, 119, 129, 159, 160, 161, 168, 191 Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, 2 Jacob, Irène, 13, 144, 178, 230, 246, 271, 279 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 16, 45, 61, 62, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 96, 141, 147, 161, 162, 174, 178, 181, 187, 188, 189, 230, 236, 248, 269 Jancsó, Miklós, 4, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 67, 96, 270 Jarmusch, Jim, 40 Jenkins, Hugh, 2 Jewish Humanistic Brotherhood, 257 Jia, Zhangke The World, 55 Josephson, Erland, 86, 224, 247, 260 Joyce, James, 32, 68, 109, 137, 175, 182, 190, 274 Dubliners, 274 Finnegans Wake, 137 Ulysses, 137 Kafka, Franz, 90 Kahn, Laurence, 224 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 116 Soy Cuba, 119 Kambanellis, Iakovos, 37 Kamboureli, Smaro, 18 Kant, Immanuel, 225 Karaindrou, Eleni, 88, 194, 255, 271 Karalis, Vrasidas, 17, 135, 144 Karamanlis, Konstantinos, 14 Karr, Gregory, 171, 204, 226, 279 Katrakis, Manos, 13, 54, 108, 191, 203, 22 Katrivanos, Kuriakos, 75

in dex  321 Katsaros, Mihalis, 126 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy, 173 Night Train, 173 Kawarabata, Yasushi, 40 Kazan, Elia Viva Zapata, 138 Kazan, Vangelis, 75, 77, 92, 222 Keitel, Harvey, x, 34, 48, 84, 85, 177, 223, 241, 246, 251 Kemal Ataturk, Mustafa, 11, 256 Kiarostami, Abbas, 5, 47, 270 Klee, Paul, 30 Kluge, Alexander, 4, 62 Kobayashi, Masaki, 24 Kolokotronis, Theodoros, 131 Kolovos, Nikos, 62, 65, 210, 236 Kolovos, Vasilis, 214, 248, 269, 279 Kotamanidou, Eva, 92, 134, 167, 169 Koundouros, Nikos, 35, 136 1922, 136 Ogre of Athens, 35 Kouros, Nikos, 77 Koutsourakis, Angelos, 16, 62, 79, 96, 173, 238 Kovács, András Bálint, 4, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 62, 63, 67, 68, 72, 79, 148, 155, 166 Koyama, Akiko, 40 Kracauer, Siegfried, 104 Kropotkin, Peter, 135 Kubrick, Stanley A Clockwork Orange, 120 Spartacus, 108 Kuhn, Annette, 67, 266 Kurosawa, Akira, 29, 68 Rashomon, 69 Lacan, Jacques, 203 Ladis, Fontas, 38 Lambrakis, Grigoris, 14 Lambrinos, Fotos, 24 Lang, Fritz, 29, 34 Metropolis, 148 late style, 17, 141–55 Lee, Jang-ho, 40 Lenin, Vladimir, 24, 107, 135, 149, 151, 160, 177, 178, 241 Leone, Sergio, 27 Once Upon a Time in America, 123 Lester, Richard, 28 A Hard Day’s Night, 28 Help!, 38 Knack . . . and How to Get It, 28 Létoublon, Françoise, 178, 182, 189, 190, 221

Lewis, Jerry, 27–8 Disorderly Orderly, 27 Nutty Professor, 27 Loach, Ken, 139, 248 Land and Freedom, 129, 139 Logothetis, Ilias, 171, 201, 209 long shots, 17, 54, 87, 91, 147, 159, 162, 168, 178, 214 Loraux, Nicole, 224, 227 Lord, Albert, 190 Lukács, Georg, 101, 102, 105 Lumet, Sidney The Hill, 34, 35, 37 Lyotard, Jean-François, 227 MacCabe, Colin, 190 Magritte, René, 182 Makarios III, 14 Makavejev, Dušan, 50 Makhno, Nestor, 135 Malatesta, Errico, 135 Manakis, Yanaki and Milton, x, 85–91, 223, 224, 2247, 251–2, 154, 255, 256–8, 260, 261–3 Weavers, 84, 86, 90, 251–2, 254, 263 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 205 Mankiewicz, Joseph All About Eve, 240 Barefoot Contessa, 240 A Letter to Three Wives, 240 Manoussakis, Kostas The Fear, 36 Marcus, Laura, 181 Marder, Elissa, 268, 269, 270 Marin, Louis, 231 Markaris, Petros, 271 Marketaki, Tonia, 24 Marxism, 25, 47, 56, 60, 69, 73, 74, 83, 95, 122, 145, 160, 236, 238, 263 Mastroianni, Marcello, 8, 33, 34, 38, 170, 172, 198, 204, 220, 226, 236, 245, 252, 279, 285 melancholia, 7, 8, 29, 80, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 95, 100, 107, 128, 148, 154, 167, 173, 180, 204, 235, 266 Méliès, Georges, 66 melodrama, 5, 35, 49, 63, 71, 109, 116, 127, 135, 138, 150, 151, 154, 155, 159, 283 Melville, Jean-Pierre Second Breath, 27, 29 memory, 6, 16, 18, 33, 80–1, 84, 85–6, 88, 89–96, 109, 111, 114, 117, 123, 124, 125, 127, 188, 189, 221, 222, 225–30, 231, 235, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245,

322  i nd e x memory (cont.) 246, 247, 248, 249–63, 265, 266, 270, 271, 273, 274 Metaxas, Ioannis, 2, 11, 12, 72, 74, 75, 100, 14 Metz, Christian, 185, 190 Mihalakopoulos, Yorgos, 246 Mikellides, Ninos Fenek, 38 Minnelli, Vincente, 7, 28 Mitchell, John Cameron Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 151 Mitchell, W. J. T., 9 Mitchum, Robert, 34 Mitry, Jean, 2 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 9, 45, 47, 81 modernism, 2, 4–5, 7, 16 27, 30, 56, 45–7, 50–2, 54, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 72, 73, 79, 80–5, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 122, 127, 128, 144, 146, 147, 155, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 219, 235, 269, 270, 283 Monicelli, Mario Casanova 70, 34 Montaldo, Giuliano Sacco and Vanzetti, 138 Moreau, Jeanne, 33, 85, 172, 204, 245 Morgenstern, Maia, 86, 134, 177, 186, 224, 247, 252, 257 Morrison, Jim, 273 Mourouzi, Nadia, 214 Mousoulis, Bill, 59–60 Moxey, Keith, 267, 272 Mpoumpis, Alekos, 75 Mueller, Roswitha, 65 Mulvey, Laura, 94–5 Murphet, Julian, 17, 78, 177, 180, 181, 182 Murphy, Kathleen, 207, 212 Mussolini, Benito, 12 Murnau, F. W. , 45, 51 myth, 6, 16, 30, 33, 47, 48, 50–1, 56, 58, 60, 73, 74, 80–2, 85–6, 88, 92–6, 105, 115, 118, 120, 121, 126, 127, 129–34, 135, 137, 170, 171, 178, 181, 187, 208, 209, 211, 221, 222, 224, 230, 277 Naficy, Hamid, 211 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 268, 270, 272, 273 narrative, 16, 17, 18, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 82, 89, 90, 95, 99–113, 115–20, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159, 161, 166, 175–90, 207, 211, 215, 220, 222–3, 230, 236, 251, 254, 255, 258, 271

Nazism, 12, 13, 26, 77, 92, 93, 99, 120, 135 neoliberalism, 7, 17, 145–7, 162, 172, 173, 223 New German Cinema, 5 New Greek Cinema, 23, 24, 35, 37, 122, 126, 130, 136 Nezer, Christophoros, 77, 168 Nichanian, Marc, 227 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101, 128, 224, 248 Nobus, Dany, 17 Nora, Pierre, 124, 188 Oliveira, Manoel de, 5 Olivera, Héctor Rebellion in Patagonia, 129, 138, 139 Orr, John, 45, 83 Orwell, George Homage to Catalonia, 139 Oshima, Nagisa, 4, 16 Death by Hanging, 74 Empire of Passion, 41 In the Realm of the Senses, 41 Ottwalt, Ernst Kuhle Wampe, 67 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 184 Ovid, 175, 178, 189 Metamorphoses, 187 Ozu, Yasujirō, 101 Pagnol, Marcel, 182 Pahis, Stratos, 93 Palaiologou, Tania, 198, 206 Pangalos, Theodoros, 11 panning shots, 2, 17, 42, 75, 127, 141, 152, 159–73 Papagiannidis, Takis, 123 Papagos (Marshall), 92, 219 Papandreou, Andreas, 135 Papandreou, George, 14 Parry, Milman, 190, 224 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 4, 50, 79, 96, 99 Salò, or the 120 Says of Sodom, 120, 167 Paul, Christiane, 271 Pavlou, Costas, 72, 118 pensivity, 210, 214–18 Perrault, Pierre, 245 Peters, Durham, 211 Petrides, Elly, 267, 285 Phillips, Adam, 213 planimetric shots, 49, 81, 127, 144, 152, 163, 166, 168, 265 Plastiras, Nikolaos, 11

in dex  323 Plato, 86, 168, 175, 177, 189 Alcibiades, 86 The Symposium, 177 Poe, Edgar Allan, 199 Porter Edwin S. Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison, 138 Porton, Richard, 139 Pouli, Nektaria, 17 Pound, Ezra, 187 Poursanidis, Nikos, 144, 269, 279 Proust, Marcel, 91, 123, 189 Quandt, James 188–9 Rafailidis, Vassilis, 4, 19, 24, 25, 38, 67, 88, 118, 126, 208 Rafelson, Bob, 40 Rancière, Jacques, 78, 214–15, 219 Rauschenberg, Robert, 30 realism, x, 26, 28, 46, 50, 51, 53, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 70, 76, 118, 186 Reed, Lou, 273 refugees, 11, 15, 95, 96, 99, 151, 153–5, 171, 186, 195, 199, 211–14, 217, 220, 225, 226, 228, 229, 245, 253, 269 Renoir, Jean Crime of M. Lange, 162 Resnais, Alain, 39, 77 Last Year at Marienbad, 109 Restivo, Angelo, 50 Ricoeur, Paul, 266, 267 Rilke, Rainer Maria Tenth Elegy, 182 Rivette, Jacque, 9 Rocha, Glauber, 4, 40 Rodowick, David, 50, 80 Rohdie, Sam, 49 Rollet, Sylvie, 18, 143, 176, 182, 205 Romanian School of Commerce, 257 Rosenstone Robert A., 77, 124 Rossellini, Roberto, 137 Rome Open City, 2 Rushton, Richard, 18, 62, 243 Rutherford, Anne, 205 Rouch, Jean, 2, 6 Sadoul, George, 2, 24 Said, Edward, 141–2 Sanjinés, Jorge, 2, 9, 142 Santos, Nelson Pereira dos, 4, 9, 19, 40 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 115, 160 Saura, Carlos, 10 Schlöndorff, Volker, 40

Schoonover, Karl, 9 Schor, Naomi, 216 Schroeter, Werner, 5 Schütte, Wolfram, 10, 68, 206, 209 Scorsese, Martin, 276 Gangs of New York, 123 Scott, Tony Enemy of the State, 55 Seel, Martin, 268, 269, 274 Seferis, George, 175, 182, 275, 277–8, 285, 289, 291 Seidl, Ulrich, 47 Sembène, Ousmane, 77 Serdaris, Vangelis Vassiliki, 136 Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet, 260 Shibata, Hayao, 40, 41 Silverman, Kaja, 184 Simmel, Georg, 102 Sinanos, Andreas, 271 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 16 Siodmak, Robert The Killers, 27 Sjöberg, Alf Miss Julie, 33 Skalenakis, Yorgos Dancing the Sirtaki, 36 Skevis, Achileas, 187 slow cinema, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 61, 91, 94, 101, 148, 164, 225, 267, 269, 270 Socrates, 177, 278 Solanas, Fernando, 4 Sontag, Susan, 267 Spanish Civil War, 135, 139 Stalin, Joseph, 7, 17, 135, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 178, 185, 189, 146, 271, 272, 273 Stassinopoulos, Maria A., 176 Stathi, Irini, 19, 65, 189 Stathopoulou, Toula, 69, 134 statues, 105, 112, 149, 150, 151, 177, 178, 181, 205, 209, 273 Stavrakas, Dimitris, 38 Steinbeck, John, 138 Steven, Mark, 17, 96 Straub, Jean-Marie, 50, 77 Swann, R. E. C., 181 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 47, 148, 161, 248, 264 Andrei Rublev, 162 Mirror, 155 Stalker, 155

324  i nd e x Tarr, Béla, 47, 78, 101, 148 Sátántangó, 155 Werckmeister Harmonies, 155 Tashlin, Frank, 27, 29 Glass Bottom Boat, 28 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio, 4, 77, 205 Taymor, Julie Frida, 159 Thessaloniki, 10, 87, 137, 181, 203, 207, 241, 254, 255, 256, 257, 269 Third Cinema, 9, 160 Thomson, David, 101 Tierchant, Hélène, 189 Tito, Josip Bro, 249, 250, 256 Tolstoy, Aleksey, 66 tragedy, 17, 26, 36, 43, 60, 73, 84, 86, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 101, 1105, 109, 121, 122, 133, 144, 145, 165, 166, 175, 176, 191, 195, 214, 216, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 231, 235, 247, 275, 280, 281 Trier, Lars von Dogville, 110 Trotter, David, 183, 185, 187, 190 Truffaut, François, 25, 127 Truman, Harry, 13 Tsai, Ming-liang, 47 Tsaldaris, Dino, 13 Tsangari, Athina Rachel, 155 Tsarouchis, Yannis, 68 Tzortzoglou, Stratos, 171, 206 Utopia, 4, 6, 7, 8, 128, 147–52, 153, 154, 155, 171, 177, 220, 223, 259 Vadim, Roger Dangerous Liaisons, 2 Varda, Agnès, 24 Cléo from 5 to 7, 34 Velouhiotis, Aris, 135 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 10, 11 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 224, 227, 247 Vertov, Dziga, 148, 160, 161 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 227 Visconti, Luchino, 4, 10 Ossessione, 101 Vitti, Monica, 58, 59 Volanaki, Dora, 108, 192 Voulgaris, Pantelis Happy Days, 136 The Stone Years, 136

Wajda, Andrzej, 10 Walsh, Raoul, 29 Watkins, Peter, 161 La Commune, 160 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 195 Weber, Carl, 73 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 47 Weill, Kurt, 284 Welles, Orson, 29, 81, 106 Wenders, Wim, 5, 40, 49, 155, 208 Alice in the Cities, 188 Kings of the Road, 188 Wings of Desire, 155, 189 Wrong Move, 188–9 Werbner, Richard, 259 Wertmüller, Lina Love and Anarchy, 138 Widerberg, Bo Joe Hill, 138 Wigoder, Meir, 217 Wilder, Billy, 7, 28 Kiss Me, Stupid, 28 Willemen, Paul, 4, 15 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 101 Wiseman, Joseph, 138 Wollen, Peter, 123 Woodworth, Jessica Hope, 2 World Cinema, 4, 15, 19, 61, 83, 114, 117, 126 World War I, 10, 12, 99, 144, 257 World War II, 7, 41, 44, 47 57, 91, 92, 93, 99, 130 135, 137, 144, 252, 279, 283 Wyler, William How To Steal a Million, 28 Yamada, Isuzu, 34 Yomiuri, 40 Young, Terrence Thunderball, 26 Yugoslavian Union, 257 Zafiropoulos, Ilias, 134 Zahariadis, Nikos, 135 Zapata, Emiliano, 138 Zarkadis, Petros, 93, 222 Zeke, Michalis, 198, 206 Žižek, Slavoj, 147 Zola, Émile The Fortune of the Rougons, 110