Theodoros Angelopoulos, an Observer

By: Dimitris Psachos

SUBJECT FOR UPDATE WITH COMMENTS AND PHOTOS!

Inspired by Josh Dushane’s personal countdown of directors’ oeuvre, I decided to compile a ranking list of a highly meditative observer of historical, naturalistic and at the same time elegiac events, embroidered within the landscape of time-space coalition.

To everyone about Eternity and a Day: yes, sorry, not my cup of tea when discussing Angelopoulos’ oeuvre, I prefer the political catapults and frankly, had it not been for Ganz’s brilliant performance and the allegorical bus ride, it would have been last.
Moreover, I find it highly preposterous and comical for anyone to admire Eternity and a Day and Ulysses’s Gaze more than true masterworks from Angelopoulos’ work like Reconstruction and The Travelling Players. Not that I’m against to his recent cinematography but his first 7-8 works is where the “beef” of his talent lies and there and only there will viewers be able to get introduced to perfect Greek cinema which has been duly ignored by countless of critics and academics around the globe.

I wonder what did they edit in The Beekeeper version from Artificial Eye.

Note: Vote for Angelopoulos in the Directors Cup!!!

Seminal viewing for everyone:

A Trilogy of History

Continuing in the vein of reflecting the dynamic cultural landscape of rural Greece through episodes from contemporary history, Angelopoulos created Days of ’36 (1972), the first film of what would become his self-described trilogy of history that also includes The Travelling Players and O Megalexandros (1980). Ostensibly inspired by an actual prison hostage situation involving a parliament official in 1936, the film is also a subversive indictment of the corruption and incompetence of the then-ruling military junta (1967–1975) whose heavy-handed method of governance and retention of power relied on violence, intimidation, and censorship of the opposition.

While the events depicted in Days of ‘36 were compressed over a relatively short period of time, Angelopoulos’ epic masterpiece, The Travelling Players, is pivotally set in the years 1939 through 1952 and provides an expansive framework that spans the pro-monarchy Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), the German occupation of Athens (1941–1944) during World War II, and the Greek Civil War (1944–1949). Expounding on the themes of migration and displacement explored in Reconstruction, the film follows a struggling itinerant acting troupe as they repeatedly attempt to perform (but never seem to be able to finish) a pastoral play entitled Golpho the Sheperdess throughout the turbulent unraveling of Greek history during the mid 20th century.

It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos uses members of an otherwise anonymous cast of marginalized traveling players as conveyers of contemporary Greek history through a series of fourth wall monologues in the film: Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) traces his immigration from Asia Minor to Greece (a reminder of the country’s historically borderless, ethnically diverse population that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire), Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) chronicles the start of the Civil War after the defeat of the Germans in 1944, and Pylades (Kiriakos Katrivanos) provides a personal account of the torture of political prisoners. In essence, by using the testament of people who are literally transient and homeless (and without identity), Angelopoulos creates a powerful analogy for all Greek people as displaced exiles within their own country.

The problematic pattern of foreign intervention in Greek sovereignty that is depicted in The Travelling Players is also visible in O Megalexandros, a densely structured film that interweaves two of Angelopoulos’ predilections—history (the late 19th century kidnapping of aristocratic British tourists by Greek bandits in Marathon) and myth (the bandit leader who believes that he is the reincarnation of Megalexandros—into a provocative examination on the destruction of myth, both as a heroic figure (Alexander the Great) and as an ideology (utopia). Even at this early juncture, Angelopoulos’ cinema had begun to reflect on the failed idealism of his generation, a disillusionment that he would subsequently articulate through the elegiac image of Lenin’s dismantled statue aboard a drifting salvage barge in Ulysses’ Gaze.

Angelopoulos’ use of allusive, iconic representation in O Megalexandros is also evident in the preceding film, The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.

Excerpt from Senses of Cinema

Many thanks to Kenji for comprising Angelopoulos’ list of top 10 films, which can be found here: Theo Angelopoulos’ Top 10 Favourite Films